Two Poems (December 20, 2009. Issue 12.)
Conquering the Five Senses
I wish I knew what it would have been like for him to hold me,
An embrace more of comfort than of sex,
Though sex is a visible ghost in the room.
Standing body to body, my smallness is engulfed by his height,
My head against his chest, as if it has always been there,
I can hear his runner’s heart hit tachycardic speeds,
My tears soak his shirt, but he absorbs them,
My breath comes in gasps, swallowing up all the oxygen in the room,
A sliver of a crescent moon could not fill the space between us,
Yet a Grand Canyon exists.
I can taste my own tears, as I breathe in his,
I smell us both—sweat mixed with that morning’s soap,
I feel the heat between us, a room filled with concupiscence,
I steal a look into his brown eyes—moist with confusion,
And I see what might have been, in another time, another place,
Our hearts slow now, as we reach a reasoned moment,
We leave the insanity of our five senses,
And our arms return to their respective sides.
The Kiss
I kissed his hand because I could not kiss his lips—
Imperfect creatures sitting side-by-side,
A union that can never be,
Forever out of reach,
Though not unrequited,
His hands intertwined in mine—
His grip strong and warm,
A sweet release of salty droplets came—
Yet only two or three escaped,
The rest returned to a tear-filled heart—
Now held within his hands,
On that day he cried for me,
So I kissed his hand because I could not kiss his lips.
Table of Contents
The Singing Lesson (November 20, 2009. Issue 11.)
Her name was Jeannie H., and she was, in the most non-medical of medical terms, a train wreck: six fractured ribs, complicated fractures to both legs, a fractured left wrist, a fractured right arm, a concussion, and to top off all these insults and injuries, she was crazy. Crazy as a loon, crazy as your Aunt Alice in the attic, a crazy quilt of a human being, and I grew to love her. The word eccentric for Jeannie H. would have been a kindness or a compliment.
I got to know Jeannie H. for about three months in the hospital where I worked as a nurse on the Orthopedic Unit. This was a different time in health care, a time when you were not shown the door before you were healed. It was a time when you were still a patient, a human being, not just a chart, a diagnosis or an ID number. She was 56 years old to my then 29, so of course, she seemed old to me. Now at 53 years of age, I know better.
Jeannie H. was about 5 foot 6 inches tall, and when she finally learned to walk again, she weaved and wobbled, like a toy top out of control. Her shoulder length chestnut brown hair was always unkempt no matter how often we well-meaning nurses tried to comb it into submission. It was always sticky from hospital Jell-o and knotted up like miniature birds’ nests. Jeannie’s facial expressions continuously seesawed between gross bemusement and wild anticipation. Ask her a simple question like, “How are you today, Jeannie?” and she would often respond with her brown eyes, their black pupils fully dilated as if she did not know who Jeannie was.
She was not fat, nor was she skinny. Whatever the attribute, you could not fit her into a neat little category—maybe it is just easier to say that Jeannie was just Jeannie. In mental health jargon, she was also hard to define. She fell somewhere on the schizophrenic spectrum, probably schizotypal. The DSM, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of psychiatry, describes Schizotypal Personality Disorder in part thusly: 1) Odd beliefs of magical thinking that influences behavior and is inconsistent with cultural norms. 2) Behavior or appearance that is odd eccentric or peculiar. 3) Paranoid fears rather than negative judgments about self. I guess to put it more succinctly, Jeannie H. was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole, but then aren’t we all?
For her three-month stay with us, Jeannie occupied the same semi-private hospital room, room 376. When we could, we usually paired her with a roommate that was disoriented, and if that roommate was hard of hearing, all the better. She would greet me almost the same way every day when making my initial rounds at around 3:30 pm. Jeannie was either in bed, or sitting in a big blue recliner. Full leg casts on both legs, propped up on fat pillows, a cast on the right arm and a shorter cast on her left arm for her fractured wrist. Nothing made Jeannie happier than when someone signed her casts. She oohed and ahhed like a gushing teenager as you signed the cast’s pebbly surface, it was as if she had just received an autograph from Paul Newman or Frank Sinatra. Jeannie welcomed me each evening shift dressed in a blue and white hospital gown, and invariably one of the arms of the gown had fallen to her waist, giving her a decidedly unfashionable off-the-shoulder look. With her gown half off, she was usually and unashamedly exposing one big floppy breast, a breast that looked as if it could feed all the newborns in the hospital’s nursery and still have enough milk left over for your afternoon tea.
“Hi, Nurse. Hi, Nurse Barbara!” was her daily salutation to me in her booming, too many cigarettes voice, and eventually as we got to know each other, a big hug and kiss followed with me trying once again to re-snap Jeannie’s gown. After taking Jeannie’s blood pressure, I commenced my search and destroy mission. Jeannie had a habit of stuffing food down her leg casts, like a nervous squirrel, preparing for a long hard winter. She had lost a lot of weight during her hospitalization and numerous surgeries, and eventually due to her weight loss, you could fit half your arm down her leg casts. There in that sweaty and malodorous confine were found barely-eaten bologna, or American cheese and ham sandwiches, or a still juicy canned peach half leftover from the cottage cheese and fruit plate. And since she believed that one should never be without condiments, I found mustard, mayonnaise and ketchup packets as well. While removing the food, Jeannie often burst into song. As far as I know, she only knew two: a little ditty called “Three Little Sisters”, which had nothing to do with Anton Chekhov, and an eardrum-bursting version of “God Bless America”. “Three Little Sisters” went like this:
“Three little sisters, three little sisters,
Each of them were a dream,
One married a soldier,
The other married a sailor,
The last one married the Marines!”
