It is almost 11 p.m. Eastern Time, and Judgement Day is obviously not getting underway. There is a bit of a volcanic eruption/earthquakey thing going on in Iceland, but it being Iceland and all, that is not really a big deal. Other than the Bruins losing to the Bolts in game 4 of the Eastern Conference playoffs, and Animal Kingdom not quite able to overtake Shakleford in the Preakness Stakes (and Big Papi scoring his 300th home run for the Red Sox over at Fenway Park), nothing of any importance seems to be going down today.
It baffles me, deeply and sincerely baffles me, that anybody ever could believe that because some self-styled preacher with a radio show in California says the End Times are coming May 21, 2011, that they really are. I saw the billboard proclaiming it on Route 107 as I drove into Revere one day, and mostly wondered who the guy was all hunched over in a fearful, yet reverent position, silhouetted against a full, blazing sun; was he one of the faithful, or was it a stock photo someone chose out of a file? Was he startled to be all mixed up in this, his figure plastered up and down highways all over the world?
I had a patient who was Pentecostal, and her husband was the pastor of their church. She died an arduous death, one I would not wish on anybody (I still wonder if I could have done something more...anything more...to have eased her suffering). She was young, and their daughter was not yet out of her teens. I took a large chunk of time off in the middle of my work day to attend the funeral, and besides all the "praise Jesus!!" and "amen!!" that was going on, what struck me most was her daughter and how happy she was. She was beaming, smiling at all of us, from the pulpit, declaring, "she is Home! My mom is Home at last!" Her eyes shone, but not from a shimmer of tears. They shone with joy, and pride, and pure love.
I thought...yes, but your mother is dead. That faithful servant of Jesus you are talking about may be someplace wonderful right now, but the woman who was your mother is gone, gone, gone.
My father always said, "Religion is a crutch." He ditched his religion right around the time I was born, and it was a heavy religion he got rid of, a strain of Baptist that was less overpowering than the Pentecostals, but not by much. He shed it with a vehemence that never abated. He invited the Jehovah's Witnesses into the house to debate Scripture with them, essentially turning the tables and witnessing to them . My mother was a garden-variety, indifferent atheist, but my father took it on like the born-again convert he was.
"Religion is a crutch!" As I got older, I started to think, "...but if you have a broken leg, you're kinda stupid not to use one."
The first time I prayed I was about eight, and it was for no reason in particular. I was reading the Little House books (I was an early and precocious reader), and Mary and Laura would say a prayer at bedtime: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." It sounded pretty morbid to me, but it was the only prayer I had heard of, so I started to recite it to myself at night, on the sly, in the mutest of whispers, my clasped hands hidden under the blankets (to actually kneel beside the bed would have risked exposure). It got so I became quite superstitious about saying it, and if I forgot, I would be overcome by dread the following day--which was a decent enough introduction into what religion can be if taken too far in a certain direction, which it often is.
I did eventually give up this small prayerful part of my life, with no ill effects. The desire to be connected to some kind of God has never left me, though. It seems to be something my rational brain has no use for, which makes it tough for me to believe in any theistic religions except as nice cognitive-behavioral guides for effective living, because my rational brain has a very strong say in what goes on in my life. Thank my parents for that.
There is that something else that calls me, though. I will never be sure if it ever called my father; he died ten years ago, athesist to the end--but a few days after he died, for about a week, I felt as if he were very close to me. In my mind's eye I could see him as he looked when I was a girl, with a full head of hair and his beard, shaking his head at me in a rueful way and laughing, "You were right! All the time, you were right!", and I could hear myself replying, "Dad, I told you so. I told you so." Then the feeling of him, and his face in my mind, just went away.
Was that wishful thinking--or was it something else? My dad knew that I had developed some sort of faith in some sort of God, but we didn't much discuss it. "How can intelligent people believe in God!" he exclaimed one day, and I simply didn't answer, and the conversation moved on. Afterlife? Well, how do I know? How could anybody know?
He was sick with brain cancer for a very long time before he died. It messed up his thought processes, and conversations with him often became painfully scattered and irrational. He had a lot of fear around his illness, and the fear never much left him. It took away his brain, the very thing he held most dear, and the irony of that was not lost on me at all.
