I just finished my month-long hospice rotation at the Connecticut Hospice in Branford, which both gave more and took more than I anticipated. Perhaps because after a slew of clinical rotations, I've lost a bit of the expectant newness that used to come before each new venture, and so there wasn't much anticipation to begin with. I didn't think much about what hospice would be like before I started. Having had a strong experience that led me to being interested in the rotation in the first place, I think I unconsciously felt that I'd reached a certain level of intensity that would prevent me from being taken by surprise here, even as I approached this rotation as an opportunity for broadening experience, concrete and emotional. I'm glad to have been wrong.
I haven't felt this motivated to write about a medical school experience for a long time, but before doing it in a structured and comprehensive form, it feels nice to sit in bed and ramble about all the things that made it filling, and hard.
On my last day, an APRN asked me what was the most memorable event during the rotation. It would be hard, and probably not accurate, to choose one event or interaction or experience. Instead it was more generalities absorbed that most affected me. I told her that I'd take with me the calmness of the place, the simplicity of the medicine, and the kindness of the people.
Connecticut had the most snow in January on record since years and years ago. We had two two-feet snowstorms, a couple ice storms, and record below freezing temperatures. While I was used to this in Boston where the winter is more harsh than here, I'd never had to deal with the visceral challenges of snow and ice. For the first time in my life, I had to shovel my car out of the snow, had to try to drive it through the narrowly plowed driveway, had to shovel myself out of the driveway that wasn't plowed widely enough, had to shovel piles of snow off the entrance to the street where the tires would just spin in place, had to chip away at inches of ice off every window and off the roof of the car, had to see why getting ice off the roof is important as a I saw sheets of ice slip off cars on the highway, had to steer my car as it slid on unsalted iced roads, had to walk strategically to avoid puddles of slush and piles of iced snow. It was uncomfortable, and tiring to have to work so hard and think so hard about how to simply get somewhere.
There were also incredible vignettes of how pretty harshness can be, in the snowflakes that would freeze on my car windows to create a printed pattern I'd have to scrape away, in the ice that dressed bare tree branches making the forests on my drive looks like crops of glistening gray hair, and in the sheen of clean soft snow hardened on top like creme brulee, by the ice. There were incredible views from the windows, of big flakes falling against warm yellows and cold grays. There were the first falls, untouched, and the old snows, dirtied.
After the trek through all of that, I arrive at a workplace with windows in tandem, bookshelves, and fireplaces. Laid on the beds are crocheted blankets and patchwork quilts. Hand-painted signs of patient's names are hung in their respective spaces. Guitars strum, and every other day there are sweets from families or employees. It seemed to me I was lucky to have done this rotation during the onslaught of winter, to have to confront bitter elements with reason to escape to this cove. It's not often that you think of a workplace as soothing, especially not hospitals.
It's true that this atmosphere is partly due to the way that the rough edges of medicine are worn away a bit by the different goals and mindset of hospice. There is more thought to necessity, and the removal of what's not. In that sense, things feel simpler. There are no fancy tests to order; people often get sicker and instead of embarking on a diagnostic quest for etiology, we acknowledge the worsening condition and continue. There's still a lot of room for creativity in catering to individual needs. My attending pushed us to consider the best options for care, to not get stuck in status quo. But grounding all of that movement is a framework of simple stability. Not to say that dying is simple, but in the face its possible complexities, people's wants and needs become basic and streamlined to the core, without the excess that can often distort. After awhile the pharmacological treatments become routine, leaving more room to focus on non-pharmacological care, and hospice focuses on that much more than other areas of medicine. Its wholistic perception of people is reflected in its interdisciplinary approach to care; doctors aren't at the center, are instead an arm, of the scheme. There is constant, continual communication with the nurses, social workers, pastors, and family. And while there are many factors to consider, the way in which all these people work together to focus on each person's care, gives a simple sense of value.
I imagine that the comforts and simplicity help the staff as much as the patients, because as calming and welcoming a place it is, it is a hard place to be. Because of that, I think it attracts and seeks certain qualities in the people who work there, making for an incredible community. I've never met such a cluster of genuinely warm, kind, and strong people. The nurses, who are the heart of hospice care, made the biggest impression on me, but the kindness is palpable in every person encountered, from the person at the front desk to the person manning the cafeteria.
In the morning, the nurses and physicians round together, going over the care for each patient. The nurses are the ones giving report, which has never been the case for any other rounds I've seen. They make me remember why I want to be good at whatever it is that I do. They take care in the most whole way possible: delicate where people are fragile, tough and honest when needed. They advocate for their patients, they know their stuff, and they all have voice. It's this combination of warmth and strength that I admire most in women who give care, and every day it reinforced goals to work for.
On my last day I told a slightly demented patient of mine that it had been really nice to take care of her. She replied, "It was really nice to take care of you too." Even as her response was a rote one, I appreciate the truth in that. I think that at their worst these patients and their loved ones have given me more than I could give at my best. Each person copes differently, experiences different pains and discomforts. It would be misguided to say that all of them gave the same thing, but as a whole, it was valuable to witness their capacity to give when so much is being taken from them. There is a woman whose body has been distorted and disfigured by tumors, and as she struggles with grace and patience, she makes me think of how deep our reserves run, how much we can face without being torn. There is a man who has accepted that it will be difficult for him to breathe until he no longer has to, and his first thought in conversation is to answer all the questions he knows you'll ask before you ask them, without pause and without rest, with the creases in his face working with effort to give you all he can. There is a man actively dying before the eyes of his wife, who comforts me with stories of him before he was sick--redheaded, singing silly songs in the morning.
In conversation about this, it was pointed out that perhaps it is something about this stage in life, and not something intrinsic to these specific people, that make us that way. It doesn't matter to me too much from where the source stems. To see people in pain, so close to something unknown, be gracious and generous and sensitive gives me faith in the endurance of these qualities and makes me try harder for the patience to endure. And it's not to say that these people weren't struggling, weren't falling back in some ways, but that there seems to be a pull to hang onto the good when things are slipping away.
I can't say that I endured the past month of this rotation with the same kind of grace that I observed in my patients and their families. The rotation was hard for me. I was surprised by how quickly people transitioned from alert to unresponsive, how I could never get used to someone changing so much over hours or days from the way I first met them even for the ones I rationally knew had come to hospice to die. I missed the people they were as they were still breathing, and I wondered how it was for people who had been their lives. While the pace was unhurried and I was never overworked, and I loved most days there, at the end of them I felt tired.
