Environmental Services by Christine Lowther

Christine Lowther has made the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize shortlist for Environmental Services.

She will receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Artsand her work has beenpublished on CBC Books.

The winner of the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize will be announced Sept. 21. They will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and win a two-week writing residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point.

If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize is open for submissions.

• CBC Short Story Prize open for 2024 submit your new fiction now!

Christine Lowther resides in auukwiiat (Tla-o-qui-aht) territory on the west coast. She is the editor of Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees and its youth companion volume.She is also the author of four poetry collections. In 2014, she was presented with the inaugural Rainy Coast Award for Significant Accomplishment. Christine's memoir Born Out of This was shortlisted for the 2015 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize. In 2016, Christine won first place in the creative non-fiction category of the Federation of British Columbia Writers Literary Writes contest. She served as Tofino's Poet Laureate during the Covid years.

Lowther told CBC Books thather inspiration for writing Environmental Servicescame from personal experience: "In my mid-40s I took a job in a small hospital's housekeeping department, otherwise known as Environmental Services. I also took some training in inventory and supplies. My new position brought many new experiences, surprises, wonders, shocks, hilarities and sorrows. Ten years later, I am often struck by amazement during shifts. As a writer my natural desire is to share, honour and memorialize people and events. In this piece I wanted to describe some of the moments I've lived or witnessed with friends or strangers who were dealing with accidents, illness or death. So many personalities, and yes, characters there had to be ways to express my awe without breaking confidentiality, so I made sure to change names and circumstances enough to respect privacy. I also wanted people to know how hard we work, how much we have to do every dayand how welcome are the friendly and/or dramatic interruptions from patients and other staff. I was additionally motivated to mourn the unnecessary loss of trees for our helipad expansion. Housekeeping/ ESsounds low-brow, as if we clean toilets all day, a misconception. So many things surprise me in those hallways and rooms and on those grounds, things that might never have crossed my mind if I'd stayed in retail. The work is routine yet diverse, emotionally challenging, sometimes grossand frequently mind-blowing. I couldn't keep it to myself."

You can read Environmental Servicesbelow.

1.
Some time in late 2013, a brown hand shuts the lid of a gleaming white coffin through the morgue's closing door. I wash a stretcher with a sterile cloth soaked in Oxiver. After four long training shifts, this is my first day alone on the job. In the birthing room I clean every surface, both horizontal and vertical. Then turn to the trays. Each instrument must be soaked, scrubbed, disinfected, packaged, sent away for sterilization. Downstairs in the laundry room, I pull a dripping body bag from the spin cycle.

2.
A large policeman throws a small, handcuffed woman sobbing to the floor. It's my second shift rotation. In "Emerg" (with a soft G), a fork sticks out of a man's big toe. In the cast room a youth holds his withered right hand close to his body, tells me he is lonely, stops mid-sentence. Lets his head fall into his left hand, quavers weakly with uneven breaths. Descends into quiet robotic seizure as I pull the flat mop across the floor. When I press his call-button, the nurse rushes in. "Has he been like this the whole time?"

3.
Human remains are located about a month after a cessna plane crash. When they are finally driven away from the morgue by the undertaker, I don perfumed mask, disposable gown, gloves and shoe slippers. Tell myself death is natural. That it is my honour to clean up after the dead. But unmistakable reek creeps into halls, kitchen, elevator, upstairs to the patient ward. It's my fault for keeping the door open as I scrub fluids from the cold walls. My fault, so I spray citrus scent until the aerosol rattles empty.

4.
Some mornings I'm supposed to clean Physio, Community Care, Admitting, hallways, nurses' station, nurses' lounge, or Mental Health, but most days I begin with the waiting room, then move straight on to Emerg and Trauma. Then bathrooms. There are many. Then patient rooms and discharges, TV lounge, personal commodes, laundry, biohazard trash, kitchen floor meals are cooked on-site from scratch! I struggle to keep the linen and housekeeping closets stocked; it's crucial to have enough warm flannels. On weekends there's the Lab, staff dining room, X-ray, offices, stairwells, downstairs floors, storage and supply rooms. Yearly we are trained in chemical spill response. Fitted for special masks.

