I have spent the last three days in a Grey’s Anatomy episode, one of the particularly harrowing ones they release mid-season when viewers start getting a little bored. This is the first time hospital helicopter transports and brain scans are plot points in the story of my own reality and not silly fun on my television. I can say without a doubt I will probably never again enjoy Grey’s Anatomy, all of the silly fun drained from it by my own foray into the ICU. My father whom I love very dearly has been ill and on Tuesday it progressed into an emergency that is keeping him in surgeries and space ship rooms.
Death and her shadow are not uncomfortable or foreign concepts to me. In many ways, my devotion to the mysteries of Love require me to hold hands with Death and her questions daily. Like a camera lens, Love focuses on us our ephemerality. That’s why we have shotgun weddings in Vegas and bring babies into the world and move to Paris when we fall in love. We’re reminded how good all this human stuff can be and how much we want to feel it before it’s over this time around. Love and Death are the first soulmates, the lovers whose union created all the billions that ever were.
My father has been seriously ill for a little while now and when I tell people, their reactions are ones of polite graveness; an effort of solemnity to express that they care for how heavy the weight is. I think that’s a natural reaction in our society; to associate Death and sickness with only a one note gloom and I do appreciate peoples’ care immensely. It is not an easy gift to give in our current world. While the experience I’m in certainly doesn’t have the flash and flair of falling in love or going to Disney world, gloom is not how I feel necessarily. I feel many emotions and sensations, but most of all a holy quiet. Every experience and interaction going on around me seems to slow down and move in hushed tones. Perhaps that is where the forced severity comes from in the first place. A misunderstanding of the need for quiet.
But the quiet is not devoid of joy, or beauty, or peace. Quite the opposite. I noticed a few days ago that people’s faces had suddenly become so extremely beautiful to me. People I had seen before a million times were now glowing with this bright life, their smiles radiating in slow motion. My parents’ “I love you’s” as my mom departs the hospital room come out with the sincerity and intensity of ones exchanged for the first time, despite their 35 years of marriage. The nurses’ equanimity in the throes of illness’ mess fills me with a faith altering joy that people can make such arduous work into a beautiful art. My dad’s kindness and laughter despite feeling so wretched reminds me the sun always rises. I need to the quiet to take notice of all of this or else it will zoom past me.
Amidst all of this profound beauty our situation is delivering us, there is still a part of me that whispers to feel any lightness in an ICU is wrong, sacrilegious almost. My first unconscious assumption is to feel an obligation to abstain. A few lines from a poem by Jack Gilbert have been pressing against those thoughts in my head though.
“We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”
So I am risking levity right now. Because it is helpful and because I want to but mostly because I would always rather find the love in life’s inevitabilities than rage against them. Whenever I am going through the thick of it, my mom always tells me “Bright flowers grow from dark soil.” Those words are also following me a lot right now. Muck, pestilence, heartache…perhaps they are not only where we end but where we begin.
I hope you find some delight in whatever you are bearing right now.