And I was mean when tired, and the emotional stress of seeing and taking in this weighty process manifested in a lot of physical breakdown. Getting sick, breaking out with a cold sore, a couple allergic reactions, and developing various muscle strains, I was told that I was pushing myself too hard, that I needed to listen to my body. I think it is true that we should take care of ourselves, but I also find value in digging for the resilience that lies in vulnerability, and believe that this first means knowing what makes us weak. I didn't plan this of course, and it could be argued that I'm rationalizing the discomforts of the experience. But somehow, an intuitive, inexplicable part of me feels that there is good reason the weather was so harsh, the people so fragile.
Showing posts with label transitions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label transitions. Show all posts
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
back & forth
This fifth year, this in-between year of personal goals and time for self, has been a year of coming and going. Took a post-boards vacation in California, came back to living at the VA for my medicine subinternship, trekking cross country and living on a Navajo reservation for a month. Even having been back in New Haven for a couple weeks, the weekends have been spent elsewhere, in Boston then in Long Island/NYC. It was nice to dwell in bigger cities than New Haven, cities that are big parts of my past, and to share them with someone open to new sights and feelings. At the same time, because of the trips and because of the upcoming trip home for Christmas and because many friends are also coming and going and I see them in spurts of their being in New Haven, time in New Haven feels transitory, and the slight instability makes it hard to get down to the business of slowness. Instead of taking the time for what it is, it feels like filler until the next movement, when what I really do want is just to stay.
It's both helpful and frustrating to think of goals that stretch past these bumps in place. On the one hand, I find it really hard to work on things I know will have to be paused. On other hand, it's nice to have things to come back to, after an endeavor or a return home. Everything I want to do is a long-term pursuit, the pile of books to read and topics to read about, the work to run better after a setback from which I haven't recovered, maintaining friendships in the midst of a lot of transitions for all of us, being with him and exploring the newness of me and of my surroundings that he makes me feel, the list of stories I feel compelled to narrate. I want to give each of these things room, and it's hard when I keep moving around, but I'm trying not to so strongly associate internal and external spaces, to remember that what's best about these things and why I value them is their mobility.
It's both helpful and frustrating to think of goals that stretch past these bumps in place. On the one hand, I find it really hard to work on things I know will have to be paused. On other hand, it's nice to have things to come back to, after an endeavor or a return home. Everything I want to do is a long-term pursuit, the pile of books to read and topics to read about, the work to run better after a setback from which I haven't recovered, maintaining friendships in the midst of a lot of transitions for all of us, being with him and exploring the newness of me and of my surroundings that he makes me feel, the list of stories I feel compelled to narrate. I want to give each of these things room, and it's hard when I keep moving around, but I'm trying not to so strongly associate internal and external spaces, to remember that what's best about these things and why I value them is their mobility.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
what i'm doing
I've finished my month of subinternship and am in the midst of a month in between rotations. I'll be starting a primary care rotation in October, but in the meantime, when people ask what I'm doing, I usually say, nothing. Which is both true and not true. It's true that I'm not assigned a particular rotation, don't have a routine schedule, and don't have any concrete tasks to accomplish each day or even by the end of the month that anyone is going to check on. And it's true that I've prioritized getting enough sleep, food, exercise, and time with people above all else, which can generally qualify as what's commonly regarded as nothing, as it's not work. But it's not true that I don't have goals to work towards during this time. This block of time was blocked off for research and writing, both endeavors with less concrete goals than this past month.
The last month of being in the hospital was absolutely worth the time and work (of which there was an incredible amount), and I loved it more than I thought I would (in the beginning I was mostly terrified). The structure, mindset, and general atmosphere are very different than my current state, though. Being in the hospital is about treating acute problems, accomplishing tasks: figuring out a diagnosis, ordering the right medicine, filing out the right paperwork, presenting numbers. You work patients up for their problems, you try your best to make them better, and then you discharge them from the hospital. In the gaps and in the broader scheme there are all the other things that make a good doctor, that are more abstract and less straightforward, but the day to day is about getting stuff done.
Which isn't the case with research and writing, both of which I've been working on this past week, without much visible to show for it.
In terms of research, I developed a project that is more about knowing patients than attaining data, which is a difficult thing to 1) do and 2) measure. The general gist is that I want to speak to terminally ill patients who have transitioned from care with goals of cure, to care with goals of quality of life. In the hospital we're good at acute care and quantifiable results, but not as good with transitions that happen over time and aren't easily communicated. I think it's important to know what factors play into patients being ready for this transition, so that we know when and how to talk to them about it, so that care is focused on minimizing suffering, not so much maximizing breathing time.
The first patient I interviewed is dying from lung cancer and had been admitted to the hospice unit of the VA. He was very open to speaking with me but was breathing so heavily, with few gaps between large gasps, that he couldn't talk for longer than a few minutes. When I came back the next day, it was only worse. So nothing came about from those efforts, in terms of my project. But it reminded me of what it's like to see someone actively dying, and of what I want to learn in this process.
My second interview was an actual interview, with a lovely 88 year old woman with lymphoma. She had very developed thoughts about her life and death, and was very comfortable talking about them, so the outcome was completely different from my previous attempt. Another thing I wanted to explore was personal writing, and to have patients journal about their experiences at the end of life, because that can be so different than what someone is able to share in a conversation with a doctor. So at the end of the interview I asked the woman if she'd be interested in participating in something like that. She said that she can't really write due to arthritis, but she had been working awhile ago on a story about her childhood. She brought out several pages of yellow lined paper, and asked if I wanted to read it. We talked about typing it up and having me help her finish it.
So I took the pages home to read and transcribe. Several of them are numbered the same number, such that the order was hard to determine, and as I read through them I realized that's because she had written several different beginnings. Throughout there are some anecdotes told in slightly different ways, so that in typing up the story, I had to maneuver some passages, putting the similar ones side by side, so that she could decide which parts of the same story she wanted to keep, discard, combine. During some particularly difficult parts to decipher, where reading continuously didn't seem to give a sensible narrative, I saw that she'd written in every other line, and in the lines in between added other parts of the story. All of this required some rearranging as I read and typed, and I liked indulging in both the neurotic need to organize and the creative desire to piece things together. The story has nothing to do with my research, but it does have to do with what a lot of people seem to want, a desire to record certain memories, something that resonates a lot with me personally.
I really appreciate the flexibility of this time, that allows things to happen that don't fit a mold of efficiency or list of things to do, where I'm led not by steadfast goals but by natural happenings and my natural responses to them.
And this woman's story comes to me during a time when I've been working on a story about my childhood too. The writing part of this time off is even more vague than the research. I have a list of things I want to write about, which is a little overwhelming, and even when I focus on one, I'm not quite sure what I want to say or how to say it. All I'm sure of is that I feel compelled to write about them, but having the time to do it means being faced with why, and that has resulted in major writer's block. I could spend an entire day on something without much to show for it, and the lack of proportion can be disorienting. But I'm endeared to writing in the way that it's not science and things don't logically lead to other things, and it is amazing to wake up each day with the freedom and privilege to just try, with no expectations, to feel that that's enough, for now.
