© Rev. Kelsey O’Brien, M.Div., Pastoral Service

An elderly man is dying in the Special Pathogens ICU.

Breathe, I say to myself as I hang up the phone. Try to just breathe.

Dr. X greets me at the front entrance. I think he is trying to smile, but with our masks I’m not sure. He tells me that the man’s wife and daughter were called an hour ago. They live an hour and a half away, but are currently sitting outside waiting to talk to us.

I follow Dr. X through the glass doors into the spring evening, the sound of voices and vehicles filling our ears. There they are. A tiny white-haired woman perched on the bench. A younger woman stands crying, her homemade mask already soaked through.

Dr. X leads the conversation: he is dying right now. There is nothing more we can do except keep him comfortable. I’m so sorry, but per policy only one person is allowed. They will have to decide.

Both women are crying now, their eyes bloodshot wells of sorrow. They look at each other for a long time. They drove 30 miles over the speed limit to the front doors of the hospital to stand outside and make an impossible choice.

Breathe, I say. Try to just breathe.

I squat down, my hand brushing the cool side walk, trying in some way to ground us all. This is impossible. But you are going to be able to do this because love grounds you even now.

I offer to bring my laptop out to the bench for the one who does not get to go in. It is not enough. It is not fair. It is such a poor substitute for the comfort of being in the same room, holding that familiar hand. Wife says that she will stay here. She reasons that she’s had fifty plus years with him. Daughter has only had forty-seven.

We arrange for Wife to sit on the bench until I come back with my laptop. She tells Daughter to hold his hand and tell him how much she loves him.

Soon, Daughter sits with him in a blue plastic gown, gloved, masked, and covered by a face shield that I helped her don outside the room. She holds his hand, a strange calm settling over her. She is here. She is present.

Breathe, I say to her quietly. Try to just breathe.

Six feet back from the glass door, behind red tape on the floor, the nurse whispers he has almost nonexistent blood pressure. It will be soon. We stand together outside the room, watching the monitor, trying to give this intimate moment privacy, but afraid to leave Daughter alone.

Breathe, I say to myself. Try to just breathe.

Outside on the bench huddled next to Wife, with my laptop and a box of tissues cradled in my lap, I pull up the video. Wife squints at the image, loudly telling him she loves him, tears fogging up her glasses above her mask. She does not want him to suffer. She says a few more things, noting that he looks tired and comfortable. That he has lived a long life. She and Daughter will be okay. She speaks her blessing into the evening air. Then she asks me to turn the camera off. She has a lifetime of memories to reference outside that sterile room.

And then, through her tears, she begins to tell me their story: married fifty-six years. They met as children and grew up together. He served in the military. They had one daughter. They couldn’t have more. He had a good heart. His parents were very religious. He was not. He had been sick for a while but had a way of making her laugh. He loved the outdoors. He hadn’t been out of the house for weeks before they rushed him to the ED. He loved watching Daughter dance. All his family had died off over the past couple of years. His memory had faded. He was getting hard to understand. He hadn’t been eating. But he still knew who she was. He always knew who she was. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. We went to Hawaii on our 50th anniversary. Chaplain, how much does a funeral cost? She talks until she has exhausted herself.

Breathe, I say. Try to just breathe.

When Daughter walks out of the hospital alone, she joins Mother on the bench. They both sit still united in their grief, looking out into a strange new world. His gaping absence.

Breathe, I say to no one in particular as I walk back inside. Try to just breathe.

© Muhammed Rahim, MSII

Behind the mask there is a person
A person who yearns to hug his grandparents
A person who misses handshakes and smiles
A person who only sees two eyes instead of a whole face
A person who wonders what is behind the masks of others
A person who reminisces about the days before this all started
A person who dreams about returning to his old life
A person who envisions a world safe and unmasked
A person who hopes this will all be over soon
A person who understands that for now, he must stay behind the mask
Behind the mask there is a person

© Benjamin Watt, MSIII

When the sun sets,
The window becomes a mirror,
So I lower the blind,
And switch on the lamp,
That I may see yet not be seen.

When Mercury fades,
And I climb to center-view,
Argus stirs and blinks.
A hundred other invisible people
Light lamps under baskets.

When the day ends,
And the world doubles in reflection,
Then I close my lids,
Trading illusion for blindness,
Perceiving but no longer seeing.

© Dan Wolpaw, MD
Departments of General Internal Medicine and Humanities

“Gentlemen,
Not having had many diseases, after growing old and
finding many that are aplicable to humans or the human
body, I find, growing up I should say, that weather it
be vulnerability to poison ivy, an organism in barbers
shears or close contact with a carrier; after a chek up
when I was told there was much going around, I found out
of the parts irritated, a large percentage of my body
is cleared up. There is only a little left. Thank you.”
Letter from Emergency Department patient, circa 1985

Record gone, there are only questions. Primarily who
typed this prose poem onto a blue, pre-made folding letter,
dropped in the mail to no person in particular, to
gentlemen in a city emergency department? A place
offering the possibility of relief in bright lights and strangers,
rescuing more from life than to life. Not comparable,
for example, to a place of worship, though weekend mornings
can work for both, and both promise healing. Worship, of course,
also tries for uplifting, shedding the body to inhabit
the spirit, free from what is going around. Emergency
departments are all about what is going around.
What can be cleared up, not acquired. Subtracted, not added.
But in the end, if the person is still there, and the means
of communication still at hand, there is an opportunity
to give thanks. Including some gentlemen to this author who
likely never considered himself a writer of poems.

