Ten

JUNE 30

Dear Diary,

From ecstasy to grief. Feet back on the ground with a thud. Kevin in a coma, EEGs deteriorating, we’re still hoping but it doesn’t look good. Doc Steinberg finally agreed to come on as a “consultant.” Rob’s talking to a lawyer about getting the hospital audit records. Bennerton let Steinberg do a second surgery with the fluids still building on poor Kevin’s brain, along with a nasty staph infection. It was probably too late by the time Steinberg came on.

Should I just have let it alone? This is tearing everyone apart, Marci and Rob fighting when they should be pulling together, Joanie furious at me for butting in—”Who do you think you are, God?”—and there’s a sort of no-contact zone around me at work, like I’m carrying something infectious. I can feel the whispers….

Grief and longing. No word from Newman. And I feel guilty for even thinking about him with all this going on. Anyway, it’s way too much weight to be putting on that one day of magical connection, but I want so badly the comfort of feeling his arms around me or just hearing his voice saying I didn’t imagine it. Why did he leave me the silk shawl and the Rumi book?

Broke down and left a message on his cell phone, asking when he’ll be back, telling him I was feeling like Rumi’s “Guest House” full of rampaging visitors/emotions. It’s another poem from his book:

Being human is being a guest house.

Every day a new emotion….

Welcome them in the door!

Even a mob of sorrows with axes,

They may be making space

for a new delight….

How could Rob and Marci be expected to be grateful for this mob of sorrows? Am I supposed to be grateful for Nick and the cancer?  Right now, I don’t feel like I’m making any steps forward at all, just circling around to the same place. Heartsick.

Or is it a widening gyre? Are these the new wings, bringing me around on a rising spiral? Now that my heart’s laid open, I don’t get to choose joy over sorrow, have to feel it all.

Did I forget what it means to be alive?

Kevin hasn’t had much time for that.

“Lindsey?”

Her fingers jerk on the keyboard, and she blinks, hopes they were actually transcribing the voice droning away in her headphones. She’s been in robot mode again. She lifts her foot off the pedal, silencing the dictation, and looks up to see Olivia standing beside her.

Lindsey pulls off the headset.

Olivia’s studying her, lips pursed. She pushes her pink half-glasses up on her nose and tilts her head toward a cart by the door, piled with chart folders. “Lindsey, would you run those down to Archives?”

“Oh. Sure.” Puzzled, Lindsey saves the half-finished admitting exam file and sets the headphones on her desk.

Olivia’s already back at her desk, flipping through a stack of reports, her glossy red nails flashing over the papers. Lindsey passes the cubicle where Sono’s stolidly typing, not looking up. Marlene does glance up from her diagnostic coding, giving Lindsey a look of self-righteous indignation. Lindsey hasn’t received any invitations to join the staff for breaks this week. And the ever-sunny Gayle is off on vacation.

Lindsey pauses at Olivia’s desk. “Just stack them? Or do you want them filed?” She’s confused as to why Olivia’s sending her down to Archives. Especially right now. The second time she went up to ICU to look in on Kevin, she could see the blond nurse—the one who’d caught her going through Dr. Bennerton’s progress notes in the chart—whispering to another nurse and gesturing toward Lindsey. Now she’s just waiting for it all to catch up to her.

Olivia sets the papers aside, pulls off her glasses, looks up at Lindsey. “Just stack them for now. If Natalie has time on evening shift, she can file them.” She gives her a wry smile. “Then go ahead and take a break, dear.”

Shrugging inwardly, Lindsey rolls the cart into the elevator, punches Basement. The light refuses to light up. Hot, then cold flash over her for no reason as she stares at the obstinate button. The elevator doors open again at First Floor, where she entered, and someone gets on behind her. She tries Basement one more time, but it won’t engage.

The person behind her clears his throat. It’s a nursing assistant, waggling his ID card on its cord. “You have to use your card, for the basement.”

“Oh. Right. I usually take the stairs.” Lindsey inserts her card into the reader, then hesitates before punching the button again, paranoia taking over. Maybe they’ve blocked her access to secure areas, and this is Olivia’s way of telling her. Then the button lights up, and the elevator drops smoothly.

This time Lindsey waits a few seconds for the fluorescent light to kick in before she rolls the cart past the stairway door where she tripped over Newman in the dark. Her footsteps echo off concrete down the empty hall.

She can hear his voice: “Be well, Lindsey.”

Somehow she gets through the Friday afternoon. Before she leaves, Olivia casually drops a sealed envelope beside her keyboard. Lindsey blinks, glances around to see that no one else has noticed, sees Olivia’s back heading out the door. She slips the envelope into her shoulder bag, waits to open it as she’s retrieving her bike from the rack outside.

Lindsey, I just wanted to let you know that Administration will be asking to talk with you Monday morning.

Olivia had typed it but hadn’t signed it.

Lindsey closes her eyes and blows out a long breath. So. She violated her confidentiality agreement, she knew what she was doing. She could be in deep doo-doo.

But somehow, despite a sick feeling in her gut, like she’s just stepped off another cliff, she doesn’t care. Maybe they can’t save Kevin, maybe it’s too late for Mr. Montague, but maybe the next accident victim won’t end up under Bennerton’s scalpel.

“Hey, Lindsey!”

She looks up, realizes she’s been wheeling her bike on auto-pilot toward the parking exit. A young man in shorts and Birkenstocks lifts his hand toward Lindsey as he waves a protest placard at the employees leaving in their cars. The students are still keeping up a presence as the drawn-out negotiations continue over the proposed new hospital park access route.