5.
Gwen is fastened by restraints to her meal chair, her hearing aid lying on the bedside table. "NURSE!" she calls every time I pass her open door, even after I've shouted "I'M THE CLEANER." Wiping down her room, I smile at her a lot. "Is this a hospital?" she asks, every day. The urge to free her is mounting, until Sophie at Admitting says Gwen fell badly at home and is likely to do so again. "Do you know when I'm gonna get outta this place?" "NO. I'M SORRY."

6.
Heidi lies dying in the last room. "Just clean the floor," I'm told. Whispers recede with my entrance. This is years before Covid; her bed is hidden behind relatives and friends, yet I glimpse the withered hands held up to faces and kissed. I manoeuvre around many feet. There are more in the hallway and TV lounge. Cots are set up beside both beds in the adjacent patient room. Relations take turns sleeping.

7.
Simon prefers his door left open: "I might catch some gossip." His days are full of retching. Soon he is taken off the cook's list. I find some slippers, ask him if they're his. He cracks up, "You think I'd wear those?" The TV lounge's freezer is full of popsicles. I comment, "That's a lot of sugar." That's when he tells me they are the only food he can eat anymore. I apologize. When Simon sleeps, his sister pulls her chair close, leans into him and gazes at his face. After my days off his bed is empty, ready to clean.

8.
On a Sunday morning, some Emerg bays are occupied by men with hangovers. Behind the Suture Bay curtain, a nurse comforts someone suffering from "accidental amputation." Following a vasectomy in Trauma, I scrub and process the hooked instrument.

9.
Doris always misses the toilet. My mop follows her pee-prints down the hall and out the front door where she is having a cigarette. I bring her clean socks but she cannot bend. That's a nurse's job. Doris insists her black sweater went downstairs to laundry, but I have not seen it. She is the one who helped herself to another patient's jello. There is no sweater, whispers the head nurse.

10.
Proud of his room, Hugo says I don't need to clean it. He is surprised and embarrassed when my mop finds a few stray crumbs. I later discover that he has filled in the small dents of his walls with toothpaste. That night, he departs through the TV lounge window, checks in at the hostel. Maintenance tightens all the patient windows in the hospital.

11.
Time passes. John, who has x-rayed us all for 20-plus years, laughs when I describe Housekeeping as "oddly, strangely satisfying work." Reminds me that it's called Environmental Services now. He later dies of lung cancer before he can retire. Others complain every time they speak. If I couldn't sit up by myself, if I couldn't move my bowels without help, would I find paths to gratitude, search for a positive spin, grope for a joke?

12.
I knock on the door of the ocean view room, where so many have stayed, healed or died. The terminally ill grandmother is surrounded by her many grown children. All turn toward me at once, every face with the same huge, forest-green eyes. They walk her slowly down the hall, their hands gently holding on everywhere, as if she were their touchable miracle, someone already risen again. And she holds on in wide leaf-eyed wonder.

13.
In her room beside the red maple tree, the big woman lies motionless in bed, emitting faint cries of help through unmoving lips. Later, wheeled back from a bath, her round head sits grinning atop piles of white towels. She tells me she remembers being a child so involved in reading that she felt inside the story, hearing and smelling and living it, so that her mother had to physically shake her out of it at dinnertime.

14.
A man I snuggled with one long-ago new year's eve sits in the waiting room with his left leg thrown over his chair arm. After a nurse leads him into the suture bay, he calls to me from behind his curtain: "Could you please take a picture?" I draw the curtain aside. He is lying on his front, handing me his phone. His thigh is cut clean across, yawning open like a red toothless mouth.

15.
To improve access to the newly enlarged helipad, the red maple is cut down. So is a beautiful oak tree, and many hemlocks and cedars too, though some are merely topped. Every shift with its chainsawing soundtrack shreds my morale. Later one of the pilots claims that many of the trees, including the oak and the maple, did not have to come down.