I have always been well aware of what a strange, scary, unpredictable world this is. Smarts, and even a big heart, won't always get me through. Maybe God is a crutch, even the God I believe in who doesn't give a shit about dogma or the hereafter or whether or not I pray, but I have come to believe that I need one.
I cried when my father died, and I miss him more rather than less as the years go by (as I have since had my son, and my children are growing, and I wish he could be here for it all). I can look that square in the eye, and I can feel how lousy that is and all the questions and contradictions it brings up in me about this world and this life.
I also have the feeling that something bigger is going on. Something far too big to understand. Something that comes to me at times like after my dad died, when his face would appear in my head like something not quite out of a dream. Something I see over and over again in my hospice work--just the sheer timing of events can be striking, completely uncanny. I don't need an End Times theology, and I don't need to focus on the next world to kill the pain I find in this one. I just need the occasional reminder that God is there, and God is good, and I have all I seem to need to go on...upright, strong, with two feet and a crutch (for when I stumble, and believe me, I will).
This isn't me. It's Night Windows by Edward Hopper.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Provincetown
I went to Provincetown for a night by myself back in April. I almost didn't, because I couldn't afford it, but I had been longing for such a night away for years and years, and something told me it was time.
April is a wet, chilly month in New England, and the grasses were not yet as green as those in Tom and Maggie's picture. It was too early in the year for vacationers, and the day I drove down was supposed to be full of rain. As I left town, making my way past King's Beach, the waves were huge and choppy, breaking spectacularly over the seawall, but before I even hit the tunnel that hugs Boston and heads to the South Shore, the dark clouds broke up and I could turn the wipers off.
Three hours later I was in Provincetown. I sat in my car in the parking lot of the inn where I was staying, eating a lunch of olives, crackers, and cheese that I had packed up back home. The wind was whipping in all directions but the sky had remained blue, and it was surprisingly warm. I put my hair back in an elastic and walked a bit toward the breakwater. On a better day I could walk it out to Long Point, which curls into Cape Cod Bay, but not that day, the wind was too fierce.
In the other direction was the road to Herring Cove Beach. Not far along it was a barricade; it was closed to both cars and foot traffic. It had been a particularly tough winter, and the road was not yet cleared of brush and sand. I got in my car and headed for the other side of the penninsula, the ocean side, and Race Point Beach.
I love the quiet on the very tip of the Cape. I love having ocean hugging close on three sides. It feels fragile and remote. I often wonder how living in a place like this would change me, city-dweller that I am, so used to things being solid and overwrought.
The parking lot was mostly empty. Some college-aged kids were playing touch football on the beach, and couples were walking their dogs. Curiously, the wind was nothing more than a light breeze there, although Race Point faces the open Atlantic. I started up the beach in the direction of Race Point Light, the very tip of the Cape.
I followed other people's footprints for a while, then past where they had turned to go back and the footprints disappeared. The dunes curved gently to my left. The ocean glittered widely to my right, somewhat choppy. It took a while, but after almost an hour, I started to notice the puffs of mist here and there over the dashes of foam. By the time I could see the lighthouse rising up over the dunes, I knew I was seeing whales out there, and quite a few of them, too.
The wind was fierce again when I rounded the bend and could see marshes and Herring Cove spread out before me; a couple of women sat on the sand with their dogs. I had seen no one else for almost an hour, and didn't care to see them, or them me, as they didn't acknowledge me at all (which makes Provincetown sort of funny...some people smile and say hello as you pass, and some ignore you like it's Boston). I turned and headed back.
The sun was warm. It was dipping lower down the sky as it was getting close to four, but the slices of clouds managed to stay out of the way. Flocks of birds dotted the wet sand at the water's edge. I kept my path as close to the dunes as the feds permitted (there are markers along them to keep people out), not wanting to disturb them. The whales weren't breaching, but I could sometimes spot the tip of a tail or the edge of a back as they came up to spout. Birds circled the air wherever there was a whale (that's one way to spot them--a crowd of birds over a choppy piece of ocean).
