G2 - Cast of Characters

A rather bare-bones introduction to a story that I'll continue next week.

The first time I saw Ruth, I was sitting on the floor of the ward working on a friendship bracelet. I saw an elderly-ish woman walking toward me, leaning heavily on the arm of her husband. The two of them ignored me as they walked down and up the hallway, and I scooted closer to the wall to let them pass, and pass again.  It occurred to me that this woman must be a new member of our small and consistently changing community of inpatients. This piqued my curiosity, but the glances I kept sneaking while pretending to be uninterested did not prepare me for her bland, genteel ignorance or the rage it would provoke in all of us.

To make things a little clearer, I provide you here with a Dramatis Personae of the hospital's voluntary* psych ward, in more or less the order that I met my fellow inmates, and with all the names changed just in case.

Anita was a forty-year-old woman with anorexia who had been there almost six weeks and managed to go from 60-80lbs under constant supervision. Eccentric, bristly, wary of strangers, she became an advocate for me when I was too shy to confront the nurses.
 
Jerome was a quiet and extremely kind college student struggling with depression. We knew each other pretty well before the hospital, and are still good friends. Jerome is a poet who loves the outdoors.

David: depressed middle aged man.

Jonathan: Very sweet elderly telephone salesman with a death wish.

Emma: Bipolar young woman with fibromyalgia and constant difficulties with parents. Loud, honest.

Kaia: my roommate, bipolar mother of 2 small boys, had been there almost a month. She got electro-shock therapy 3 days a week and missed most CBT sessions.

Diane: Beautiful, depressed fat woman. Knitted elegant shawls. Checked herself in a couple of times a year to stay alive. Same age as Anita but looked 20 years younger.

Sue: Energetic elderly woman, in and out of institutions her whole life.

Sarah: emaciated woman with AIDS. Usually very quiet and polite, confined to a wheelchair. Sometimes I could hear her screaming from across the hall. Occasionally joined us for occupational therapy or CBT, never for meals.

Me: small college girl with constant, extreme panic. Believed she was doomed with a degenerative curse and that she had failed the ones she loved.

Involuntary patients ( I knew fewer of these because I was not in their ward):

Rick: psychotic/angry 30 yr old man with a death wish. Homeless, drug addict, tattooed.

Beatrice: schizophrenic, bipolar young woman suffering from obesity and fibromyalgia. chronic pain, suicidal and paranoid but trying hard to heal.

unnamed portuguese woman who thought we were the fbi trying to attack her. 

What made us crazy? We were dangers to ourselves or to others. We could not be trusted around silverware or rope or scissors or concrete tiles. Some of us would have spent day after day in bed if we could; others would run or walk until our bodies collapsed. Our pain made us special. Our inability to handle our pain made us special. In the voluntary ward, we had an understanding: we needed this prison that protected us from ourselves. We shared a vulnerability that comes from losing control of your own behavior and knowing it.

Ruth didn't share any of that. She was happier and more normal than anyone I have ever seen in a psych ward.

*Voluntary in the sense that one could choose to enter; this did not mean that one could then leave voluntarily. However, there were fewer restrictions than in the involuntary ward.

A Night Out

            On some days, everything seems to conspire against me. Like today, when the cold, rainy weather, new medication, time of the month, and lack of sleep all decide to get together and give the Lyme Disease a standing ovation. By the time I've finished three hours of essay tutoring and come back from dinner, I feel like I can barely walk. I'm still wearing my PJ's, haven't showered in three days, and have spent the last 2 days reading Shakespeare and researching Haitian politics. It's Friday night! It is Friday Night! I refuse to spend the whole weekend in my bed playing Final Fantasy III and watching Bones again. I am going to a party.
            But oh, the arthritis, my knees, my hips, my wrists my shoulders my back ah, god, I'm such a weakling and all I want is a drink, a hit, a dose of something that'll leave me drifting in a cottony world above myself and the pain and the way I can hear my body creak like an old ship.  Okay, Helena. One step at a time. The gay community is having a Lady Gaga themed party tonight. I want to dress up.
            Thank you, ibuprofen with your minor pain-fighting powers. One hour and two White Russians later I'm riding on the back of my friend's power chair on my way to a drunken performance of Julius Caesar.  This is Shakespeare the way it was meant to be played. That is, if Shakespeare was meant to be played in front of an audience passing around bottles of wine and making homoerotic jokes about Brutus. "Oh snap!" I shriek. "Tell it like it is, Calpurnia!" Caesar comes onstage and a group in the front chants, "Caesar! Caesar! Caesar!" My friend throws pieces of cucumber from the aisle.
            Times passes and I become less and less concerned with the play and its raucous audience and more concerned with the White Russians that have managed to sneak their way through my system. Each scene change brings me closer to intermission but the call of Mother Nature will not be ignored.  Knives appear from under togas! Fake blood splatters everywhere, dripping from the players' hands! It's like the sound of a running tap to my poor bladder and I have to make a dash for the door, stumbling through a sea of feet and folding chairs.
            Relief. On the toilet I check my messages; Julius Caesar is far from over but another friend wants to go out for Boba so I ditch the Shakespeare and meet her in the parking lot. Every person I see tonight reels at my appearance and I keep having to explain, "I'm going to a Lady Gaga party" over and over. Somehow, I've made it all over campus and across town in this outfit but don't reach my destination until all of my friends have left the party, and everyone on the dance floor has already paired off. No less than four acquaintances of mine have apparently just been rejected by the objects of their affections. Bummer and a half.  I don't try to take advantage of these lonely ladies' situations (in some cases it's tempting), but I offer a listening ear.
            It’s a night for wandering. I walk a lonely lesbian home and she asks me why I'm not in love. I tell her I don't want to feel responsible for anyone. I'm practicing selfishness and autonomy. I don’t tell her that I'm also afraid of what that depth of feeling would do to me. Instead we part at a crossroads and I break into a basement party where I don't know anyone and have a conversation about music and psychedelics with someone who has a more favorable opinion of them than I do. Eventually, I find my friends at home playing Starcraft and we talk for a while before I finally leave.
            This is my fourth cup of tea. At 5:43am, I am 32 minutes into the Spice Girls' movie on Netflix. Today, I realized that the bear in my half-finished novel ran away from a traveling circus after fighting an addiction to sugar. I love staying up late.