And so instead of explaining to every person who asks, I say I'm doing nothing. It gets somewhat tiresome, because we're not used to nothing being okay. I'm not traveling anywhere, so it's not like a vacation. The few times I've tried to go more deeply into it, I usually just confuse the person and I'd rather have them think I'm doing nothing of significance instead of misunderstanding something of personal significance. Besides, everyone takes nothing in their own way, and I think we could all use more of it.
The last month of being in the hospital was absolutely worth the time and work (of which there was an incredible amount), and I loved it more than I thought I would (in the beginning I was mostly terrified). The structure, mindset, and general atmosphere are very different than my current state, though. Being in the hospital is about treating acute problems, accomplishing tasks: figuring out a diagnosis, ordering the right medicine, filing out the right paperwork, presenting numbers. You work patients up for their problems, you try your best to make them better, and then you discharge them from the hospital. In the gaps and in the broader scheme there are all the other things that make a good doctor, that are more abstract and less straightforward, but the day to day is about getting stuff done.
Which isn't the case with research and writing, both of which I've been working on this past week, without much visible to show for it.
In terms of research, I developed a project that is more about knowing patients than attaining data, which is a difficult thing to 1) do and 2) measure. The general gist is that I want to speak to terminally ill patients who have transitioned from care with goals of cure, to care with goals of quality of life. In the hospital we're good at acute care and quantifiable results, but not as good with transitions that happen over time and aren't easily communicated. I think it's important to know what factors play into patients being ready for this transition, so that we know when and how to talk to them about it, so that care is focused on minimizing suffering, not so much maximizing breathing time.
The first patient I interviewed is dying from lung cancer and had been admitted to the hospice unit of the VA. He was very open to speaking with me but was breathing so heavily, with few gaps between large gasps, that he couldn't talk for longer than a few minutes. When I came back the next day, it was only worse. So nothing came about from those efforts, in terms of my project. But it reminded me of what it's like to see someone actively dying, and of what I want to learn in this process.
My second interview was an actual interview, with a lovely 88 year old woman with lymphoma. She had very developed thoughts about her life and death, and was very comfortable talking about them, so the outcome was completely different from my previous attempt. Another thing I wanted to explore was personal writing, and to have patients journal about their experiences at the end of life, because that can be so different than what someone is able to share in a conversation with a doctor. So at the end of the interview I asked the woman if she'd be interested in participating in something like that. She said that she can't really write due to arthritis, but she had been working awhile ago on a story about her childhood. She brought out several pages of yellow lined paper, and asked if I wanted to read it. We talked about typing it up and having me help her finish it.
So I took the pages home to read and transcribe. Several of them are numbered the same number, such that the order was hard to determine, and as I read through them I realized that's because she had written several different beginnings. Throughout there are some anecdotes told in slightly different ways, so that in typing up the story, I had to maneuver some passages, putting the similar ones side by side, so that she could decide which parts of the same story she wanted to keep, discard, combine. During some particularly difficult parts to decipher, where reading continuously didn't seem to give a sensible narrative, I saw that she'd written in every other line, and in the lines in between added other parts of the story. All of this required some rearranging as I read and typed, and I liked indulging in both the neurotic need to organize and the creative desire to piece things together. The story has nothing to do with my research, but it does have to do with what a lot of people seem to want, a desire to record certain memories, something that resonates a lot with me personally.
I really appreciate the flexibility of this time, that allows things to happen that don't fit a mold of efficiency or list of things to do, where I'm led not by steadfast goals but by natural happenings and my natural responses to them.
And this woman's story comes to me during a time when I've been working on a story about my childhood too. The writing part of this time off is even more vague than the research. I have a list of things I want to write about, which is a little overwhelming, and even when I focus on one, I'm not quite sure what I want to say or how to say it. All I'm sure of is that I feel compelled to write about them, but having the time to do it means being faced with why, and that has resulted in major writer's block. I could spend an entire day on something without much to show for it, and the lack of proportion can be disorienting. But I'm endeared to writing in the way that it's not science and things don't logically lead to other things, and it is amazing to wake up each day with the freedom and privilege to just try, with no expectations, to feel that that's enough, for now.
And so instead of explaining to every person who asks, I say I'm doing nothing. It gets somewhat tiresome, because we're not used to nothing being okay. I'm not traveling anywhere, so it's not like a vacation. The few times I've tried to go more deeply into it, I usually just confuse the person and I'd rather have them think I'm doing nothing of significance instead of misunderstanding something of personal significance. Besides, everyone takes nothing in their own way, and I think we could all use more of it.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
alone
Leaning against my car, I didn’t see any water. Void of any geographical sense, I wasn’t sure where the Long Island Sound was situated but I wasn’t really looking for it either. Though the space between, between where I was and where the bank of trees ahead lay, steeped down and gave a feeling of being higher up, the parking lot was likely not elevated enough to afford a view. It was cold, not bitingly so, just so to match the gray that comes too early in the day during months like December. The sky held a dull solid gray, the trees blended a hazy one.
It’d been a short and unfamiliar drive from New Haven to the Connecticut Hospice, and now that I’d entered and left the entrance of the building, it was easier to stay. The stray leaves clinging to deceptively precarious branches didn’t keep the trees from being bare, but made them feel heavy, and I tried to focus on the lean trunks. I tried not to choke on my heaving breaths. And to stop the flow of salt and water from my eyes to the air around, air that you could tell was dry by the way it soaked up the moisture layering my skin.
He’d been transferred from the hospital to hospice the day before. He hadn’t been happy about it, had responded with “horrible” when asked how he was doing, the last two syllables swallowed by the effort of the first. Often his breathing was too labored for fluency, and sometimes words took a long time, occupying a space that I didn’t realize was open until his voice closed them. Even though his voice sounded the same whether he was comfortable or uncomfortable, it moved more than anything else about him. It was never accented by the rest of his face; his lips didn’t migrate from the straight road they naturally formed, the taut white of his forehead never disrupted even while his lungs crumpled into rough coughs.
He lived in a bed next to the door in a room of three, and when we waved from the hallway he called out hello if he saw us. The wet brown of his eyes drew a full film from one corner to the other and felt protective of something, but they kept him from seeing his food well enough to eat. He didn’t want to eat anyway, and he directed his gaze towards the sound of the television, even when the hospital headphones slipped off his ears and forward onto his chest like a necklace. It made me think that hospital gowns don’t lend themselves to accessories.