It was an amazing stroke of luck...whales, birds, sand, sun, and quiet solitude.
The rest of my night away was pleasant and restful--an excellent dinner at the renowned Lobster Pot, a little shopping for salt water taffy and whatnot on Commercial Street the next day, and a meandering drive home along the coast (Truro Light, the both quaint and opulent town of Chatham, and so on)--but the unexpected two hours on Race Point Beach was why I came.
It made all the reasons why I needed it fall away.
I discovered only the other day that what I had been seeing was an unusually large number of right whales congregated in the waters off of Cape Cod. There are only 473 North Atlantic right whales in existence. 201 were counted in Cape Cod waters off of Provincetown on April 20th (here's the link: http://www.coastalstudies.org/whats-new/4-20-11.htm , which I can't make any prettier because a kitten got on the keyboard and killed my plus-sign key).
My bank account was screaming "don't go", but my gut feeling was insisting "GO", in that firm and inarguable way it has with insisting things. My gut feeling does not lie (which will be the subject of another post someday, I am very sure). Thank you, gut feeling (although my bank account didn't lie, either, and I'm still a little behind, but I'm used to that sort of thing anyway)...
Thank you, whales.
(You can see the top left corner where Race Point Light is, Race Point Beach along the top left, Herring Cove Beach down the left side, and the hook of sand down the bottom where Long Point is, into Cape Cod Bay. This view is south-north, not north-south.)
Ariel view of a North Atlantic right whale--
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Match-dot-com
I figured I needed to throw some sort of vibe out into the universe, and I was told about OkCupid back in spring 2009. It took just one "you bitch" e-mail from a man who looked (in his pictures) like a gnome to drive me out of there. My ignoring his first unsavory e-mail had unleashed some old baggage for him, plainly. I suppose I wish him luck, or the proper dose of medication.
Getting onto Match was a similar affair--old friend, "give it a try! It's fun!", and blah-de-blah. Yeah, okay. Well, it was not QUITE as bad...I met one man, anyway, who I am still friends with two years later. I exchanged some nice e-mails with a couple of non-contenders, and had coffee with another guy who used to be a bouncer at the Channel in the eighties, which earned him huge points for "cool".
Last summer I tried OkCupid again. It's free, first of all, and it encourages all kinds of social connections, not just romance (and not just hook-ups, either, since I can read your mind), and it has lots of entertaining, smart, goofy quizzes and does an actual percentage-type match thing when you answer questions and they run your responses through their system. (It was started up by a bunch of math geeks from MIT.) The whole tone of the place is "irreverent", and that is me, at least as far as dating sites go.
My pictures were much better this time, and the Gnome did not resurface. I got more traffic than I had with any of my other two attempts at online dating. None of it interested me. I met one guy from the town next door, and truthfully, I should have (and probably did) meet him decades ago, since he was in the music scene and we knew a lot of the same people. I went to a punk show he promoted in October, and saw a good friend of his that I had dated once when I was nineteen (and had only the very faintest memory of....nineteen and twenty were the Hangover Years, pretty much). This guy had gone on to front a band that was playing at the show, and played it well, I may add--more points for "cool" (for the nineteen year old me, anyway), and the show was enormously fun, but still no romance to be found.
I couldn't take to the online thing. I felt like I was flipping through a catalog, and one that was way more Cabela's than Victoria's Secret. I felt some sort of obligation, though...to make some "effort"...to "get out there"..."look around a little!"
Maybe putting a flyer up on the corkboard in the laundromat would work better, and result in a substantial connection, not all this promotional angling?
This one guy was a "97% match" for me, the site tauted. His pictures were attractive, but he had the same facial expression in all of them--a tight-lipped, constrained smile and a hard blank stare. That didn't look too good...and his profile was very lengthy, but that could mean he was just a word-fiend like me; no problem. I e-mailed him a friendly greeting, and he responded within minutes. That never happens. I waited a day (acting just as manipulative and self-promotional as everybody else) and and sent my response the next evening. He again responded within minutes. I was starting to catch on, so I asked him, "So...have you been in many relationships?" His reply mapped them out in detail--in terms of his age at the time, how long they lasted, and the spaces in between--and thus I discovered that my "97% match" had never had a long term relationship (more than three months) ever in his life (fifty years old), and no relationships at all since his early thirties.
