Pine needles on the floor. Wrapping paper ripped off and tossed aside, or neatly folded for future use. Labels from new clothes. Potato peel and outer leaves from all those sprouts. Dishes and greasy pans in and around the sink. All that tidying work that needs doing. Christmas includes all those messy bits as well as the glitz and glamour. They can be unpleasant chores left for “somebody else” to do offstage and unnoticed, or shared out and managed with kindness, making the Christmas journey easier for everyone.
The story goes that, during a visit to the NASA Space Centre in 1962, President Kennedy noticed a man carrying a sweeping brush. He went over to the man and introduced himself: “Hi, I’m Jack Kennedy, what are you doing?” The cleaner said: “I’m helping put a man on the moon, Mr President.” Never “just a cleaner”, he was part of the space team. Every cleaner’s in a story.
A dear friend of ours is seeing Christmas through in hospital and, as a day began, was not looking forward to unpleasant medication. Then, a message pinged in from her. “One of my angels in disguise, Jackie the cleaner, came and distracted me as I swallowed it down so only 2 more to go today…” There’s more, of course: “This angel in disguise also comes and says good morning to me as she starts her day, and farewell at the end of her shift. When she leaves my bedside she always checks there’s nothing else I need that she can help with. Much more than “just a cleaner”. She is a key to my healing.”
We remember some of those friendly faces from other hospitals, in Belfast, Birmingham and London. Jane, Rachel, Davy, Stefan, others whose names are mislaid in memory but whose kindness isn’t. The best of them not only kept the wards clean (and changed the bags in those metal bins quietly!), but were always good for a conversation about the world beyond the wards, about their children and grandchildren, their trek to the hospital through the traffic or the snow, shopping and preparing for Christmas, about Strictly Come Dancing (laugh if you must but on many Saturday evenings Strictly proved a welcome distraction, something to look forward to as relief from the daily medical demands. “Ke-ep dancing!”)
Angels in disguise indeed, with cheery greetings as the light first comes into the cubicle, something “normal” helping patients remember they are people first and always more than patients, with a wider spectrum of life than the necessary focus points in hospital.
And from a retired district nurse who was at the forefront of developing hospice care in N Ireland, we learned that “…cleaners were always involved in the multidisciplinary team’s psychosocial ward rounds at hospices, valuing the information and understanding they gathered while brushing under beds.” Excellent indeed.
So, if you’re sitting down after tidying up for the umpteenth time, thank you, and especially to those on the frontline of infection control in the wards, thank you for reminders of how extraordinarily valuable the apparently ordinary can be…