Dear Teacher with a Nursing Degree,
Every teacher is a nurse this year. The epidemic teacher takes temperatures and keeps a running log. She also closely monitors all COVID related symptoms, which, as we have all come to know, could truly be any ailment. Sneezing. COVID. Scratchy throat. COVID. Headache. COVID. Swollen thumb, head lice, throbbing knee, ingrown toenail. All COVID.
But the nurse I am referencing is not the one who stands at the school house door ready to click a button on a digital thermometer at 7:20 each morning.
I am talking about a woman you didn’t know, but you should have.
She was a nurse for 50 years. She spent five decades of her life dressed in scrubs and caring for the infirmed, but she spent every single day of her 93 years of life in selfless pursuit of caring for others. She taught me so much about the kind of person I long to be.
We called her Sippi Nanny to help our boys differentiate between the Nanny that lived in Brewton versus the one who lived in Mississippi. In time it was shortened to merely, Sippi. I think she liked the moniker because it was a tribute to a state she loved and devoted 65 years of her life to calling home.
She entered her new home, her heavenly home, last week after a brief illness, not COVID.
As I think of her in this celestial realm without a walker, it is hard for me to imagine what she is seeing, but I know whatever she’s seeing it’s without eyeglasses or labored breathing or aching bones. And this comforts me, though my heart still longs for another opportunity to sit beside her as she consumes a Chick-fil-a sandwich in patient, incremental bites while laughing at her children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren splashing in her pool that was installed the year Reagan took office.
I was 24 years old when I married into her family, but she treated me like I had been her granddaughter since birth. She made me feel like I was her favorite when I plugged in her dusty record player and watched her close her eyes to savor the scratchy melody of a sound from long ago. As I listened to the lyrics more closely than I've ever listened to a set of lyrics in my life, “Don’t look so sad. I know it’s over, but let’s be glad we had some time to spend together…For the Good Times,” I could not help but imagine her as a radiant younger woman with dark locks of hair I never got to see swaying with her husband, a newly married woman who thought she might never find love again after the loss of her first husband.
I am glad I paid close attention because today Ray Price's lyrics take on new meaning as I consider all the good times I had with her. Countless memories spill out like assorted pieces of unopened hard candy left on the shelf near her pantry. There are far too many memories to recall but each is satisfyingly sweet.
I find it fitting that Sippi Nanny died in a year when nurses are heralded as the heroes of the era. Earlier this year I asked her if she was glad to be retired during this health crisis. She threw back her head and shook her perfectly groomed grey hair, “Aww Lord..honey…yes,” she said, “but I pray for them, all of them, every single night,” which I suppose means she also unknowingly prayed for all the teachers who have become makeshift nurses this year.
When she clocked out for the final time last week, she took her prayers with her, but I can say with certainty that her work here is not finished. As anyone who has lost someone dear this year knows, it is their memories that will heal us. In this way, I love that she is still a nurse (working to heal) even in death.
And in a comforting way, it is as if I can hear her whispering, “There's a shift change. It’s your turn. Will you pray for the nurses and teachers now?”
-CDB
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