Well, gak.
So here I am, just as single as when I started, although richer in having two more male friends, although one is not currently speaking to me (he's like that, on one hand, and really wants to find "love", on the other, which is not with me, but I think we will cross paths again. After all, we know SO many of the same people!), and the other I am pretty much in love with--but don't tell him, he doesn't want to hear it. We are certainly friends, though, and I like that fine as it is, actually.
Internet dating...I don't have the heart for it. I know that a true knight has to slog through a lot of hostile territory to get to the Holy Grail, but my days of being a warrior for love have ended.
That doesn't mean I'm done with love. It just means that I have noticed where my heart resides, by seeing clearly where it does not...and I would rather be in that warm, soulful, expansive place than set off looking, again, for people who can excite my neurons but leave my heart untouched. And yeah, they are legion.
I don't mind. Here is where I will quote you some Rumi, as no discussion of love is complete without him...
A thousand half-loves
must be forsaken to take
one whole heart home.
(translation by Coleman Barks, Rumi: The Book of Love, copyright 2003.)
Getting onto Match was a similar affair--old friend, "give it a try! It's fun!", and blah-de-blah. Yeah, okay. Well, it was not QUITE as bad...I met one man, anyway, who I am still friends with two years later. I exchanged some nice e-mails with a couple of non-contenders, and had coffee with another guy who used to be a bouncer at the Channel in the eighties, which earned him huge points for "cool".
Last summer I tried OkCupid again. It's free, first of all, and it encourages all kinds of social connections, not just romance (and not just hook-ups, either, since I can read your mind), and it has lots of entertaining, smart, goofy quizzes and does an actual percentage-type match thing when you answer questions and they run your responses through their system. (It was started up by a bunch of math geeks from MIT.) The whole tone of the place is "irreverent", and that is me, at least as far as dating sites go.
My pictures were much better this time, and the Gnome did not resurface. I got more traffic than I had with any of my other two attempts at online dating. None of it interested me. I met one guy from the town next door, and truthfully, I should have (and probably did) meet him decades ago, since he was in the music scene and we knew a lot of the same people. I went to a punk show he promoted in October, and saw a good friend of his that I had dated once when I was nineteen (and had only the very faintest memory of....nineteen and twenty were the Hangover Years, pretty much). This guy had gone on to front a band that was playing at the show, and played it well, I may add--more points for "cool" (for the nineteen year old me, anyway), and the show was enormously fun, but still no romance to be found.
I couldn't take to the online thing. I felt like I was flipping through a catalog, and one that was way more Cabela's than Victoria's Secret. I felt some sort of obligation, though...to make some "effort"...to "get out there"..."look around a little!"
Maybe putting a flyer up on the corkboard in the laundromat would work better, and result in a substantial connection, not all this promotional angling?
This one guy was a "97% match" for me, the site tauted. His pictures were attractive, but he had the same facial expression in all of them--a tight-lipped, constrained smile and a hard blank stare. That didn't look too good...and his profile was very lengthy, but that could mean he was just a word-fiend like me; no problem. I e-mailed him a friendly greeting, and he responded within minutes. That never happens. I waited a day (acting just as manipulative and self-promotional as everybody else) and and sent my response the next evening. He again responded within minutes. I was starting to catch on, so I asked him, "So...have you been in many relationships?" His reply mapped them out in detail--in terms of his age at the time, how long they lasted, and the spaces in between--and thus I discovered that my "97% match" had never had a long term relationship (more than three months) ever in his life (fifty years old), and no relationships at all since his early thirties.
Well, gak.
So here I am, just as single as when I started, although richer in having two more male friends, although one is not currently speaking to me (he's like that, on one hand, and really wants to find "love", on the other, which is not with me, but I think we will cross paths again. After all, we know SO many of the same people!), and the other I am pretty much in love with--but don't tell him, he doesn't want to hear it. We are certainly friends, though, and I like that fine as it is, actually.