He had been a patient on our list of patients to see every morning for almost a week before I really met him, when the physician taking care of him allowed another medical student and me to sit in on a conversation she had with him about his health. Earlier that day she had talked of him as a patient she knew would stick with her; “he’s sweet; you can tell life’s been unfair to him.” I’d felt somewhat guilty for not noticing, as once I sat down on his bed it was palpable through the blankets.
The doctor touched his shoulder, which was usually enough to rouse him if his eyes were closed (at this time they weren’t), and told him she wanted to talk to him about things.
She gently explained the state of his major organs and how in trying to support one, we hurt another. When things reach a balancing act where balance would be unstable, when piling or removing things from either end keeps hurting, we turn our attention to the fulcrum. Again nothing in his face moved, but he said he wasn’t ready. He’d have to talk to his wife. She didn’t visit because they didn’t have a car, and a taxi would be too costly for their resources. She didn’t like seeing him so sick, anyway. But Thanksgiving was coming up, and his nephews and nieces had cars that could carry his family, and turkey with cranberry sauce in plastic containers, to the hospital then.
I was also in the hospital on Thanksgiving, when his room went from three patients whose beds were separated by cloth curtains maneuvered by nurses and doctors, to a flock of relatives standing in their puffy winter coats that they didn’t remove once inside. His wife’s shape matched her voice on the phone but she looked much older than him, with the gray in her hair prominent since she’d let it go long while his hair was still brown, and the wrinkles I sometimes imagined to be hiding in his forehead openly lined her eyes. A teenager with glasses and thick strands of hair across his forehead, a nephew I presumed, brought him a walkman. The headphones that came with it weren’t any more stable around his head than the others, but he took them with him to hospice; we had to disentangle them from the other pair to make sure he had the right ones.
I said hello to the group forming a sort of semi-circle at the foot of his bed as though participating in an icebreaker, and saw the cranberry sauce. It is strange to meet people whose lives give a disproportionate amount of substance to yours when compared to vice versa. I wasn’t in the room when the doctors talked to them about the future. But I saw them leave the room and walk down the hallway in a choppy stream, some visibly upset and others subtly so.
His wife nodded as I passed and said that she would like him to be comfortable. I nodded back, and went into his room out of an invisible inertia, without thought to if I had anything to offer and if so what form that would take. And so I started as we did every morning.
“How are you doing?”
“Oh, half and half.”
“I saw your family in the hallway. It must’ve been nice to have them here.” I looked at his bedside table to see if he’d eaten, but I couldn’t really tell. It was only then that I heard what he’d said, which was something he would say often in the following days. When evaluating his physical state, the doctors taking care of him spoke of him as having good days and bad days. It is true that on some days his face looked cleaner and his lungs sounded clearer, and other days the crackles that our stethoscopes could hear would rattle his chest so that he looked limp and for some reason during those times, the crust that develops from standstill remained in his eyes instead of being washed with blinks. “Half and half?”
He nodded, which for him meant bringing his chin down to his chest. By the time he’d bring it back up, you may have forgotten the first motion.
“Did you talk to your family about things?”
“We’re looking for a place. There’s one near my house so my wife can walk there and see me.”
Surprised that the logistics of things had already been discussed, I nodded.
Back in the room with the computers where we typed records of how our patients were doing today versus yesterday, they tried guessing what would take him, eventually: his kidneys, said one; his lungs, said another. How does that work, when his cancer had started in his throat? He never asked, but I wondered and despite the daily updates on his physical state I never knew.
Later through a process of which I wasn’t aware but trusted, it was decided that he go to Connecticut Hospice in Branford, not to the place he mentioned in his town. We told him it would probably be better when he was settled into a place, in a room with more privacy. He asked whether he would be in his own room, and was told that it was likely to be shared but that the rooms were vast. Although he seemed to want his own room, he wasn’t eager to leave the company of the people passing his open door in the hallway, though he never stated either sentiment directly. “It’s nice to just see faces,” he said in what felt more like a confirmation than a confession.
On one Friday, after having seen him on our morning rounds every day he’d been in the hospital, I said I’d miss him over the weekend.
“Well, then you should work on the weekend.”
I paused. “I’ll come by to see you.”
There was no pause, and no movement of his eyes from their station. “That’s very nice, but you won’t.”
Our interactions were not scarce, but brief. We ran out of things to say. I didn’t find out much about his life before here, or his life at that time outside of that bed. The natural course of asking how he was would be to discuss the present and near future, and I didn’t know how to bring the past in relief. On days when he wanted to be in limbo or something more than that, he’d talk about the new cancer center and what his doctors had told them. On the days it was explicit, mostly he said he didn’t want to die. Asking why would have felt too easily misunderstood, but now feels too easily absent.
So the day he left for hospice was one of the half and half days; to his doctors it was a bad one. In the hours before the transport from hospice arrived, he was having trouble breathing, and when they arrived he was receiving a breathing treatment to help open the vessels in his lungs. The man and woman in uniform who had come for him stood by the window and told us to take our time; they were “in no rush.” When he finished breathing into the mask, they brought a thin stretcher alongside the hospital bed.
“We’re going to move you from there into this so we can drive you there, okay?”
“How far is it?”
“The ride will be over before you know it. Barely twelve minutes.” The woman’s conversation was proficient, and I became acutely aware that this was my first time seeing all this happen. Her hair was tight where her braid started to form and then throughout. Nothing about her gave way, but still she was kind in a way difficult to pinpoint with tone or act. Maybe it was this softness without known source that made me turn away when they put the rails down on his hospital bed.
But I watched as they gathered the sheet below him and swiftly transferred him to the stretcher. Narrow as he was, the stretcher still just accommodated him. The man and woman layered him with blankets that had the texture of towels.
“There will be a brief period, less than a minute, where you’ll be outside as we move you into the van. It’ll be cold, but we’re putting these blankets on you, and it’ll be very quick.”
His belly was large, but he was seamlessly consumed by a swarm of blankets. Once covered, his arms and legs disappeared. His small face lacked sharp edges and fell into underlying pillow without difficulty. There were hints of him against the sheet: the deep brown of his hair splayed in tufts, the red in his cheeks dissolving thinly out and down to his jaw and seeping into the pillowcase, the wet in his eyes making all else feel dull. This was all I could see of him; everything else was white on the black stretcher.
“We’re going to strap you in now, okay?”
He brought his chin down to his chest, and coughed, “Okay.”
The woman pulled on a black belt with a heavy buckle, stretched it to as far as her arm extended, and handed the other end across his body to the man, who pulled down and tightened it. This spanned his torso. They started another across his lower body but as the transfer of buckle was taking place, one caught the other’s eye and they paused. “It’s probably not necessary.”
