Bad News

In my country, many people are named 'Talalelei', meaning 'Good News'. My great-grandfather was one of them, and so it is my surname. It was a sunny, proud day when I started my first shift here at the hospital and people started calling me 'Dr. Talalelei'. Dr. Good News. Fancy that, aye?

At six thirty-five I rang the young lady to say her father was dead. She gasped, wailed, said 'sorry' in the redundant way people do when they have nothing to be sorry for. I told her it was alright. What else could I do? Nothing about her life was going to be alright from this point on.

In person, she was alot younger than she sounded over the phone. Ms.Taumafai looked about nineteen or twenty. Her nametag told me she worked at some telecom company, front desk, I assumed. She was a short, pretty girl with a nice smile. Her mother, a tall, greying woman was comforting an old, plump, toothless woman when the girl came in.

"How much is it?" I heard Ms. Taumafai asking the nurse.

It had begun.

I looked away from her - from all of them - and pretended to fill out a report. I had seen and felt it all before; been one of those who were not entitled to grieve publicly becasue I had to buy something or pay off something or work for something for someone else. I snuck a look at her as she followed the nurse to the reception area. Her mother never spoke to her. She was pulling the old woman back, away from the pale lifelessness lying tiredly on the bed that we'd need for another patient as soon as he was taken to the freezer. Morgue. I'd have to rememeber to say the nice word that makes humans feel like even in death they're somehow different to other mammals.

"Is the $100 just for the bed, or...?"

"It's for the whole stay. The cost was eighty, actually, but Mrs. Taumafai accidentally knocked over some cutlery in the hospital cafeteria."

I watched Ms. Taumafai counting, ten, twenty, thirty. She had only tens in her purse. Little units of thought. Little to-do lists. Not-so-little things to do now.

The nurse realized she was short by $2 and waived it immediately, as people do in my country.

A Polish couple who had come to the ER for excessive sunburns and were waiting for their prescirption smiled at Ms. Taumafai warmly. "I'm so sorry for your loss, my dear," the woman said as they both approached the watercooler.

The cooler had - and still has - only one plastic cup atop the upside-down water bottle on it. Ms. Taumafai must have known what the Polish woman was thinking and apologized that there was only one cup.

"For everyone?" the woman asked, eyes wide with disgust and pity.

"Here, Mam," the receptionist smiled, handing her a new, sparkling-clean glass from the doctors' cutlery cupboard. "You can use this."

"What about everyone else?" the woman stammered.

Ms. Taumafai had a smile on her weary, pretty face. "It's alright, Mam," she said quietly. "We're quite used to it."

"When's the funeral?" a nurse asked Ms. Tamafai when the couple had gone in to see their doctor.

"Two weeks time."

"Are you expecting many overseas relatives to come home for the burial?"

"Yes. And I need to get my loan approved before we can plan a service. Five of our relatives are church pastors. You know how that is."

Church pastors must receive gifts of food and money whenever they attend important events like a funeral or a wedding. My own great-paps Talalelei's funeral had twelve pastors in attendance.

I watched her leave. She was talking about having the eight o'clock shift and overtime tonight. As she closed the large wooden door I remembered we hadn't told her about the costs of our embalming services, which she had selected on the form.

"It's $350 plus tax, Doc," our busybody resident cardiologist from Melbourne said over my shoulder as he pulled a glass out of our cutlery cupboard. "Give her the news, aye?" he smiled, going back to his part of the hospital.

I called her at twelve-fifty-two. She was an hour away from finishing her overtime shift. She sounded a bit tipsy. Or just tired.

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