Pietá

She doesn’t look like a Mater Dolorosa, and certainly not like a Michelangelo Pietá. She’s a short and plump woman in her sixties, with a wart on her chin and a slight limp. And yet, every time I meet her at a coffee stall at the boat terminal, I see motherly love, and pain. She always greets me warmly, sends her regards to all the hospital staff, and shrugs with a short sentence, like “It’s been over a year already!” or “I remember him every day!”.

I first met her son, let’s call him Oscar, when he walked into my office with his fiancée, a twenty-something type 1 diabetic clerk, average looking, with the usual vascular and renal complications of his disease. In spite of good compliance with his therapy, his disease progressed rapidly and in a few months he was on dialysis. I only saw him again about 2 years later, when serious complications got him into the hospital ward. He looked much older then, and that’s when I met his mother. He had already lost his job and his fiancée. And from that time on, he embarked on an all too familiar downward spiral, that we see so many times, just not usually on such young people. He suffered infection after infection, gangrene, amputation, bowel ischemia… He spent weeks in the hospital, that turned into months. In spite of all the medication, surgery, etc, he got steadily worse. When I watched him by the time he was on parenteral nutrition, I was really impressed, he looked like an old man, or a victim of progeria. And he was a really kind and stoic patient through it all, it made us all in his care heartbroken to look at him. We knew he would die soon, and there was not much we could do to ease his suffering.

And through all those months, this little woman was there beside him. She became a familiar figure at the ward, we all knew her, and felt guilty for not being able to help her son more. There came a time when we were all – including her – wishing he would die quickly to put an end to his sufferings, but his body was young and he put a lot of a fight. Eventually, he died.

I know she has another son, a healthy man with children. But I know that Oscar was unique to her, and she couldn’t have been more supportive. We witnessed her suffering, and I still feel uneasy every time I meet her – couldn’t we have done more for Oscar? Probably not. He was one of those cases in which everything goes wrong. But I can’t help to admire his endurance, and his mother’s love and courage, through all his pains.