At one point, I corrected her, as nurses are annoyingly apt to do, and said, “Jeannie, don’t you mean the last one married a marine?” “No,” she corrected me, with a wide smirk on her face, “she married all the Marines, and boy, it was some honeymoon!” She would then let loose a cackle that reverberated down the hall and decreased the morphine levels of all the other patients. I chuckled, shook my head, and removed yet another mangled bologna sandwich. Jeannie had a deep basso singing voice that was so bad that it would have annoyed Helen Keller. And while the “Three Little Sisters” tune was a favorite of hers, it was just a warm up for her specialty, “God Bless America.” Kate Smith lived through Jeannie, although Jeannie’s version had a rather smoky and boozy nightclub flavor to it. Jeannie sung her patriotic heart out whenever the spirit moved her, which was often. Many times, it was at 3:00 am, waking up the entire 40-bed unit, or while being wheeled to one of her numerous trips to the operating room.
I have a confession to make. When Jeannie first came to us, none of the nurses, including me, wanted to go near her. Besides looking as if she had been ravaged by a lifetime of craziness, she looked like something Satan would have rejected at the Gates of Hell. She smelled like a three-week garbage strike and had a body full of lice. Jeannie had not had a real home in over twenty years. She came to us from the State Mental Hospital only a few miles away. The State Mental Hospital was a huge Gothic-Victorian-looking complex that included a labyrinth of underground tunnels, all looking like something out of a Charlotte Bronte novel. I had been there twice myself, not as a patient but as a visitor. My mother had spent some time there years ago, and later, I did a month-long Psych rotation there in Nursing School. It was a difficult rotation for me because I saw an apparition of my mother in every dark corner of that place. From what I could see, the patients were treated humanely for the most part; however, one horrid image is engraved forever in my mind. Assigned to a woman’s ward one day, I witnessed a group shower of about thirty women. The women lined the hallway naked with either overblown or undernourished bodies, awaiting their turn in the communal shower. Some looked floridly insane, mumbling to themselves or to someone the others could not see, but most looked depressed and ashamed, trying without success to hide their exposed body parts. It was Auschwitz without the gas, a final solution for the mentally ill. I recall thinking, why couldn’t they have at least been issued robes. Had my mother stood on a line such as this? To this day, I cannot think about that too deeply. Some thoughts are not made for exploring.
The hospital staff had been told that Jeannie H. had received her injuries because a truck had hit her. Apparently, she had wandered off the vast green and manicured state hospital grounds and walked onto the highway. It is not until this writing that another possible version of her story comes to mind: perhaps Jeannie did not wander off; perhaps, she walked with purpose, in the style of Virginia Woolf, without the modus of a cold, dark river in March. Maybe beneath Jeannie’s comic bravado lay a hellish secret.
Before I met Jeannie, I considered myself a good nurse. Caring for Jeannie H. made me a better nurse. Certainly, it was not due to developing a specialized skill in bologna sandwich fishing. No, it went deeper than that. The mechanics of my nursing skills did not change during that time, but my view of the world did. Here was a woman who had been hit by a giant truck, but hadn’t a giant truck hit Jeannie just about every day of her life? Yet, she could still belt out a song, laugh an earthquaking laugh, and hug me when I was having a bad day. I learned, during that time, to look beyond the lice, the smelly body, and the craziness, and just see a very human, human being.
A second confession. Jeannie H. scared me. I saw a bit of my mother in Jeannie, but I also saw a little bit of myself. Since my teen years, I had been through years of depression, coupled with unrelenting anxiety. Though I could not belt out a tune like Jeannie, I soon learned to belt out a brave front, and only those closest to me knew my secret: maybe I could not sing, but I sure could dance. Many years after my stint with Jeannie, I was diagnosed with manic depression, which eventually changed its name to the more genteel and somewhat less degrading term, bipolar disorder. When first diagnosed, I thought of my mother, but I also thought of Jeannie H. Was my gene pool swimming, or more aptly drowning, in a similar future? In the end, I decided that I was more scared of myself than Jeannie.
I do not know if Jeannie is a dead or alive now, but in my mind’s eye, I like to think of her as fully healed in mind, body and spirit. I want to picture her enjoying a bologna sandwich with a fine mustard, maybe a Dijon. Between joyful bites, she is belting out “God Bless America” and cackling a Jeannie H. laugh. I want to believe that the oddest of people, the social outcasts, the weirdest and the most misunderstood among us have a gift that most of us do not possess. Perhaps they have the power to teach us to be better human beings and to appreciate the gifts we have: friends, family and the small sliver of sanity that we all precariously cling to every day. I try to keep that idea in my heart while passing the most unfortunate among us here in New York City.
I rarely believe in God anymore. I have seen too much. I am not sure I believe in America either, but nonetheless, I will say, God bless you always, Jeannie H.
Table of Contents |