I wrote this yesterday and it was therapeutic but posting it would have been too much. That’s what I need to do now.
I don’t want to write about it because I don’t want to remember it, but I think maybe I need to. I believe in writing so I’ll just write. Start from the beginning and tell. Honesty.
I spent some time in the hospital’s courtyard this morning. I sat very still on a bench and watched a fountain. Some people walked laps around the courtyard. It’s a cool day finally in Minnesota. Cloudy and without the awful heat of recent. A man in a turban who I saw out walking in the courtyard yesterday did five laps around it and then sat down on a bench across the way. He and I locked eyes the first time he walked by and nodded to each other and there was steadiness in his eyes. When he was just past me he muttered something in another language. He took short steps as he walked, but there was confidence in it. He kept up the same pace the whole time and just walked.
The courtyard was surrounded by the four buildings of St. Marys (no apostrophe for some reason) Hospital at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The buildings each went up seven or eight stories. All of them brick and big. Windows of rooms with beds in them with people in them sick. Families. The courtyard was very quiet and calm, but when I looked up and around at the walls of the buildings I knew that behind all of them was sadness, fear, worry, grief. Maybe there was also joy. There were families together, leaning on each other. There was life behind those walls. Artless life. Life in peril, life uncomfortable, pain, but life all the same.
Lord, somebody’s crying.
Lord, somebody’s dying.
Lord, somebody’s praying.
Last night as I rode down the elevator with my uncle and my mom I thought of how we had clustered around my dad’s bed and talked with him except he couldn’t talk because of the hole in his neck, the nurse had been a good guy and though he had never heard my dad’s voice I knew my dad liked him. There were the four of us around his bed and it was a good talk about North Carolina (where the nurse was originally from and where my parents had a very good vacation once). But as we rode the elevator down I thought how my dad wasn’t brother husband father now, he was the patient. The patient. Something unto itself.
Sleep seemed like the best thing to do yesterday, but I couldn’t. I felt tired deep in my chest and just wanted to sleep. I thought of going to the bar in the hotel after my mom went to sleep last night and getting drunk. Good and drunk. I didn’t, I just sat and watched television and then went to sleep, the exhaustion in my chest finally numbed and I just felt alone and anxious and of course I thought that I wouldn’t be able to sleep now.
My dad is mute right now. I notice every time he smiles, I also couldn’t help but watch his face, twisted into a grimace as he took a morphine-induced nap yesterday afternoon. While everyone else has tried to make small talk with him, tell him things, entertain him, successful to varying degrees, I have felt mute myself. I have hardly been able to speak. Perhaps in sympathy, perhaps not wanting to flaunt it, perhaps wanting him to know that even though he can’t speak right now, I’m still willing to listen. Perhaps just feeling sorry for myself because I felt so goddamned useless.
He had most of one vocal cord removed so that they could take cancer with it. They got it all and the doctor is optimistic. The one time I met him he was business-like, to the point. Didn’t even look at me but just told my mom everything and left. So actually, he wasn’t optimistic, but the things he told her made us optimistic. My dad seemed reassured but just focused on getting this over with. I kept telling him that he was going to make it through this, that he really didn’t have any choice, and that it would soon all be behind him. I don’t think it was much comfort to him when he was just concerned with the plastic thing sticking out of his neck which he had to breathe through.
So I sat in the courtyard by myself very calmly this morning. I knew my dad would be okay. I knew my mom would be okay. I tried to let go of the tightness in my stomach that I’ve felt since heading down here yesterday at noon. I tried to erase the images in my mind of blood and pale skin and the awful smell of the hospital and the beeping and the godawful boredom of it all. I tried to resolve the feelings of guilt and fear and everything else. I tried to just be alive. Just be.
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