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    A One-Sided Coin
    A One-Sided Coin
    A One-Sided Coin
    Ebook79 pages1 hour

    A One-Sided Coin

    By Jim Metcalf

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    About this ebook

    "I have made you, I will carry you, I will sustain you and I will rescue you."

     

         Jim Metcalf heard these words as a soft whisper in the months after his wife's death.

         Jim and Sandy met and fell in love at the age of fourteen, beginning sixty-three inseparable years as a two-sided coin. After   

    fifty-five years of marriage Sandy received a diagnosis of inoperable brain cancer which took her life within two weeks. Shocked and angry, Jim felt unable to function alone in the world. Was there a way for him to go on living? Was there a way to build on their lifelong love, or was he now a useless one-sided coin?

         Jim was tossed into the storms of grief just as COVID began to bring isolation and further losses. A One-Sided Coin is Jim's story of loss, grief and healing through the help of others. Led by the soft whisper, Jim found friends as well as strangers who threw him lifelines from the one-sided coin of God's grace.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJames Metcalf
    Release dateJul 1, 2022
    ISBN9798201306342
    A One-Sided Coin

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      Book preview

      A One-Sided Coin - Jim Metcalf

      1

      Iwill never forget the painful, empty silence following Sandy’s last breath. It was like I was thrown into a vacuum where no sense of time, space and feelings exist. She was lying on the bed in the hospice motioning me to massage her right knee. She had hurt it years ago as a result of a fall in the office where she worked but never wanted to report it for fear of angering the owner. I continued to softly massage that knee as the only thing that gave her comfort. I kept telling her that I loved her and asking what else could I do to make her comfortable. There was no answer except her hand holding on to mine.

      Sandy’s breathing was very shallow, seeming like every breath was an effort. Then she stopped for a second, took a deep breath, and she was gone. That was the last breath of sixty-three years of loving togetherness. It was surreal. We had been together like a two-sided coin since we were fourteen. How could it end like this? How could our life end with one last breath? A one-sided coin is useless. I felt like I had died with her. I kept telling her that I loved her and would see her soon, but I was probably just talking to the wind.

      There was an explosive rage inside me. I began identifying and blaming everyone who I thought did not take Sandy seriously during her pleas for help. I started to remember every person who acted like they were just doing their job without caring. It didn’t matter if Sandy was a mannequin, a person, or a sack of potatoes; the treatment had the same objective distance; finish with this one and on to the next.  The technician who took her mammogram a year after breast cancer treatment and who, way out of line, announced, Wow, you better get this checked. The clergy who was getting ready for a new job so did not have time to visit Sandy during her illness, even though she had been a member of the church for half a century including performing the role of treasurer of the women’s group. Her personal physician who explained Sandy’s fatigue by saying, You’re old and old people get tired.

      I had run a psychiatric facility for adolescents where we all cried every time a kid came in from being raped, tortured or banged up from a failed suicide attempt. To me, care is a personal investment, not a manila folder with a name and a snapshot so the clinician could mispronounce a name of the person in the snapshot. I figured that every one of those white-jacketed house staff who did not see a very sick woman but rather a body of data to apply to an algorithm must have a fear of interacting with people. Would these mechanics treat their mother this robotically? I could not stand this indifference from those in the hospital and those in the hospice. Didn’t anyone realize that Sandy was a living, breathing person with seventy-seven years of a beautiful life? She deserved more than being represented by a number and list of diagnostic presentations.

      I yelled at one neurologist who was using Sandy as a prop to have a resident practice doing a spinal tap. When I asked him to explain he said that the resident had to learn. But not on my wife, without even talking to her or asking her permission. Then there was the junior oncologist on Memorial Day weekend complaining that the senior staff left the bad news of moving to hospice to him. Poor baby. He must have missed that part of training about doctors having to care for people.

      I cannot say all were uncaring. The hospital nursing staff were great and very supportive. They understood the anxiety of a family with a very sick member. Throughout their training and career, the bad news explanations, clean up and blame were most times dumped on them.  When I discovered that a meal of pot roast was being served with plastic utensils, I asked the charge nurse to send me the dietary manager when she came on the floor. Nursing staff said this happens all the time, especially on nights and weekends, and nurses must run from room to room cutting up food for patients because the plastic utensils break easily. A dietary supervisor came to the floor to explain the situation by saying that the dishwashers throw many of the metal utensils into the trash when cleaning the trays so plastic utensils are used on off shifts. I came close to exploding by asking her if she could eat a meat entrée with plastic utensils.

      After that the nurses wanted to bring me more issues they had to deal with and actually told me that I might want to meet the hospital administrator and director of nurses when they made administrative rounds. It was a mistake for those two happy souls to stop by and ask how we were enjoying our stay. What the hell did they

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