Internet dating...I don't have the heart for it. I know that a true knight has to slog through a lot of hostile territory to get to the Holy Grail, but my days of being a warrior for love have ended.
That doesn't mean I'm done with love. It just means that I have noticed where my heart resides, by seeing clearly where it does not...and I would rather be in that warm, soulful, expansive place than set off looking, again, for people who can excite my neurons but leave my heart untouched. And yeah, they are legion.
I don't mind. Here is where I will quote you some Rumi, as no discussion of love is complete without him...
A thousand half-loves
must be forsaken to take
one whole heart home.
(translation by Coleman Barks, Rumi: The Book of Love, copyright 2003.)
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
How I Got Into This Nursing Racket, Anyway
I had been waiting tables for a few years, and badly. Whatever it is you need to be an engaging and tipable waitress, I don’t possess. I had shirked going to a four-year college (although my excellent high school transcript could have sent me to a good one) and had dabbled and failed at a little community college (I stopped showing up). I was at a crossroads time of my life, just turned twenty-one, and saw an ad in the newspaper for a direct-care human service job at a state institution for the mentally retarded. I had a black mohawk and was fifteen minutes late for the interview—but the job being what it was, I was hired anyway.
That job set the direction for the rest of my life.
They were all in wheelchairs. They couldn’t talk. Some of them had seizures, small ones like tic-like twitches and blinks, and others had full-blown grand mals. The diapers were cloth ones—the adult sized pampers were only used for when they left the dormitory to take the van to their day programs. The day programs were to stimulate them, engage them in some way, but I only saw them back in the dorm. It was my job to bathe them—everybody was bathed every night—and feed them, and put them to bed. Every two hours diapers were checked and changed if needed. They were repositioned out of their wheelchairs onto vinyl wedges or mats on the floor. The beds were in large rooms, like wards, and arranged against partitions.
By "they", I don't mean “they”. At first it was the most frightening thing I had undertaken in my life, far and away—a human being, fully grown, who didn’t look or act like anyone normal, and who didn’t seem to live by any rules I could readily understand. The first time I was by myself, undressing and bathing a nonverbal adult who couldn’t even make sustained eye contact with me, I was a mess. I could only break it down to a mechanical task, like doing the dishes, separate from the person I was caring for. After a few days it was better--I would smile, and chatter, and try to be as quick as possible so they wouldn't get too cold. They started to become people to me.
One of my co-workers was an older woman who had been there a few years. She was a bland person, a stickler for routine who often got on my nerves, but what I remember about her most was her telling me early on, "When I started here, I would go home every night and cry over these poor kids and how sad it is that they are like this...I don't know why God makes people suffer this way. I try to do what I can to make things nice for them."
I was startled when she told me that. I didn't go home and cry; I didn't feel sorry for them at all. The only time I saw pain on their faces was when, for instance, little Sadie was having one of those awful runs of seizures that would jerk her body so badly she would start to cry, like the two-year-old she mostly was; that was hard to witness. She was my favorite...rather, one of my favorites. She had a freckled, homely face, and would smile and laugh when I hugged her. Feeding her was a chore; she drank all her meals and would not eat any other way, and often would shake her head from side to side and most of the drink would spill down her bib.
I got immune, more or less, to any fluid or substance that would come out of a person's body. I got the best upper body strength of my life, hauling six-foot tall men out of their wheelchairs onto the raised porcelain slabs we lay them on to bathe. (This was before mechanical lifters, and before gloves, too, if you must know.) I took to bringing my boombox in and playing The Cure, or 10,000 Maniacs, or whatever else I was into before I was told not to by the supervisors (I was a young twenty-one, more like fifteen in many ways). For this work, my take-home pay was $225 a week.
I loved that job.
A couple of years later, when the state was paying for me to go to nursing school and giving me full-time pay (that $225) for part-time work (but nursing school was 7:30am until 3pm, except clinical days, which were 6:45am until 2pm, Monday through Friday, for eleven months for an LPN diploma), my hands-down absolute favorite man was moving out--on his way to a newly-formed group home in the community, which were quickly becoming more common. He was the first of our residents to go to one. I got permission from his family to take him out for an evening before he left.