Lindsey takes a breath and smiles. “Joshua. How’s it going?” She’s gotten acquainted with a few of the students over the past months. He’s the one who was handing out Birth Announcements a month earlier, with photos of the engagingly homely barred-owl chicks spotted in the area of the park proposed for road construction.

Joshua grins and pushes back his billed cap. “Thank God I survived finals. Got an internship this summer with Northwest Stream Stewards.”

“Hey, that’s great. You know they helped me with my native-plant project. I’m downstream from here.”

“Awesome!” He gives her a thumb’s-up. “Any time you want to take a turn here, we’ve got plenty of flyers to pass out.” It’s an ongoing joke he’s been playing off Lindsey as he’s seen her leaving work over the past weeks.

This time she pauses. “You know, I might just do that. See you around, Joshua.”

The encounter cheers her briefly, as does the bike ride. She takes a second loop through the park and dismounts to walk her bike along a narrow trail threading a grove of old cedars and big-leafed maples.

As she pauses to breathe in the moistness and the quiet of this oasis in the midst of town, she feels a light touch on her bare arm. A green bit of maple leaf is stuck to the skin. She peels it off and notices a couple more pieces drifting down past her face. She squints upward.

Above her on a big, mossy limb of an old maple, two fledgling owls—all downy fluff, gangly talons, and comical feather tufts emerging around their faces—clutch the branch and lean out to watch the drifting leaf bits. Shoulder to shoulder, they sway side to side to the rhythm of the leaves’ swooping glides. When those reach the ground, one of the pair sidles along the branch to an intersection of another leafy bough, where it plucks a new piece with its beak. It returns to its nestmate and leans out to release the green bit. Again they sway, leaning together like Tweedle Dee and Dum, rapt in contemplation of the dance of the leaf through the air.

Lindsey, craning upward, feels a grin stretching her face. She’s filled with the sheer wonder of this world she’s lucky enough to inhabit along with these experimental young owls.

She turns her bike back along the trail, then stops short. Red surveyor’s tapes dangle from wooden stakes following a path beneath the big maple, right through the cedar grove toward the hospital. It hits her in a sudden kick to the heart: This is the proposed route for the new access road.

Dear Diary:

Damn!

Lindsey tries to get a grip on the shock and anger surging through her as she paces her bungalow, unable to grasp the monumental cluelessness of the road plan. And she’s got the weekend ahead of her to wonder about this upcoming “talk” with Administration. Plus there’s no message light on her phone. Should she try Newman’s number again? Her pride won’t let her.

Nightfall, and she’s back to pacing the cramped measure of her walls, trailed by HighJinks and Sombra anxiously mewing—furry mirrors of her agitation. Another hot flash assails her, and she grabs a spiral-bound notebook to fan herself. Then she opens it to a blank page, picks up a pen, and sits down to write out her confusions.

It’s a mystery, our connection to special places. I can’t explain why the one bend of my favorite trail quickens my heartbeat as it brings me down a dip where I veer off the path, over a windfall cedar, to crouch beside a tiny pool fed by a spring seeping from under gnarled alder roots. The smooth surface makes a reflecting glass for the doubled branches reaching skyward, reaching rootlike deep beneath the surface. I’m stilled, peering into what someone else might call a puddle, the way I’d label homely some beloved face only one person finds beautiful.

She’s writing not just to herself now, but trying to reach wider. Why not make it an essay? She’d once dreamed of being a writer, before Nick convinced her it was a waste of time. “Maybe you just don’t have what it takes.”

She takes a deep breath and flushes his voice where it belongs—down the toilet.

How do we feel when our personal nature-refuge is suddenly wiped off the map, crushed under bulldozer treads and scraped flat of trees, moss, birds? Reduced to mud? We’re slapped right down into the mucky stages of grief—shock, anger, denial—just as inevitably as facing the traumatic death of a loved one. So maybe a turn toward the rituals of grief might find us a path toward environmental recovery.

Lindsey writes about the young owls and the senseless proposed road that could easily be located elsewhere. She writes about her uprush of blind anger and then righteousness, the gut feeling of wrongness that must be rectified. She wonders how the Native Americans could ever be expected to recover from their shock over the ways of the settlers ravaging their land. How the words of Chief Seattle still ring compassion down the decades. “We are all children of the Great Spirit, we all belong to Mother Earth. Our planet is in great trouble, and if we keep carrying old grudges and do not work together, we will all die.” Maybe there’s a place for healing—for regeneration?—in that primal mud this “civilization” is laying bare as its blank slate.

I flinch when I pass a clearcut or a ravaged hillside slated for more urban sprawl. Don’t want to look at it. Seal myself off and go in search of a new “natural” refuge. But it’s the wounded places that need our love.

Suddenly Lindsey realizes that’s part of Nick’s sickness. He can offer only anger against the environmental shortsightedness and greed, can feel only his personal pain at each loss. Ultimately, it’s all centered on himself. And she wants to be bigger than that. Is there a way?

All of this finds its muddled way into the essay. She writes and rewrites all weekend, wondering if she’s finally gone around the bend, and what difference can these words make, anyway? Whether anyone ever reads them or not? But it’s somehow become an act of love, and faith.

She titles it “The Stages of Environmental Grieving,” prints up a clean copy, and addresses it to an anthology soliciting women writers on the environment. Then, what the hell, sticks a second copy into an envelope for the Weekly Whiplash, the local alternative newspaper.

Sunday night she lays the two stamped packets by her bike pannier. She shrugs and stretches her tight shoulders, shakes out her hands she should have given a rest from typing. Who knows? Maybe soon, after this meeting with hospital Administration, she’ll have a real long break from typing. These days, she looks for things to be grateful for: She’s managed to get through the weekend.