"Wind Beneath My Wings" by Victoria Walls
Most people are afraid of getting sick, but not me. What many don’t know is that I lived in a hospital. I grew up in a nursing home. And, at 21, I moved out of a hospice.
I am seven years old. I have a cold, and Mama, my relatively young grandmother, is taking care of me.
“Mama?”
I push open the door. There she is: a mound of damp laundry on the bed.
“Baby, call 911,” she says under a quiet wheezing breath.
A lady asks where I am, if I am alone, where my parents are.
“900 Lynnwood Boulevard. Mama is sick.”
Strange people come to the door, wearing bulky jackets. They pull in a big bed. It doesn’t look very comfortable.
“Sweetheart, what is your name?”
“My name is Victoria Isabella Walls, sir. And my Mama is Regina Pittman Walls and my Daddy is Ulysses Walls.”
I see them wheel her out of the house. The big man tries to distract me with lots of questions. Little kids like answering questions. We like telling grown ups what we know so they think we are smart. But, I’m too smart.
“MAMA! Where are you taking my Mama? You can’t take her, she didn’t do anything!”
“We are going to help her get better, but we need you to be a big girl and stay here, okay? What is your Daddy’s number? We’ll call him.”
The men leave. I remember being alone in that house. It is dark and very scary.
When I see Mama for the first time after that night, she is in a hospital bed with beeping machines chiming a horrid cacophony around her body. For many weeks to come, I sleep on a hospital floor, on top of folded cotton blankets, and am awoken by the comings and goings of nurses. My aunt – Teensie – and I never leave her side.
Months later, she comes home. She has a hole in her neck. It takes me several years to understand her diagnosis:
Myasthenia gravis – a degenerative neuromuscular disease collapses her diaphragm, keeping her from breathing. The doctors think that juicing her up will help, but the steroids only give her diabetes. The intubation device they use is too large for her trachea and causes permanent damage. She now has a hole in her throat, with a metal tube allowing airflow. Over the years, I watch her remove and clean it, then put it back into her neck, stringing fashionable ribbons and locking it with a golden pin.
For fourteen years I watched my grandmother suffer. I heard her cry when her hair started to fall out from all of the medication. I helped change her sheets when she soiled herself, not having the energy to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I felt her fingernails dig into my back when she fell off of her chair and I, at 16, wrapped my arms around her waist and picked her up. I endured her hallucinations and incoherent babblings when the steroids made her delusional.
During Christmas of 2012, a cut on her leg gaped to the size of a softball. Her heart failed several times. Eventually, she was deemed “septic” – her body was flooded with infection. Her brain activity was sporadic – only enough to keep her breathing with the aid of a machine. Finally, under the supervision of in-home hospice care, my mother and her siblings turned off her respirator. In April of 2013, I watched my grandmother’s pine box settle into the ground, beneath the cool monotony of a Jewish eulogy.
I remember the last conversation I had with Mama. I read her a letter, quoting E. E. Cummings’s poem, “You Shall Above All Things Be Glad and Young:” how I “would rather learn from one bird how to sing / than teach then thousand stars how not to dance.”
When I was a little girl, Mama and I would fill hummingbird feeders together in the backyard of our Bellemeade home. She loved their whimsical nature, their rapid movement, and their bountiful colours. Even when her body tried to keep her from moving, she – like those birds – found a way to fly. She stood tall in front of the Eiffel Tower, clinging to my uncle’s arm. We spent months at a time in Melbourne, Australia, visiting my mom and taking pictures with dingoes and koalas. She took me to Niagara Falls, Disney World, The Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and New York. In all respects, Mama was a bird, gracefully drifting from one place to the next, all the while fluttering in my heart. Mama was my home. She was my teacher, my mother, my best friend, and my entire life. And, admittedly, I thought I would die without her.
“Daddy, when is Mama coming home?”
She is home, now. She is beneath a beautiful tree in Nashville. The Lord breathed the breath of life into her in 1944, and then inhaled her back into Himself in 2013, after a long and graceful life. And, while I miss her and ache for her to tell me, “It’ll be okay, baby. I love you. You’ll always be my Chicken Little,” I know that she is with me everyday.
I am no longer afraid, because she was never afraid. In all of the pain I watched and felt, I am certain of one thing: When I fall ill, when my hand no longer lifts a pen to write my next poem, when my legs no longer carry me from one city to the next, and when my sharp tongue sinks to the bottom of my mouth, I will see her again. And, like those hummingbirds we would feed in the heat of Southern Junes, I will fly next to her – with my own wings, singing my own song. Chicken Little, the unibrow’d bastard child of her middle-born is no longer a confused pigeon: Chicken Little grew tall, and I – the final chick in Mama’s nest – will soar on the wind beneath my wings.
