BEING REMEMBERED

"You are one mean old guy," I told the elderly gentleman as I walked out of his room at the nursing home, where I had been working for more than a year.

The new patient had only been there for about two weeks and he made every one of the nurses' lives a living hell. He would curse, hit, pinch or kick anyone who came near him. Not to mention, deliberately wetting his bed so that he could get one of us near him so he could inflict additional torment. I don't think the old gentleman had any family because no one ever came to visit him, at least not in the eight months that I took care of him.

One day, this organization of women came to the nursing home. They sang songs and handed out a single red rose to each and every one of the patients. The old man looked at the rose and then knocked the vase off his eating table with the back of his hand. It broke into a thousand pieces as it hit the wall. Everyone just stood there looking at him in disbelief.

He rolled over and faced the wall, turning his back toward the group of women who had began cleaning up the mess that he had made. I picked up the rose, placed it in a plastic drinking cup, and sat it on his night stand. I left his room without saying a word.

For the remainder of the shift that day, I would return to his room and reach up and pull one of the petals off the rose. I threw it into the garbage can beside his bed. He never said a word but just looked at me straight in the eye each and every time I pulled off one of the rose petals.

Before leaving that day, I walked into his room and I pulled the last rose petal off the stem and I threw it into the garbage, leaving only the stem in the plastic cup. As I turned to leave he grumbled, "Why did you do that?"

"I just wanted you to see what you have done to us -- one petal at a time ever since you have been here," I told him.

When I returned to work the next day I was told to go and clean out his room. He had died during the night. When I began to pull the sheets off the bed, I noticed the rose was still sitting in the plastic glass.

Each and every one of the rose petals had been taped back onto the stem with scotch tape. I picked up his robe, the rose and his old black Bible, and I wondered what to do with them. As I walked down the hallway staring at the rose I remembered something that he had said to me just the day before.

"It's not that I want anyone to dislike me -- it's just that I don't want everyone to forget me," he said.

Being an orphan myself, it should have made perfect sense to me then. Mr. Rahl was probably not a mean old man after all. It was just that he, like me, had absolutely nobody in the world who cared about him. We both had been forgotten, even while still living our lives. All he wanted was to be remembered by someone.

Mr. Rahl will be remembered for a long long time. Even if it was for just being very good at being a cantankerous old man.

Unfortunately, I will be very good at it too, Mr. Rahl. Even though you were not an orphan, I am afraid that you and I and many others have had the same teacher somewhere along the way.