Johnny was no taller than me, couldn't talk, but he could walk and rarely wet through his underwear. He wore a huge football helmet because he banged his head when he was frustrated. I took it off the minute we got to my car. He wouldn't need it with me, and he didn't. I strapped him in, and we drove off, first to my favorite local Italian family restaurant. I cut up his spaghetti into small pieces and he ate it with a spoon, grinning hugely. He was difficult to read, as all of the residents were--how is life experienced when your body is thirty, but your brain is still somewhere around three, or four, and has been for decades? After dinner we went to a playground, and he climbed the ladder up the slide in a lumbering, slow, cautious manner. I wasn't sure if he was enjoying himself or not; back at the dorm, he spent most of his time sitting cross-legged on the couch, making faces, and occasionally laughing at nothing I could see.
One reason why I liked Johnny so much is he giggled wonderfully when tickled, and gave the best hugs in the world. I think that is reason enough to like somebody--anybody, really.
I saw him once more after he had been living in the group home for a while; his parents took him to a Christmas party being held for the residents. I rushed up to him and beamed, and he squinted up his eyes and grinned at me with his mouth wide open. His mother said, "He is so happy, he is doing so well there...he doesn't bang his head at all anymore, and he doesn't have to wear that helmet!" He still had a receding hairline, of course, but his hair was thicker and combed neatly. "Oh, I am so glad to hear that," I said.
There was one night I was working late, doing an overtime, and while making rounds at midnight it hit me--where I was and who these people were hit me in a way it never had before. I suddenly felt profoundly sad. The blank eyes, the wet diapers, the one-sided conversations seemed to strip all meaning from what I was doing. "Why are these people alive?" I thought. The feeling hung with me for the rest of the long night.
The next day I was back at three in the afternoon for my shift, almost apprehensive when I unlocked the heavy door and let myself in, but I needn't have worried. The feeling was completely gone. The stark, institutional wards seemed full of life, even merriment. I knew each face, and many of them had become dear.
All us employees knew the backstories of the residents. Some of the stories were tragic, and for reasons sometimes within God's control (if you believe that sort of thing), but more often from within the control of man.
People make mistakes. Things can go wrong. Pregnancy, childbirth, home environment...
But none of that was present in those dormitories. None of that mattered, day to day. Were their lives harder than mine? Did they suffer? Was the simple fact of their existence a tragedy?
Well...is the fact of anybody's existence a tragedy? Or do we just live a life, and enjoy the hugs and the laughter and the people who take the time to take care of us?
Does anything matter more than that?
That job set the direction for the rest of my life.
They were all in wheelchairs. They couldn’t talk. Some of them had seizures, small ones like tic-like twitches and blinks, and others had full-blown grand mals. The diapers were cloth ones—the adult sized pampers were only used for when they left the dormitory to take the van to their day programs. The day programs were to stimulate them, engage them in some way, but I only saw them back in the dorm. It was my job to bathe them—everybody was bathed every night—and feed them, and put them to bed. Every two hours diapers were checked and changed if needed. They were repositioned out of their wheelchairs onto vinyl wedges or mats on the floor. The beds were in large rooms, like wards, and arranged against partitions.
By "they", I don't mean “they”. At first it was the most frightening thing I had undertaken in my life, far and away—a human being, fully grown, who didn’t look or act like anyone normal, and who didn’t seem to live by any rules I could readily understand. The first time I was by myself, undressing and bathing a nonverbal adult who couldn’t even make sustained eye contact with me, I was a mess. I could only break it down to a mechanical task, like doing the dishes, separate from the person I was caring for. After a few days it was better--I would smile, and chatter, and try to be as quick as possible so they wouldn't get too cold. They started to become people to me.
One of my co-workers was an older woman who had been there a few years. She was a bland person, a stickler for routine who often got on my nerves, but what I remember about her most was her telling me early on, "When I started here, I would go home every night and cry over these poor kids and how sad it is that they are like this...I don't know why God makes people suffer this way. I try to do what I can to make things nice for them."
