An Armful of Glads
Such colors of an August afternoon. First, the shades of wedded green, from the backlit leaves and their lapped and shadowed neighbors, to the heavy hip-high grass, to the mosses of the rock garden; the ruffled ears of rhubarb and dense and barbed raspberry thickets; the high architecture of island elms and the near-black interiors of the shrouded pines. As if in backdrop to all the rest: for when you turn your eyes away from the boundless seas of growing, grown greens, there are these highlights, flags and banners above the surging day: red in the bowl of just-picked berries, sunlight filling the shards of brilliant glass mosaic in a living-room window, a far sail on the deepest green of the sea, and an armful of gladiolas, released upon the table with a flourish, waiting to be arranged in a vase.
Snapshots retrieved from a life in motion.
At my parents’ cottage in eastern Canada, I paused in the yard before entering the house, the spray of stars catching my imagination and my daughter’s eye, the local green gone underground for the night, while the infinity of space and the fullness of a galaxy took our breath. With our eyes we tiptoed around the heavens, navigating imponderables, while the fragrance of the garden reminded us our feet were planted on the earth.
Then, as if to make the colors more precious still, the night was spent in incredible pain.
As though the fabric were being torn, as one tears sheets from end to end, along the weave, for bandages. And unfortunately it was me being torn, it was me in the ER, me with tubes and bags and inertia being hung from my body like weights, an anchor holding me in one space and one time: the precise place in the abdomen where, clenched into a fist, my body refused to cure itself.
My parents, as helpless as me, drove me 40 minutes from their home to the hospital. Two hours later, I left triage and was seen by an excellent and caring staff. And then, I think, whatever physical pain I experienced was multiplied, because this gentle and caring nurse, whose profession it was to tend the hurt, was forced to increase the anguish some hundredfold, moments (two minutes? five?) stretching into the timeless expanse of trauma, and having to tough through the experience of creating, not removing pain.
In the end, gasping, I thanked her, and I am pretty sure she heard that as “thank you for untying the knot in my body”, “thank you for all the gentleness you brought to an ungentle procedure”. But that is not what I was saying. I was thanking a clearly empathetic person for working so hard, to hold her humanity, to maintain mine, when so much energy and pain moved through her hands.
My condition stabilized, I was given a couple of drugs and invited to sleep if I could. I waited for the tension in my limbs and mind to unwind, and it slowly uncoiled and slid away… a snake, but more a protector than a threat, it uncoiled itself and slid away, and I lay there listening to the quiet, earnest activity of the ER.
And if there was a moment of true sadness it came then, and surprisingly it wasn’t a sadness for my Self or my poor, tortured shell. As I lay there and remembered the gentleness and care given me by the doctor and the on-duty nurse, I thought – no, it was more a feeling than a thought – Ah, if only someone would put their hand on my forehead… Not the insensate moment of sheer pain, which draws you so far into yourself, away from any comfort into the singularity of your damage, but the minutes and hours of solitude with only the remnants of that suffering as your companion, and fear, and uncertainty, the strange tubes and cold sheets and antiseptic surroundings.
But the tears that came – and they did come – weren’t the child of me waiting for that hand. This was one evening, a few hours, almost nothing… my father in the waiting room for much of it. The tears came when my heart filled, with the absence of that gentle touch in the space around me: hour after hour, the emergency room and its constant river of suffering, a broken bone, abdominal injury, an elderly woman, a child, a man, another, another child and her mother, one after another after another, and every one of them, every last one, bearing the bodily hurt and the dissolution of their trust alone… one after another after another all through the night, as I lay there listening.
And one night after another night after another to a year of broken nights; then year in and year out, a river of hurt humanity, wanting a hand only to touch their hand; not to go unaccompanied into the dark of the night.
I thought: a nurse or a doctor, who has to dance so intimately with the suffering, wouldn’t last a year in his or her profession, if they commiserated this closely with their patients. And how would they attend to the critical new cases, if they stopped a while by those whose crises had stabilized? How would they steel their senses against the next cries of pain, if they had just opened them to a whimper of recovery? But what if a hospital hired a few people, retired from their life professions, perhaps, to make rounds of those who are treated and solitary, to fill the void of hours between doctors’ calls? A hand to the forehead, a soft word, un-businesslike and caring. It would make all the difference in the world, the difference between physical pain and mental torment.
~
In the morning I drove back to the village and walked in past the garden, where the gladiolas were brighter, softer, and more ephemeral than I had ever seen them before.