For Maria

Stand for a moment where I’m standing now.

Me here, thumbing a chart.

My face to a window, a window looking in on a room in the ICU.

And me all at once, looking to the window, into the room, to the patient beyond, thinking, yes, Maria, I do know you. I do know you, Maria.

But what I know of Maria is this, what I knew before, that respiratory problems had brought her into the hospital.

“Bad lungs,” as Maria herself might say, in an accent you’d peg as Czech, maybe Slovak, although you’d be wrong either way. Pneumonia, it is, though. Pneumonia serious enough to make Maria septic, let alone in acute respiratory failure, that and more dry-marked on the board in her room detailing her life, her life this minute.

The same thing that brought her in last time.

Maybe even the time before.

And Maria there in the bed, a slip of a woman, so hard of hearing that I was only lucky to have chosen her right side, literally her right side. That smile, the one I remember from before, those eyes, those lake-blue eyes that have known what life will never let me know.

Only then do I remember more.

Maria, she, of the Polish accent, sweetness in every vowel.

Old now, only a teenager then. What, thirteen, maybe, at most fifteen. A girl, in any case. A girl, only a girl, no doubt a beautiful girl, hunted, no less than a deer, a rabbit, for what she then was to some. In a Poland no longer her Poland, but theirs, they of a solution once imagined final.

Escaping somehow to England, leaving behind, what, all she knew? Who, all she loved? And for what? Eventually coming by steerage to the United States, to the life she has known since. The life behind never behind. Her life since including children, the grandchildren, some once sought to deny her.

And this morning Maria’s my patient, Melanie’s patient, that history not the history that has any bearing on what is this morning pneumonia, is likely sepsis, but is history, is the Maria, the Maria I, others, others like me, those of us who love her, know.

“You’re beautiful,” Maria, not quite hearing Melanie’s question, says. “You’re beautiful,” her smile sugaring her words.

Maria, there in the bed, beautiful herself, all that she lived there in the bed with her, me knowing that only because of knowing her before. And days later, she, unable to communicate that, anything.

Stand for a moment where I’m standing now.

Me? I’m just doing what I’m doing. What I’m doing, my best, I only hope.

For Maria.

For all the Marias.