© Janette Guzowski
St. Joseph Family and Community Medicine Residency Program

Friend where have you gone today?
Smoke from your chimney yesterday
Made me think that you would stay.

Where light once shone I searched for you.
Somber windows spoke no clue.
No embers glowed from darkened hearth.
No footsteps sprung from dampened earth.

Southern breezes called your name
Restless soul no heart can tame.
Damaged pride replays the frame.

If your path leads back again
I’ll search for you in summer’s rain
Call out your name to wood and plain
Rekindle fire with crackling grain.

© Pratiti Roy, MSIII

On the day they gave out the paraphernalia,
you were late
(as you often are).
The good stuff had already been taken.

Gone the winged sandals,
the boats,
the scale and its feather,
the dark wings,
only a stethoscope and a starched white coat left.

The stethoscope is a perfunctory thing that hangs around your neck.
The white coat hangs on a hook in your office
because it makes the patients skittish,
the whites of their eyes flashing,
like fallen horses who see their riders pull out the rifle.

Never mind that their demise is not in your hands.
To a dying patient who knows no better
the words “palliative care” and “hospice” are final as a gunshot
or the wide arc of a scythe.

“They’re giving up on me.”
Always a statement, never a question, but you answer it anyway:
“No, we’re not.”

© Drew Mullins, MSII

Silvery mist saps your soul
Surrounds you in eternal snow
The wondrous wind throws you forth
Guiding your unsteady course

Vision lacking blurred and bright
Only instincts give you sight
Just before you give up hope
A distant light, the smell of smoke

Familiar voices welcome you in
Fantasizing winter’s end
Stew is served from pewter pots
And then is chewed and slurped and slopped

Belly full and all tucked in
Warm sheets slide against your skin
Your tired mind fades away
To visions of a warm spring day

© Ananya Das
Department of Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation

Sitting out in the backyard with Grandpa
Or on the porch sometimes, when I was young
We would play I spy with my little eye.
I would say after the rains, “I see the rainbow!”
And he would nod his head,
dark glasses and all firmly in place
He would look up and say, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
And we would watch together in wonder,
the vibrant rainbow bridging the sky,
or the glorious sunset in orange and gold,
sometimes the purple pink azaleas with the bees.
We would talk about how pretty they were.
Later as the evening melted into the night,
Grandpa would collect his white cane
and walk me home down the road.
I never knew Grandpa couldn’t see, not then.
Later as I knew I asked
How did you know how they looked?
How did you describe them for me?
Why didn’t you say you couldn’t see?
He smiled as he took his dark glasses off,
laughter crinkling his sightless eyes,
“You don’t need vision to see beauty,
the mind’s eye is all you need for that!”

 

© Jeffrey Feehrer, Patient

On an unforgettable afternoon our son got off the elementary school bus carefully balancing a polystyrene coffee cup. In it was a sprig three inches tall and as thick as a piece of wire coat hanger.

“A pine tree.”

“Uh huh.” Its four puny needles identified that. “What kind?” I asked. “There are different species, um, different types like spruce, hemlock, fir … spelled with an i.”

Sufficient.

“Can you plant it?”

I tablespooned a relative hole but was silently doubtful. Our soil is rock and clay; crabgrass and dandelions flourish, a pretty green when mowed but mockingly recidivistic.

We watered it and I made small perforations in the hostile earth at its frail base adding nutrients.

It survived, progeny and pine growing rapidly.

Not long till we could stand and hang extra Christmas balls and twine blinking lights to be topped with a star. Augmenting, conifers retain their colorful plumage through winter. They don’t shed or die. Perennials like youth and love should be.

Seemingly next Yule dad needed a stepladder, later a precarious extension ladder, then so quickly when Santa became a myth it had grown out of reach and decorations.

One summer the pine began diverging, forking into two equal but individual trees conjoined only at their trunk. With prophetic symbolism, each division taking a new direction. The point of the branching away was at our son’s eye-level, that summery day right after school ended. Everything’s blossoms and fragrances and sweet, new life.

The same June his parents split up.

Possibly the pine tree sensed this fissure as it knew his age and elementary school grade when the sprig came home and their climbing years. After all, we nurtured and raised this floral life. A botanical study I’d read stated that plants responded to music and voices. His evergreen appeared endowed with emotropism? Empathsynthesis? A definite symbiosis.

I stopped adorning our tree after that. No young eyes and hands to help. It loomed too big, beyond reach, different in meaning and distance. The weather was cold and we only shared an hour or two of noncustody Christmas visitations before he and his presents returned to mom’s home. I was left with shredded wrapping
paper in a silent, empty living room.

It’s 60 feet tall now.

With every visit our son walks up to it, leaning back in amazement and memory to scale it, see its peak.

The parted trunk has grown up with him, matching his stature, a kind of palmistry.

I can still put my arms around both of them, however.

But aged 36 years we noticed recently that the lowest needles have paled and are falling. A sad shedding, their bared branches snapping off dryly and easily to twigs crunched underfoot like bones. It’s spreading. We can see through it, shade diminishing, the years passed and confusing as time does to that dream day we
planted it.

The son has gone to his wife, daughter, and jobs–the warm and complete homelife.

Now his tree is assimilating mine.