I’d never seen him walk while in the hospital, though I knew he went to and from the bathroom on his own, but it wasn’t until now that it seemed that he couldn’t move, with or without the one buckle. He was breathing less heavily now and unlike when he was sitting up in bed with his gown in full view, as he lay there I couldn’t see his chest struggling.
“I hope you’ll come see me.” We’ve been advised never to promise anything, and despite instincts, we force ourselves to rephrase things into “I’ll try.” It was a Tuesday, and I told him I’d try my best to come see him, though it might not be until Thursday or so. I watched them wheel him through the door and down the hallway, no further though I could have rounded the corner to the elevators with them.
I’d never been to Connecticut Hospice but had heard it was beautiful, overlooking the water. I looked up its information on the internet on Wednesday morning. I called their number for his room number, and was given it, though they said I wouldn’t need it. The person at the front desk would help me once I got there.
It was late afternoon when I got there. Though the streets were a little confusing, I’d found the way fairly easily with my friend’s GPS. The parking lot was large and three fourths full. As I walked to the main entrance, I felt glad the transition had been made, and looked forward to seeing him in a brighter place, one designed for comfort. The front desk was where they said it would be, and I found myself thankful for the ease of things. The woman manning it wore a thick sweater upon which her light curls rested. When I gave her his name, she carefully scanned a list in front of her. As the seconds crawled, I regretted forgetting the room number I’d called for in the morning.
She picked up the phone to call for his room, and as I waited I watched others pass through the front desk and down a corridor past large glass windows, without stopping. She spoke softly, but I heard her say his name. Then, “oh,” to the phone and to me, “Are you a family member?”
“No. I’m a med student. We took care of him at the hospital.”
“Oh,” to me, and to the phone, “She took care of him at the hospital.”
I watched her nod several times at the phone, continuing to speak softly, and hang up. “Someone’s coming.”
“Thank you.” I waited and watched more people pass, without waiting.
Someone whose face and shape I don’t remember came. “Hello, are you a family member?”
“No. I’m a med student. We took care of him at the hospital.”
“Oh.” She nodded. I gave a small smile. She told me she was very sorry; he’d passed away that afternoon.
“Oh. That was fast.” So fast. Twelve minutes to get from the hospital to there. What happened in between? I’d called that morning. He’d had a room number. One with a letter, so he was sharing space. But it was more space. Blinking to buy time, I paused before it came to me to ask, “Was his family there?”
“No. We called his wife. She didn’t want to come.”
I nodded. “Thank you.” I wanted to give her more than that thank you, or to fully give the thank you, and paused. But it was too brief, and the sentiment too blurry. I turned slowly, maybe to match the stride of what had come before. But once out the door, the passing air that grazed my skin on its way to elsewhere held in it the shortness of my time inside, taking it for itself and carrying it away. Maybe because of that I stayed outside.
He hadn’t asked to be moved to a building with a view, or for much of anything other than our presence. It wasn’t much to give, and it wasn’t hard to want to give it, but in the end it was the most elusive. When asked about how he wanted to proceed, he’d defer to what we thought, saying we knew best. There were a lot of us: the respiratory team watching over his lungs, the oncology team monitoring his cancer, the renal team reminding us that his kidneys were failing, and the geriatric team checking every morning for a bad or good day. Each of them explained things, and asked questions to cater to his needs, trying to provide care in the niches they’d formed in training and in experience. Because the weight of confrontation and decision was too much for him, and because this weight had become a part of their anatomy, they let him give it to them, in the hopes that they could give something to him.
I thought this too, thought that though it felt viscerally out of place to attach him to that stretcher and move him, it would take him to a place that would be better, eventually. What happened in that transition to this place, that took from him the time required to make it better? We’d left him alone before.
Never having seen him in a new place, standing with the hospice in close distance I only saw him as he looked when I first knew him. After not too long I left for home, with the water still out of view behind the low level of trees.
It’d been a short and unfamiliar drive from New Haven to the Connecticut Hospice, and now that I’d entered and left the entrance of the building, it was easier to stay. The stray leaves clinging to deceptively precarious branches didn’t keep the trees from being bare, but made them feel heavy, and I tried to focus on the lean trunks. I tried not to choke on my heaving breaths. And to stop the flow of salt and water from my eyes to the air around, air that you could tell was dry by the way it soaked up the moisture layering my skin.
He’d been transferred from the hospital to hospice the day before. He hadn’t been happy about it, had responded with “horrible” when asked how he was doing, the last two syllables swallowed by the effort of the first. Often his breathing was too labored for fluency, and sometimes words took a long time, occupying a space that I didn’t realize was open until his voice closed them. Even though his voice sounded the same whether he was comfortable or uncomfortable, it moved more than anything else about him. It was never accented by the rest of his face; his lips didn’t migrate from the straight road they naturally formed, the taut white of his forehead never disrupted even while his lungs crumpled into rough coughs.
He lived in a bed next to the door in a room of three, and when we waved from the hallway he called out hello if he saw us. The wet brown of his eyes drew a full film from one corner to the other and felt protective of something, but they kept him from seeing his food well enough to eat. He didn’t want to eat anyway, and he directed his gaze towards the sound of the television, even when the hospital headphones slipped off his ears and forward onto his chest like a necklace. It made me think that hospital gowns don’t lend themselves to accessories.
He had been a patient on our list of patients to see every morning for almost a week before I really met him, when the physician taking care of him allowed another medical student and me to sit in on a conversation she had with him about his health. Earlier that day she had talked of him as a patient she knew would stick with her; “he’s sweet; you can tell life’s been unfair to him.” I’d felt somewhat guilty for not noticing, as once I sat down on his bed it was palpable through the blankets.
The doctor touched his shoulder, which was usually enough to rouse him if his eyes were closed (at this time they weren’t), and told him she wanted to talk to him about things.
She gently explained the state of his major organs and how in trying to support one, we hurt another. When things reach a balancing act where balance would be unstable, when piling or removing things from either end keeps hurting, we turn our attention to the fulcrum. Again nothing in his face moved, but he said he wasn’t ready. He’d have to talk to his wife. She didn’t visit because they didn’t have a car, and a taxi would be too costly for their resources. She didn’t like seeing him so sick, anyway. But Thanksgiving was coming up, and his nephews and nieces had cars that could carry his family, and turkey with cranberry sauce in plastic containers, to the hospital then.
