A shave, a haircut and a memory

The toll of mental illness, homelessness and severe alcoholism was written in the looks of the man in the hospital bed. His weathered face was dirty and unshaven. His curly locks, once the signature of his health, were matted and crusty, filled with the grime of the city’s streets.

His family had been through a lot with him – a jumble of emotion, highs and lows and the ultimate understanding that sometimes all the love in the world cannot break the spell of alcoholism or mental illness.

The patient’s sister, who was fortunate to make it to her brother’s bedside, told Darcy Johnson, now a Critical Obstetrics Nurse and former ICU nurse at Memorial Hospital Central, that the man in the bed didn’t even look like her brother. The years, she said, had been so unkind.

Johnson, who worked the night shift, encouraged the sister to go home and get some rest. In the morning, another sister was to arrive from out-of-state. It would be a big day. Together, they would make a decision to put legal paperwork in place requesting that their brother not be resuscitated.

After the sister left for the evening, Johnson went to the “fluff and puff’’ locker in the ICU and gathered a few supplies.

She returned to the bedside of the homeless man and gently shaved his scruffy face, which was severely yellowed, a sign that his liver was about to quit. Johnson cupped water in her hands, dabbed shampoo on the man’s hair and washed and rinsed it.

To her surprise, the curl returned to the man’s hair. When her shift ended in the morning, Johnson went home for the day.

The next day, the two sisters returned to Memorial. They completed their legal paperwork and then spent a few moments at the bedside of their brother to see him one final time.

“He looks like our brother,’’ one of the sisters said to a day-shift nurse.

A short time later, the homeless man died.

When Johnson arrived for work the next day, her co-workers let her know that the man she had groomed the night before had died. Her co-workers were sure to let her know that his sisters were grateful for the extra care that she provided. The family said that what she did meant everything to them.

“He was dying, and there wasn’t a whole lot of stuff that we could do for him,’’ Johnson said. “For me, I just thought, well, there is something that I could do. I knew his family was coming in. Sometimes, you can’t save everyone, but you can make the end of their life honorable to them and to their families.

“It’s a gift that I could give.’’