Most people are afraid of getting sick, but not me. What many don’t know is that I lived in a hospital. I grew up in a nursing home. And, at 21, I moved out of a hospice.
I am seven years old. I have a cold, and Mama, my relatively young grandmother, is taking care of me.
“Mama?”
I push open the door. There she is: a mound of damp laundry on the bed.
“Baby, call 911,” she says under a quiet wheezing breath.
A lady asks where I am, if I am alone, where my parents are.
“900 Lynnwood Boulevard. Mama is sick.”
Strange people come to the door, wearing bulky jackets. They pull in a big bed. It doesn’t look very comfortable.
“Sweetheart, what is your name?”
“My name is Victoria Isabella Walls, sir. And my Mama is Regina Pittman Walls and my Daddy is Ulysses Walls.”
I see them wheel her out of the house. The big man tries to distract me with lots of questions. Little kids like answering questions. We like telling grown ups what we know so they think we are smart. But, I’m too smart.
“MAMA! Where are you taking my Mama? You can’t take her, she didn’t do anything!”
“We are going to help her get better, but we need you to be a big girl and stay here, okay? What is your Daddy’s number? We’ll call him.”
The men leave. I remember being alone in that house. It is dark and very scary.
When I see Mama for the first time after that night, she is in a hospital bed with beeping machines chiming a horrid cacophony around her body. For many weeks to come, I sleep on a hospital floor, on top of folded cotton blankets, and am awoken by the comings and goings of nurses. My aunt – Teensie – and I never leave her side.
Months later, she comes home. She has a hole in her neck. It takes me several years to understand her diagnosis:
Myasthenia gravis – a degenerative neuromuscular disease collapses her diaphragm, keeping her from breathing. The doctors think that juicing her up will help, but the steroids only give her diabetes. The intubation device they use is too large for her trachea and causes permanent damage. She now has a hole in her throat, with a metal tube allowing airflow. Over the years, I watch her remove and clean it, then put it back into her neck, stringing fashionable ribbons and locking it with a golden pin.
For fourteen years I watched my grandmother suffer. I heard her cry when her hair started to fall out from all of the medication. I helped change her sheets when she soiled herself, not having the energy to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I felt her fingernails dig into my back when she fell off of her chair and I, at 16, wrapped my arms around her waist and picked her up. I endured her hallucinations and incoherent babblings when the steroids made her delusional.
During Christmas of 2012, a cut on her leg gaped to the size of a softball. Her heart failed several times. Eventually, she was deemed “septic” – her body was flooded with infection. Her brain activity was sporadic – only enough to keep her breathing with the aid of a machine. Finally, under the supervision of in-home hospice care, my mother and her siblings turned off her respirator. In April of 2013, I watched my grandmother’s pine box settle into the ground, beneath the cool monotony of a Jewish eulogy.
I remember the last conversation I had with Mama. I read her a letter, quoting E. E. Cummings’s poem, “You Shall Above All Things Be Glad and Young:” how I “would rather learn from one bird how to sing / than teach then thousand stars how not to dance.”
When I was a little girl, Mama and I would fill hummingbird feeders together in the backyard of our Bellemeade home. She loved their whimsical nature, their rapid movement, and their bountiful colours. Even when her body tried to keep her from moving, she – like those birds – found a way to fly. She stood tall in front of the Eiffel Tower, clinging to my uncle’s arm. We spent months at a time in Melbourne, Australia, visiting my mom and taking pictures with dingoes and koalas. She took me to Niagara Falls, Disney World, The Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and New York. In all respects, Mama was a bird, gracefully drifting from one place to the next, all the while fluttering in my heart. Mama was my home. She was my teacher, my mother, my best friend, and my entire life. And, admittedly, I thought I would die without her.
“Daddy, when is Mama coming home?”
She is home, now. She is beneath a beautiful tree in Nashville. The Lord breathed the breath of life into her in 1944, and then inhaled her back into Himself in 2013, after a long and graceful life. And, while I miss her and ache for her to tell me, “It’ll be okay, baby. I love you. You’ll always be my Chicken Little,” I know that she is with me everyday.
I am no longer afraid, because she was never afraid. In all of the pain I watched and felt, I am certain of one thing: When I fall ill, when my hand no longer lifts a pen to write my next poem, when my legs no longer carry me from one city to the next, and when my sharp tongue sinks to the bottom of my mouth, I will see her again. And, like those hummingbirds we would feed in the heat of Southern Junes, I will fly next to her – with my own wings, singing my own song. Chicken Little, the unibrow’d bastard child of her middle-born is no longer a confused pigeon: Chicken Little grew tall, and I – the final chick in Mama’s nest – will soar on the wind beneath my wings.