I was also in the hospital on Thanksgiving, when his room went from three patients whose beds were separated by cloth curtains maneuvered by nurses and doctors, to a flock of relatives standing in their puffy winter coats that they didn’t remove once inside. His wife’s shape matched her voice on the phone but she looked much older than him, with the gray in her hair prominent since she’d let it go long while his hair was still brown, and the wrinkles I sometimes imagined to be hiding in his forehead openly lined her eyes. A teenager with glasses and thick strands of hair across his forehead, a nephew I presumed, brought him a walkman. The headphones that came with it weren’t any more stable around his head than the others, but he took them with him to hospice; we had to disentangle them from the other pair to make sure he had the right ones.
I said hello to the group forming a sort of semi-circle at the foot of his bed as though participating in an icebreaker, and saw the cranberry sauce. It is strange to meet people whose lives give a disproportionate amount of substance to yours when compared to vice versa. I wasn’t in the room when the doctors talked to them about the future. But I saw them leave the room and walk down the hallway in a choppy stream, some visibly upset and others subtly so.
His wife nodded as I passed and said that she would like him to be comfortable. I nodded back, and went into his room out of an invisible inertia, without thought to if I had anything to offer and if so what form that would take. And so I started as we did every morning.
“How are you doing?”
“Oh, half and half.”
“I saw your family in the hallway. It must’ve been nice to have them here.” I looked at his bedside table to see if he’d eaten, but I couldn’t really tell. It was only then that I heard what he’d said, which was something he would say often in the following days. When evaluating his physical state, the doctors taking care of him spoke of him as having good days and bad days. It is true that on some days his face looked cleaner and his lungs sounded clearer, and other days the crackles that our stethoscopes could hear would rattle his chest so that he looked limp and for some reason during those times, the crust that develops from standstill remained in his eyes instead of being washed with blinks. “Half and half?”
He nodded, which for him meant bringing his chin down to his chest. By the time he’d bring it back up, you may have forgotten the first motion.
“Did you talk to your family about things?”
“We’re looking for a place. There’s one near my house so my wife can walk there and see me.”
Surprised that the logistics of things had already been discussed, I nodded.
Back in the room with the computers where we typed records of how our patients were doing today versus yesterday, they tried guessing what would take him, eventually: his kidneys, said one; his lungs, said another. How does that work, when his cancer had started in his throat? He never asked, but I wondered and despite the daily updates on his physical state I never knew.
Later through a process of which I wasn’t aware but trusted, it was decided that he go to Connecticut Hospice in Branford, not to the place he mentioned in his town. We told him it would probably be better when he was settled into a place, in a room with more privacy. He asked whether he would be in his own room, and was told that it was likely to be shared but that the rooms were vast. Although he seemed to want his own room, he wasn’t eager to leave the company of the people passing his open door in the hallway, though he never stated either sentiment directly. “It’s nice to just see faces,” he said in what felt more like a confirmation than a confession.
On one Friday, after having seen him on our morning rounds every day he’d been in the hospital, I said I’d miss him over the weekend.
“Well, then you should work on the weekend.”
I paused. “I’ll come by to see you.”
There was no pause, and no movement of his eyes from their station. “That’s very nice, but you won’t.”
Our interactions were not scarce, but brief. We ran out of things to say. I didn’t find out much about his life before here, or his life at that time outside of that bed. The natural course of asking how he was would be to discuss the present and near future, and I didn’t know how to bring the past in relief. On days when he wanted to be in limbo or something more than that, he’d talk about the new cancer center and what his doctors had told them. On the days it was explicit, mostly he said he didn’t want to die. Asking why would have felt too easily misunderstood, but now feels too easily absent.
So the day he left for hospice was one of the half and half days; to his doctors it was a bad one. In the hours before the transport from hospice arrived, he was having trouble breathing, and when they arrived he was receiving a breathing treatment to help open the vessels in his lungs. The man and woman in uniform who had come for him stood by the window and told us to take our time; they were “in no rush.” When he finished breathing into the mask, they brought a thin stretcher alongside the hospital bed.
“We’re going to move you from there into this so we can drive you there, okay?”
“How far is it?”
“The ride will be over before you know it. Barely twelve minutes.” The woman’s conversation was proficient, and I became acutely aware that this was my first time seeing all this happen. Her hair was tight where her braid started to form and then throughout. Nothing about her gave way, but still she was kind in a way difficult to pinpoint with tone or act. Maybe it was this softness without known source that made me turn away when they put the rails down on his hospital bed.
But I watched as they gathered the sheet below him and swiftly transferred him to the stretcher. Narrow as he was, the stretcher still just accommodated him. The man and woman layered him with blankets that had the texture of towels.
“There will be a brief period, less than a minute, where you’ll be outside as we move you into the van. It’ll be cold, but we’re putting these blankets on you, and it’ll be very quick.”
His belly was large, but he was seamlessly consumed by a swarm of blankets. Once covered, his arms and legs disappeared. His small face lacked sharp edges and fell into underlying pillow without difficulty. There were hints of him against the sheet: the deep brown of his hair splayed in tufts, the red in his cheeks dissolving thinly out and down to his jaw and seeping into the pillowcase, the wet in his eyes making all else feel dull. This was all I could see of him; everything else was white on the black stretcher.
“We’re going to strap you in now, okay?”
He brought his chin down to his chest, and coughed, “Okay.”
The woman pulled on a black belt with a heavy buckle, stretched it to as far as her arm extended, and handed the other end across his body to the man, who pulled down and tightened it. This spanned his torso. They started another across his lower body but as the transfer of buckle was taking place, one caught the other’s eye and they paused. “It’s probably not necessary.”
I’d never seen him walk while in the hospital, though I knew he went to and from the bathroom on his own, but it wasn’t until now that it seemed that he couldn’t move, with or without the one buckle. He was breathing less heavily now and unlike when he was sitting up in bed with his gown in full view, as he lay there I couldn’t see his chest struggling.
“I hope you’ll come see me.” We’ve been advised never to promise anything, and despite instincts, we force ourselves to rephrase things into “I’ll try.” It was a Tuesday, and I told him I’d try my best to come see him, though it might not be until Thursday or so. I watched them wheel him through the door and down the hallway, no further though I could have rounded the corner to the elevators with them.
I’d never been to Connecticut Hospice but had heard it was beautiful, overlooking the water. I looked up its information on the internet on Wednesday morning. I called their number for his room number, and was given it, though they said I wouldn’t need it. The person at the front desk would help me once I got there.
It was late afternoon when I got there. Though the streets were a little confusing, I’d found the way fairly easily with my friend’s GPS. The parking lot was large and three fourths full. As I walked to the main entrance, I felt glad the transition had been made, and looked forward to seeing him in a brighter place, one designed for comfort. The front desk was where they said it would be, and I found myself thankful for the ease of things. The woman manning it wore a thick sweater upon which her light curls rested. When I gave her his name, she carefully scanned a list in front of her. As the seconds crawled, I regretted forgetting the room number I’d called for in the morning.
