We lost my Mom earlier this year to bronchiectasis, a condition that weakens the lungs. At times, but for the oxygen tank, one might not believe that she suffered any illness at all. But she was also susceptible to episodes of infection and breathlessness that would leave her terrifyingly desperate for air.
After a hospital stay this past winter, we had to consider whether or not to have Mom spend some time at a rehab center. But the relentless grind of the disease had finally taken her to a place of acceptance. She decided to spend her last days at my sister’s house under hospice care. A private ambulance company arrived with two young EMT’s to take her home; two men, maybe in their mid-twenties.
The ride home took only a few minutes. I arrived at about the same time as the ambulance and walked toward the front door with the EMT’s, stopping at the outside stairs. They assured me that they could safely get her inside. One of the EMT’s wheeled Mom down the walkway on a stretcher. The other rolled over a “stair chair” and placed it in front of her.
Just as they were getting ready to transfer her from stretcher to the chair, one of the fellas said to Mom, “OK, are you ready?” She was now sitting up. He positioned himself in front of her with his arms extended, to assist her in standing. “Yup,” she said, and with a little hint of jest in her shaky voice, “I guess we’re going to do a little dance, huh?" And with that, the young man abruptly stopped. “Wait, wait,” he said excitedly, as he pulled his cellphone from his pocket. Almost as if he had planned the moment, he cued up Frank Sinatra singing, "Fly me to the Moon."
The young EMT helped my thin and feeble mother to her unsteady feet and for about thirty seconds, the two of them gently swayed back and forth under a windless, November moonlit sky, being serenaded by Ol’ Blue Eyes himself. “Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars…” Her feet shuffled tenderly, wrapped in only slippers. She was bundled up in a white cotton hospital blanket. She was seventy-seven years old. He was a young man in an EMT uniform, likely overworked and underpaid. They could hardly have been at more different stages in life. He did not know my mother. He owed her nothing. “Let me see what Spring is like, on Jupiter and Mars…” Yet, here they were, sharing a remarkable moment in time; a moment that he appeared to enjoy as much as she did.
I was captivated by this young man’s instinctive gesture of compassion. I still am. It may just be the most genuinely pure act of kindness I have ever personally witnessed. I remember thinking at the time that this would likely be the last chance my mother got to dance in this life. As fate would have it, that thought would come to be true. I will be forever grateful to the young man who set aside a simple thirty seconds to dance with my dying mother. And "Fly Me to the Moon" will be forever fixed in my heart.
#kindnesschallenge
#randomactofkindness
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