They don’t need women like me anymore. That’s the first thought I had when the hospital cut my hours down to nothing, as if fifty years of calloused hands and night shifts could be trimmed like fat off a budget.

I was twenty when I first walked into St. Joseph’s in 1968, white shoes shining, cap pinned tight, heart still stupid enough to think the world was good.

The Vietnam boys were coming in back then, half my age, screaming for their mothers while the rest of us pretended to be steady. I held their hands. I watched some of them die with my name on their lips. I never forgot that.

Back then, nurses were steel under starch. We didn’t have apps or machines chirping at us like babysitters. We had charts on clipboards, ink stains on our fingers, and a gut sense for when someone’s breath was about to turn into silence. You learned to hear it—the way the room shifted when life left a body. It’s a sound you don’t un-hear.

Now I walk through the same halls and the walls feel strange. Everything’s glass, machines, protocols stacked on protocols. The kids in scrubs tap at tablets more than they look into faces. They say “patients” like entries on a screen. I still say “people.”

America changed while I was busy wiping foreheads and folding sheets. We stopped listening. To each other, to elders, to the truth.

Everyone’s shouting about politics on the TV in the waiting room, red hats and blue banners, while I’m trying to remind some intern that Mrs. Rodriguez in room 12 needs her blanket tucked under her feet because the cold creeps in worse at night. Nobody wants to hear that anymore. Nobody wants the small, human things.

I think about my father sometimes. He was a factory man, hands cracked from steel, who came home smelling of oil and dust. He believed in work, in keeping your head down, in country before self. He didn’t live to see the plant shuttered, didn’t see men like him turned into numbers on a spreadsheet. Maybe it’s better he didn’t.

When COVID hit, they called me back for a while. I was sixty-nine then, bones aching, hair gone silver, but I put the uniform back on. The kids were drowning in it, and they needed us old dogs who remembered how to fight without flinching.

I held iPads up so families could say goodbye through a glass screen. I whispered prayers into ears that couldn’t hear. I went home to an empty house every night and scrubbed my skin raw. That’s when I realized—I had given my whole life to this country, to its sick and broken, and in the end it would still forget me.

I’m seventy-seven now. My knees groan. My pension barely covers the rent. The America I grew up in—the one of porch swings, handshakes, and Sunday chicken dinners—feels like a dream someone else dreamed.

I walk past kids with earbuds, faces lit blue by their phones, and I wonder if they’ll ever know the weight of another person’s hand pressed into theirs at 3 a.m., when the world feels too dark to survive.

But then I catch myself. Last week, at the corner store, a boy no older than twenty held the door open for me. Just stood there, waiting, eyes kind, like he had all the time in the world. I felt my throat tighten in a way I hadn’t expected. Maybe we’re not done yet. Maybe some things endure.

I don’t know how much time I’ve got left, but I know this: the world can drown itself in politics and machines and noise, but at the end of the day, when the lights dim and the body grows tired, all a person wants is the warmth of another human being saying, *I see you. You matter.*

That’s all I ever tried to give. And God help me, I’d do it all again.