She picked up the phone to call for his room, and as I waited I watched others pass through the front desk and down a corridor past large glass windows, without stopping. She spoke softly, but I heard her say his name. Then, “oh,” to the phone and to me, “Are you a family member?”
“No. I’m a med student. We took care of him at the hospital.”
“Oh,” to me, and to the phone, “She took care of him at the hospital.”
I watched her nod several times at the phone, continuing to speak softly, and hang up. “Someone’s coming.”
“Thank you.” I waited and watched more people pass, without waiting.
Someone whose face and shape I don’t remember came. “Hello, are you a family member?”
“No. I’m a med student. We took care of him at the hospital.”
“Oh.” She nodded. I gave a small smile. She told me she was very sorry; he’d passed away that afternoon.
“Oh. That was fast.” So fast. Twelve minutes to get from the hospital to there. What happened in between? I’d called that morning. He’d had a room number. One with a letter, so he was sharing space. But it was more space. Blinking to buy time, I paused before it came to me to ask, “Was his family there?”
“No. We called his wife. She didn’t want to come.”
I nodded. “Thank you.” I wanted to give her more than that thank you, or to fully give the thank you, and paused. But it was too brief, and the sentiment too blurry. I turned slowly, maybe to match the stride of what had come before. But once out the door, the passing air that grazed my skin on its way to elsewhere held in it the shortness of my time inside, taking it for itself and carrying it away. Maybe because of that I stayed outside.
He hadn’t asked to be moved to a building with a view, or for much of anything other than our presence. It wasn’t much to give, and it wasn’t hard to want to give it, but in the end it was the most elusive. When asked about how he wanted to proceed, he’d defer to what we thought, saying we knew best. There were a lot of us: the respiratory team watching over his lungs, the oncology team monitoring his cancer, the renal team reminding us that his kidneys were failing, and the geriatric team checking every morning for a bad or good day. Each of them explained things, and asked questions to cater to his needs, trying to provide care in the niches they’d formed in training and in experience. Because the weight of confrontation and decision was too much for him, and because this weight had become a part of their anatomy, they let him give it to them, in the hopes that they could give something to him.
I thought this too, thought that though it felt viscerally out of place to attach him to that stretcher and move him, it would take him to a place that would be better, eventually. What happened in that transition to this place, that took from him the time required to make it better? We’d left him alone before.
Never having seen him in a new place, standing with the hospice in close distance I only saw him as he looked when I first knew him. After not too long I left for home, with the water still out of view behind the low level of trees.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
bon iver
No better time to reflect on winter than summer.
After a long absence I started running over Thanksgiving break, when I was in Denver at my oldest brother's place with my whole family. Historically, running has always started when my life has entered a certain phase, a difficult one or a transitional one. This time around I'm trying to add more permanence to its association and role in my life. Anyway this isn't about running but just to say that when I began in Denver, I was feeling a lot and running felt simple beside those things. The beginning of second year was...crazy. We were overwhelmed in every way, and Thanksgiving was the first breather. I spent a good deal of it studying drugs, which I hadn't even attempted to learn all semester. While the mechanisms were interesting, the new language blew my mind a little. I'd sit and wonder why we were learning to talk this way, and whether my mind would always sound like a stranger to myself, and not just strange like unfamiliar but strange like not right. Since this was my second school Thanksgiving break, and since I instinctively compare one time marker with its predecessor, last year's week came back to me often. Last Thanksgiving I was in Chicago, visiting a couple friends and exploring on my own. I wasn't studying, I missed the proximity of classmates I'd recently gotten to know but also absolutely relished solitude for the first time since a pretty rough time at the very edge of ends/beginnings that fall, everything was ahead. This Thanksgiving, it was wonderful to be with my whole family and my brother's new baby, the first in our family; people who'd been good friends the past year were now my other family and I didn't have to miss them, and I didn't feel any particular need to be alone either. I wouldn't say one Thanksgiving was better than the other. Putting them aside one another just made the year in between swell a little.
So much has happened. Even from now to this last Thanksgiving, I feel I know new facets of things and older ones more deeply. In any case, even though I wasn't thinking this at the time, I think all the things of the recent past were converging to make a me that wanted to run. I was tired. Spending the summer in Vietnam, road tripping cross country just a few days after, moving into our apartment right after that, starting school before moving even finished, then continuing full speed onto a year of massive mind-stuffing--I was tired. Things had been so fast I was still trying to decide how to approach the rest of the year, what did I want to do and what could I do. A year of tumultuous boy situations also reached its worst that fall, one that I never knew what to do with and another I didn't even realize was there. By Thanksgiving I had made myself proud though not particularly happy by eventually doing the right thing with the latter (yes, that is to say I probably didn't start out right), and transitioning to what would be the best time of our friendship with the former. I didn't know this at the time, though, and deciding how I would proceed was a struggle that break. It really took a lot in me, a lot of fighting my less admirable qualities, to continue the way I ultimately did, and so my energy was low for that reason too. Seeing all of my family was really wonderful; I'd been so looking forward to it but it still surprised me. Happiness is consuming too.
I always look forward to the music I run to. One night I decided that the next day I'd listen to Bon Iver, which really isn't typical running music if you like to listen to things chipper and upbeat. It's true that Bon Iver has a distinct tone, that could be described one-dimensionally as melancholy and quiet, but for me those things have always been so expansive. The sounds are so layered and raw at the same time. The effusiveness is subtle, tugs at things in you kept underneath. The next morning we woke up to a world draped in white. It was my first snowfall of the winter, and first run in a snowfall, and the soundtrack couldn't have been more perfect. Through the slow thirty-seven minutes of the album I went past my brother's neighborhood to discover water rushing fast down its creek, fluff atop and a mix of bare trees and clothed trees, for frame. I've loved Fremont and Cambridge runs, found lesser but palpable enjoyment in San Francisco and New Haven, but this was something I experienced in a place I had no real connection to and would likely never return to in that setting. For that and for everything else, in that sliver of space I felt everything.
The anticipation of good and stress, the tension of what happened, uncertainty of what I'd do and what would be done, the warmth of people I loved, gratitude for people who loved me so well--my family at school and my family-family, frustrations over words and connections, things I don't like admitting I feel (resentment, slighted, inadequate or superior, dislike and regret), open spaces, the heaviness of breathing, someone else's winter in mine, little life, treading and traversing over states, moving downtown, learning for the first time how to learn, a return after absence and the small changes, the walks to school, making home, laundromats and grocery stores, autumn, unfamiliar pressure, working hard to barely keep up, the newness of place and the continual resurgences of past that are so constant for me they may not even qualify as nostalgia--all there in a compact five feet two inches (and a half).