Bear Stories

                 Mom’s stories were often about bears. She would tell them to my sisters and me on long car rides or sometimes before we went to bed.

                “I told you about the time your grandfather and Uncle Blake went camping, right?” She would ask. “No? Well, the two of them were in the tent, just about to get up and have their breakfast, when they heard a stick snap outside in the woods. Snap! They froze, but didn’t hear anything else, so they decided it must have been their imagination. Gramps was just opening his backpack to get out some bacon when they heard it again. Snap! And then a thumping outside the tent, and a sort of snuffle. Do you girls know what a snuffle sounds like? It’s the sound of a bear sniffing. Sometimes it blows out with a wuffly, snuffly noise. Bears have very good senses of smell, you know.

                “Well, my dad and Blake stayed very still. They didn’t know what kind of animal was sniffing around outside their tent, but they didn’t want to find out, either. They were hoping it would just go away, but suddenly they saw the tent flap move! A black, shiny nose appeared at the tent’s entrance. Dad and Blake looked at each other, horrified, as the bear’s snout pushed itself closer to them, still snuffling all the time, just like I told you. It wanted their bacon. Bears love bacon. Well, Dad looked at Blake, and Blake looked at Dad for a long minute as they watched the bear’s nose. Then Blake whispered, ‘I’ll be dessert.’”

                The car would fill up with my family's laughter.

                Bear stories weren’t always funny, but they were always exciting. “Tell us about Nanna’s chicken soup!” we would wheedle during moments when we could get our mom’s attention.

                “Bears love chicken soup,” she would begin. “Once the smell of my mom’s chicken soup was so strong it woke a bear up from hibernation. The scent of hot savory soup wafted up the mountain, all the way to the bear’s cave where it tickled his nose. The bear got up and started trundling down the mountain after the soup, even though it was only March and they don’t usually wake up until April or May. Your grandmother didn’t even realize what had happened until she heard a scratching at the kitchen door. The bear scratched and pawed at the door for an hour trying to get in. He left deep scratches on that door; you’ve seen them. Ask Nanna. She’ll tell you that now she always checks where the wind is coming from before she cooks chicken soup.”

                The next time we visited our grandparents, the three of us would stare at the scratches on the door in awe. We would explore up the mountain, wearing red during hunting season and shouting and singing to ward off the bears. Sometimes we played near an old bear cave where my cousins had built a fort, but I never saw a bear up close.

Trees

This episode took place around Spring 2004.

School had just ended on an early spring day, and I walked out of the building in the rush of teachers and students. I leaped up and grabbed a branch, swinging from it and feeling the tree’s joy in the warm sunlight, closing my eyes briefly. When I opened them, a teacher I didn’t know was staring at me and smiling.

                “What’s a young student like you thinking on such a nice day?” she asked as I hung there, shifting her grip on her rabbit-headed cane.

                “ Just wondering.” I answered. “Um. Do you ever wonder? If some of the things you know are real… are just in your mind? Are delusions?” I tried to sound nonchalant, but the teacher gave me a surprised look.

                “Well!” she muttered, then added more cheerfully, “that wasn’t what I was expecting from a kid.” She stumped off, her face tilted toward the sky, and I jumped down from my tree and started off home.

                I was thinking about last fall, when the maples looked like they were burning, and the thin incandescent wail of each falling leaf chilled my whole body. Everywhere I walked I was surrounded by a chorus of grief, a whole-hearted plant acknowledgement of winter.  And after that there was silence the whole winter long, and even the great copper beech outside my window only whispered deep under its bark. Now leaves dance in the sunlight, I thought, and I passed under the gingko tree.

                The little tree screamed so hard into the space beneath it that I almost fell down in shock. I ran to comfort it; I placed both hands on its thin trunk and poured love into the tree, poured hope and healing like green fire that dripped down my knuckles. Green, green, I thought and I saw the great gash oozing where feet of gray bark had been stripped away. I imagined the bark knitting together like skin, imagined a sweet strength holding the tree like a cord. I imagined pulling strength up through the ground but our sadness had still turned the air solid when I leaned back and tore myself away.

                In spring, leaves dance in the sunlight. I stumbled vaguely down the sidewalk, trying to shake the gingko’s grief at its dead cells and lost bark. I hardly noticed I was home until the great branch of the beech tree loomed over my head, and I leaned gratefully against its warmth.

                “…confusion… sadness?” asked the tree.

                I projected how the gingko had felt. The tree took the thought and smoothed it into a calm acceptance. Its new leaves twinkled, still translucent in the light. Its trunk stretched higher than I could see, and its roots deeper.

                “…can’t change…can’t help or hurt…” glimmered the beech as I leaned into its roots. “…grow and be you…” It sent me its calm happiness at the day, and the life blooming around us. It was right.  I couldn’t heal the gingko, or change hearing what others could not. But I could lie in the shade of a friend who would always know me. I could watch the shadows in the leaves until I fell asleep.