I was startled when she told me that. I didn't go home and cry; I didn't feel sorry for them at all. The only time I saw pain on their faces was when, for instance, little Sadie was having one of those awful runs of seizures that would jerk her body so badly she would start to cry, like the two-year-old she mostly was; that was hard to witness. She was my favorite...rather, one of my favorites. She had a freckled, homely face, and would smile and laugh when I hugged her. Feeding her was a chore; she drank all her meals and would not eat any other way, and often would shake her head from side to side and most of the drink would spill down her bib.
I got immune, more or less, to any fluid or substance that would come out of a person's body. I got the best upper body strength of my life, hauling six-foot tall men out of their wheelchairs onto the raised porcelain slabs we lay them on to bathe. (This was before mechanical lifters, and before gloves, too, if you must know.) I took to bringing my boombox in and playing The Cure, or 10,000 Maniacs, or whatever else I was into before I was told not to by the supervisors (I was a young twenty-one, more like fifteen in many ways). For this work, my take-home pay was $225 a week.
I loved that job.
A couple of years later, when the state was paying for me to go to nursing school and giving me full-time pay (that $225) for part-time work (but nursing school was 7:30am until 3pm, except clinical days, which were 6:45am until 2pm, Monday through Friday, for eleven months for an LPN diploma), my hands-down absolute favorite man was moving out--on his way to a newly-formed group home in the community, which were quickly becoming more common. He was the first of our residents to go to one. I got permission from his family to take him out for an evening before he left.
Johnny was no taller than me, couldn't talk, but he could walk and rarely wet through his underwear. He wore a huge football helmet because he banged his head when he was frustrated. I took it off the minute we got to my car. He wouldn't need it with me, and he didn't. I strapped him in, and we drove off, first to my favorite local Italian family restaurant. I cut up his spaghetti into small pieces and he ate it with a spoon, grinning hugely. He was difficult to read, as all of the residents were--how is life experienced when your body is thirty, but your brain is still somewhere around three, or four, and has been for decades? After dinner we went to a playground, and he climbed the ladder up the slide in a lumbering, slow, cautious manner. I wasn't sure if he was enjoying himself or not; back at the dorm, he spent most of his time sitting cross-legged on the couch, making faces, and occasionally laughing at nothing I could see.
One reason why I liked Johnny so much is he giggled wonderfully when tickled, and gave the best hugs in the world. I think that is reason enough to like somebody--anybody, really.
I saw him once more after he had been living in the group home for a while; his parents took him to a Christmas party being held for the residents. I rushed up to him and beamed, and he squinted up his eyes and grinned at me with his mouth wide open. His mother said, "He is so happy, he is doing so well there...he doesn't bang his head at all anymore, and he doesn't have to wear that helmet!" He still had a receding hairline, of course, but his hair was thicker and combed neatly. "Oh, I am so glad to hear that," I said.
There was one night I was working late, doing an overtime, and while making rounds at midnight it hit me--where I was and who these people were hit me in a way it never had before. I suddenly felt profoundly sad. The blank eyes, the wet diapers, the one-sided conversations seemed to strip all meaning from what I was doing. "Why are these people alive?" I thought. The feeling hung with me for the rest of the long night.
The next day I was back at three in the afternoon for my shift, almost apprehensive when I unlocked the heavy door and let myself in, but I needn't have worried. The feeling was completely gone. The stark, institutional wards seemed full of life, even merriment. I knew each face, and many of them had become dear.
All us employees knew the backstories of the residents. Some of the stories were tragic, and for reasons sometimes within God's control (if you believe that sort of thing), but more often from within the control of man.
People make mistakes. Things can go wrong. Pregnancy, childbirth, home environment...
But none of that was present in those dormitories. None of that mattered, day to day. Were their lives harder than mine? Did they suffer? Was the simple fact of their existence a tragedy?
Well...is the fact of anybody's existence a tragedy? Or do we just live a life, and enjoy the hugs and the laughter and the people who take the time to take care of us?
Does anything matter more than that?
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