Wednesday, July 22, 2015

20. Jewels are the gift of fortune while character comes from within.

Her dispatch comes in after a period of silence. The prognosis is not good. She's got things to sort out. You stiffen a little but really you've known for weeks. Still, the pronouncement of the sentence.

You happen to be standing in front of the kitchen window. It's dusk, and in front of you is a ruby throated hummingbird at the feeder she stuck on there and, a few feet beyond, a male cardinal perched on the platform feeder. Like motherless children in my care now. We'll manage, you say, we'll go on. But you don't want to. Not at all.

On the ride home they talked about depression and denial among climate scientists on the radio and how what they know and what they say to others is not the same sometimes. Howling Cassandra covering her mouth with her hand. Not mad, just clear, so clear we cannot hear.

It's been a heavy week, beginning with the young man you assessed in the Emergency Department. He came to you after having the eight lacerations of his inner arm stitched up. Earlier he called an ambulance, waited a little while, then started cutting with a razor blade. Calculus. He wasn't trying to die.

Last month, he did something similar, and wound up with 40 stitches in his lower leg. This happens after he smokes crack cocaine - feels helpless, hopeless, broke and ashamed - so he cuts himself, he says, to feel something else. He's spent nearly the entire last two months in psychiatric hospitals over four admissions. He doesn't feel safe with himself, he says, and he wants to go back. This has been happening for two years.

I challenge him on that - illustrate the small circle of his life - as though he is unaware of it. Then I back off a little because his helplessness is frustrating me and I feel it rising.

"Hospitalization doesn't seem to have been much help before, why will it be this time? "
No answer.

"What's it going to take to get you off of this wheel?"
He stares back, flat and steady.
"Death".

Another car radio tidbit revealed this week: the suicide rate of white men in Bristol County increased 72% from the year before. 

2 comments:

  1. Maybe it's a job for people who don't have much, much intense spirit in the rest of their lives. For those who have such, for those who as Cash said of Dylan can rime the tick of time, how not every molecule tensed and each eye not near tear blinded?

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  2. I definitely have the tense molecular thing going, Mike.

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