2008 Woodie Awards
May I Recommend? Give Your Time, Feel Good for Free
Erica Green
Issue date: 2/9/05 Section: Opinion
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I have worked at the same little gourmet food store where I live in Columbia, Maryland for almost four years, and cannot bring myself to leave simply because of the special people I have met and the special relationships that I have built over my years there. A place full of comfort and character, it has an undeniable family bond. We gossip about each other, we laugh and cry with each other, and we are always there for one another. We have always known, though, that there was someone missing.
The daughter of the owners of the store was in a car accident when she was twenty-one years old, engaged to be married, going to medical school, and headed for a promising career in nursing. She was literally crushed by an SUV that spun out of control, and she suffered severe brain trauma.
Fifteen years later, she is in a persistent vegetative state at a nursing home. She cannot communicate. She literally cannot do anything. She is coherent, she understands when people talk to her, but never will she be able to respond. She just dreams all day, where she is twenty-one again, about to be married, about to become a nurse, able to talk to her mother and the rest of her family.
At least that's what I selfishly tell myself, to find a way for me to feel that maybe her restricted life to the confinement of her thoughts isn't so bad.
Her mother, my boss, goes to the nursing home at least two or three times a day to visit and take care of her daughter. Even her smiles and her husband's cannot hide the exhaustion, the ache of their hearts as they are faced with the reality of it all, every day.
While the subject has been in all my years at the store a "subject of avoidance" in a sense, I felt that maybe it shouldn't be. Not really knowing what I was in for, I took it upon myself to go and meet their daughter Stephanie. I felt that if I really loved my boss I needed to meet the person she loved so much. Maybe be able to share the pain, hoping there was some magical way that I could lift some off of her shoulders.
I went over to meet Stephanie. When I first told my boss that I was going to go and asked what I should do, she simply said, "She sits in a wheelchair all day. Just talk to her. She likes someone to talk to her." Okay, I thought, easy enough.