Christianne

Her name was Christianne, as in Kd-eest-e-on-ee. You must say it with a thick, heavy accent. She had flame-red hair, even in her last, dying days.

Two other women and I went 'visiting' every Monday for about five years. I was young and newly married and they were retired, older and wiser women. We visited the sick and shut in as well as people in the hospital. The church I went to had a lot, and I mean a lot of older people. People that always reminded me that they knew me from when I was 'that big'. With so many older people, there never was a shortage of people in nursing homes or in the hospital. After a year or so, we began to get requests to visit someone's uncle's son's wife's aunt so-and-so. And we went. Wherever we were requested, we went.


And oh, was it interesting. Sometimes we would show up to people's homes and they would be totally undressed...only they would never decide to actually get dressed. Many, many times people would boldly and proudly show us their surgery sites or battle scars, amputated parts or saved body pieces. Seriously. We saw men's parts and women's parts. And we heard many stories of impacted bowels and hemmorhoids. Monday night meant lots of bodily fluids, bodily noises, and lots of listening.


It wasn't all gross. We met such beautiful people. People that loved God and people that hated God. People with roaches everywhere and lice covering their bodies and guns in their hands. People with no friends and no family. People. Beautiful, lovely people.


And we met Christianne. For the life of me, I can't remember her nationality and that drives me crazy because it was such a part of who she was. She was a ball of fire with that bright red hair. When we met her, she was living in our least favorite nursing home to visit. It smelled the worst, treated people the worst, looked the worst, and had the least-friendly staff. Most troubling of all was that in the five years that we visited the place, we never saw a resident's family member. Not one. It was full of lonely, poor, destitute people. They weren't all old either. It was a sad place.

Christianne and I clicked from the beginning. Over time, she began to show me her pictures and old letters. She even let me in on part of her story. I can't share all of it because it is so troubling to me, even now. But Christianne and her mother were very rich, very highly sought after ladies. They had riches and furs and my, my, so many diamonds. They were, uh, rentable if you get my drift. Not the diamonds, the ladies. High society rentable ladies. Christianne had stories of being escorted into the high life. Living high in society, if only for a time. When her mother died, Christianne, having always battled with mental illness, suffered her first total breakdown. She ended up trying to kill herself. After a long, sad string of events, she ended up permanently damaging most of her body's organs and functions. She lost her home and ended up in a nursing home where all of her riches were stolen while she lay semi-comatose.

The 'girls' and I visited her periodically, but I would visit her alone every week. Sometimes I took the boys and they would draw pictures for her. We would hang them on her door, but they got torn, destroyed, or taken within the same day. Chocolate, we always took chocolate to her. It was a treat. She would sing for me and for the boys. (for the record, they were totally creeped out by the home so I started to go alone...even though it creeped me out too)

I began to pick up Christianne and take her to church with me after she talked endlessly about missing big choirs and church music. It wasn't easy to lug her body, which was dead weight, in and out of the car, and it wasn't easy to do all of that just to hear her snore during church! But I think that just being in church and hearing beautiful music put her at rest. I tried to talk Jon into letting a suicidal, manic-depressed, kidney-failed, blind woman move in with us, but he looked at me, smiled, and said, "no." Go figure.

So many times I thought she was going to die and she would bounce back. Until one night I got a call in the middle of the night from the hospital saying that she was probably not going to make it until the morning. The next morning, she was barely alive and had been given her last rites. I went to the hospital to be with her and whispered in her ear that we were having another baby (Jack). She never moved. Somehow, just a week later she was sitting up in bed again and talking. We talked and laughed like schoolgirls. And then, one day I went up to the nursing home to visit her...and she was gone. Dead.

I cried and grieved for my friend. My friend who tried to kill herself every week, but who really just wanted to laugh and love life. The friend who was finally free from a failed body and her plaguing mental illness. She had found her freedom, her lovely freedom.

Today, as I drove through Delhi, I saw lots of old people on porches. I saw old people in gardens and with grandchildren. It reminded me of living there and visiting some of those very same people. Of bringing communion or music into their homes. And it made me think of my red headed friend who brought so much to my life, if just for a time.

And it made me smile just to remember my little old friend Christianne.