16.
A tour boat capsizes and sinks. The scene at work is chaotic, hard to manage: finding enough blankets, attending to nurses' hurried requests. Diesel fumes permeate laundry, cries of grief come from Emerg, police officers pore over the passenger list with Admitting staff, rescue medics line the hallway walls in an attitude of quiet respect and readiness to help. The deceased are brought in downstairs. I don't sleep well for a week. There are debriefing sessions to attend, a counsellor to see. But the only thing that helps me sleep is writing. I change everyone's name, a few other details privacy and confidentiality are paramount. Polish my words until I feel firm enough to question a certain doctor. And sleep again. A survivor whose family drowned donates a tall blanket warmer to the hospital in memory of her loved ones. Seven years later I re-read my essay, sob all the way through.

17.
Covid 19 feels like a slow tide creeping up the island. Our hospital is at the end of a long highway. At first I hear of a single case in the next town, just a rumour. Staff begin wearing masks at all times, in all departments. Nurses start testing people outside the building. They bring cotton swabs up to car windows. They test pedestrians under a tent erected by the front door. Finally a long trailer is towed across-island and installed in front of the building. Our cleaning load increases. We need more staff. There are a few positive test results, apparently, but those patients are sent home or to other hospitals. At last, a longterm in-patient contracts the virus, presumably from a visitor. For a while, family and friends are no longer allowed in. To clean the room of a patient with Covid, I add goggles or a visored mask to my regular PPE. Make conversation as usual. After three inoculations, I test positive in August 2022. Could have caught it anywhere.

18.
It's always pleasant to clean Rod's room. He founded a local research society to study orcas, and found historical artifacts while diving. Now he is eighty, and no matter how ill he feels, he engages in cheerful, interested, intelligent conversation. I even drop in on him a few times during my off-hours, like the morning I'm lucky enough to see a pod of orcas from the beach. Today, the day I've realized I'm reaching a decade of working here, he tells me he is "a dead man walking." When I ask what he means, he says that he has a date with medically assisted dying. I realize I'll be working on that date. He doesn't know the time. We agree it's better to have access to choice. But as I push the cart down the hall towards the next room, my feet drag and I almost sink to the floor.

19.
In room fourteen, in the arms of her husband, my friend dies after two short years with cancer. Our conversation this morning was our last together. I seem to be mopping the floors with my tears. Later an ambulance rushes someone to Trauma. I take advantage of the situation by cleaning the nurses' station, which emptied when they all hurried off to help. Hours later, I jog around closing doors and windows before a helicopter lands to transfer the patient to a much larger hospital. The fumes make our security guard sick and the whirling blades blow grass and leaves indoors. After landing, loading and departure, it's time to clean Trauma. Four nurses glance up from packages spread out on the stretcher. They have a lot of counting and sorting to do if they are to restock this room fully and accurately. One of them is texting the employee in charge of inventory and supplies, sending her photos on her day off. "Where will we find more of these?" She is happy to help via text. I need to clean the stretcher from top to bottom before wiping down all the high-touch and IV poles. Two garbage bins are overflowing with wrappers, tubes, IV bags and other life saving detritus. I push a broom around the floor three times to consolidate even more packaging. One of the nurses sets up her phone to fill the room with music. She used to work in a whale watching office downstairs from an art gallery where I worked. Now we are under one roof again, this time with union jobs. I am wearing scrubs she gave me. As I prepare to mop, a party atmosphere has surprised us all.

Read the other finalists

• That Poor Girlby Finnian Burnett (Princeton, B.C.)
• Glossary for an Aswangby Louie Leyson (Surrey, B.C.)
• Black Diamondby Barbara Joan Scott (Calgary)
• The Edge of Changeby Kelly S. Thompson (Colorado Springs, Colorado)

About the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize

The winner of the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and win a two-week writing residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.

The 2024 CBC Short Story Prize is currently open until Nov. 1, 2023 at 4:59 p.m. ET. The 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2024 and the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April 2024.