Thursday, May 13, 2010

May 9th, 2010

Looking through the large glass window at the far end of the ICU (intensive care unit) there was a door. It had no locks, no handles. It opened when someone pushed a metal square button located on the wall. After someone passed through the opening, it would stay opened for a while and I would be able to see into a room. It did not have access from hallways and main corridors. Only from the ICU and the nurse’s station could you enter.

It made me think about how things change when I enter an ICU. It’s second nature now. My mind goes on high alert and my eyes scan the walls and windows that see through to the beds and people that rest upon them. I can feel my mind feel things that are happening around me, without my eyes seeing them. How the feeling and understanding becomes dormant when I leave after the event is over. Only to reemerge when I enter again.

The open door letting me see into the unseen room closes and waits until the button is pushed. Maybe it is like a part of my mind that lives inside the ICU, for it is during these times the world stops, time alters and most things are turned to thought.

And as with the door closing, as with me exiting, the feeling waits until it is needed again.

But this time I do not wish to let the door close. I want to disconnect the power supply so it cannot close. Maybe it is time to let the feelings and understanding and new ideas and thoughts to live with me outside the ICU.

So maybe this is a new beginning to a life that has seen many things, experienced birth and death and many things in between. I have been afraid to write about many of them, but now the fear has seemed to fade away. Maybe by writing I might understand them more clearly, for there is much confusion in my mind.

To write about the things that have made me laugh and made me cry could lead me to places I do not know, but maybe we will find them together.

Brian
Posted by at

2 comments:

  1. UnknownMay 15, 2010 at 9:54 PM

    Brian,

    Even when our concerns are with our loved ones, the ICU forces you inside your head to confront what matters most and make sense of our dreams.

    When people say “I know what I mean; I just don’t know how to say it.” I don’t believe them. Our brains are so verbal that we do not know what we think until we have gone to the trouble to put it into words.

    On the other hand, people do not often remember what you told them, but they always remember how you made them feel.

    With the intense focus of ICU isolation, struggling to find the right words (and accepting the ones that surface in our minds) allows us to verbalize feelings to some extent – and communicate them. Poetry!

    I thought of you on Wednesday while listening to PRI's Studio 360. Author Junot Diaz –- who wrote most of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" in his 20s but didn’t finish it until 10 years later -- said: Any art worth doing requires you to be transformed in the process. He had to become the person he needed to be to write his story. He said, The hardest part wasn’t putting the words and sentences together but growing up in the process.

    It’s beautiful to see how you have grown enough to write your old stories as well as your new ones.

    Dave

    ReplyDelete
  2. John AprilMay 16, 2010 at 9:25 AM

    8:25 a.m. I have often thought of your stories. I don't know the difference between a world in which your stories are told in writing or in person or a world in which your stories equate to the fits and starts of text that have appeared over the years when the spirit just happened to move you or somehow events aligned and you allowed some of it to escape. When I read the text shape your brother framed and gave to decorate our home I think of the little boy who died, and death is not banished because of it, but he is put in his place and there is no other way things are. So if it is in your blood all would find itself arranged just so and no other way.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)