I bought a vinyl record of Bon Iver's album at their concert in Brooklyn, where wife and I were front row. I don't own a record player, and I purposely haven't gotten one yet. I would like to go to a store that probably doesn't exist anymore where they are still lined in rows and I can touch the spindles, on my own because I take a long time to make decisions, and choose one for myself...but not yet. But I like imagining that someday, when the time is right for me, I will have one, and I'll sit on my wood patterned floor and listen to those thirty-seven minutes. I might cry. Not for past melancholy, not even for present happiness, but for fullness in the crevices.
After a long absence I started running over Thanksgiving break, when I was in Denver at my oldest brother's place with my whole family. Historically, running has always started when my life has entered a certain phase, a difficult one or a transitional one. This time around I'm trying to add more permanence to its association and role in my life. Anyway this isn't about running but just to say that when I began in Denver, I was feeling a lot and running felt simple beside those things. The beginning of second year was...crazy. We were overwhelmed in every way, and Thanksgiving was the first breather. I spent a good deal of it studying drugs, which I hadn't even attempted to learn all semester. While the mechanisms were interesting, the new language blew my mind a little. I'd sit and wonder why we were learning to talk this way, and whether my mind would always sound like a stranger to myself, and not just strange like unfamiliar but strange like not right. Since this was my second school Thanksgiving break, and since I instinctively compare one time marker with its predecessor, last year's week came back to me often. Last Thanksgiving I was in Chicago, visiting a couple friends and exploring on my own. I wasn't studying, I missed the proximity of classmates I'd recently gotten to know but also absolutely relished solitude for the first time since a pretty rough time at the very edge of ends/beginnings that fall, everything was ahead. This Thanksgiving, it was wonderful to be with my whole family and my brother's new baby, the first in our family; people who'd been good friends the past year were now my other family and I didn't have to miss them, and I didn't feel any particular need to be alone either. I wouldn't say one Thanksgiving was better than the other. Putting them aside one another just made the year in between swell a little.
So much has happened. Even from now to this last Thanksgiving, I feel I know new facets of things and older ones more deeply. In any case, even though I wasn't thinking this at the time, I think all the things of the recent past were converging to make a me that wanted to run. I was tired. Spending the summer in Vietnam, road tripping cross country just a few days after, moving into our apartment right after that, starting school before moving even finished, then continuing full speed onto a year of massive mind-stuffing--I was tired. Things had been so fast I was still trying to decide how to approach the rest of the year, what did I want to do and what could I do. A year of tumultuous boy situations also reached its worst that fall, one that I never knew what to do with and another I didn't even realize was there. By Thanksgiving I had made myself proud though not particularly happy by eventually doing the right thing with the latter (yes, that is to say I probably didn't start out right), and transitioning to what would be the best time of our friendship with the former. I didn't know this at the time, though, and deciding how I would proceed was a struggle that break. It really took a lot in me, a lot of fighting my less admirable qualities, to continue the way I ultimately did, and so my energy was low for that reason too. Seeing all of my family was really wonderful; I'd been so looking forward to it but it still surprised me. Happiness is consuming too.
I always look forward to the music I run to. One night I decided that the next day I'd listen to Bon Iver, which really isn't typical running music if you like to listen to things chipper and upbeat. It's true that Bon Iver has a distinct tone, that could be described one-dimensionally as melancholy and quiet, but for me those things have always been so expansive. The sounds are so layered and raw at the same time. The effusiveness is subtle, tugs at things in you kept underneath. The next morning we woke up to a world draped in white. It was my first snowfall of the winter, and first run in a snowfall, and the soundtrack couldn't have been more perfect. Through the slow thirty-seven minutes of the album I went past my brother's neighborhood to discover water rushing fast down its creek, fluff atop and a mix of bare trees and clothed trees, for frame. I've loved Fremont and Cambridge runs, found lesser but palpable enjoyment in San Francisco and New Haven, but this was something I experienced in a place I had no real connection to and would likely never return to in that setting. For that and for everything else, in that sliver of space I felt everything.
The anticipation of good and stress, the tension of what happened, uncertainty of what I'd do and what would be done, the warmth of people I loved, gratitude for people who loved me so well--my family at school and my family-family, frustrations over words and connections, things I don't like admitting I feel (resentment, slighted, inadequate or superior, dislike and regret), open spaces, the heaviness of breathing, someone else's winter in mine, little life, treading and traversing over states, moving downtown, learning for the first time how to learn, a return after absence and the small changes, the walks to school, making home, laundromats and grocery stores, autumn, unfamiliar pressure, working hard to barely keep up, the newness of place and the continual resurgences of past that are so constant for me they may not even qualify as nostalgia--all there in a compact five feet two inches (and a half).
I bought a vinyl record of Bon Iver's album at their concert in Brooklyn, where wife and I were front row. I don't own a record player, and I purposely haven't gotten one yet. I would like to go to a store that probably doesn't exist anymore where they are still lined in rows and I can touch the spindles, on my own because I take a long time to make decisions, and choose one for myself...but not yet. But I like imagining that someday, when the time is right for me, I will have one, and I'll sit on my wood patterned floor and listen to those thirty-seven minutes. I might cry. Not for past melancholy, not even for present happiness, but for fullness in the crevices.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
transition
Synaesthesia describes one sense stimulating another, and in my mind, how they get mixed up; how inhaling the lingering warmth of a pillow recalls the sun's texture long after it's sunk for the day.
I thought for a long time about how to make this transition, mostly about what I wanted to do with my old entries. My instinct was to import my Livejournal, begun in April 2004, to a new site. But after settling on this name and URL, I looked at the fresh, empty pages and thought maybe it would be better, and easier, to move on.
But I've never been built to forget, or to compartmentalize. So since there is no easy way to import my old journal to blogspot, I copied and pasted every old entry into this new blog (I did find a program that purported to import, but as computer illiterate as I am, figuring this out would take as long as my way). With each entry, I had to change the date to reflect when I wrote it, and after posting thirty odd entries, blogspot made me word-verify each entry (and some of those are so hard to read, I feel like I'm taking a test). I'm uselessly adaptive when it comes to doing monotonous tasks for extended periods of time, so that I can finish something I've set my mind to, even though it could be done more efficiently. Though the day, month and year of these past entries are accurate, the hour and minute reflect the time I recently posted them. So I traversed 4 and a half years in an hour and a half, as you can see by the 2:53 AM posting of the first entry, and the 4:25 AM posting of the one before this. I'm up this late because I was compelled to be, and because there is finally nowhere to go tomorrow.
I left everything as it was. Kept the silly beginning posts, when I wrote often and about nothing at all; the less frequent, longer posts that were also nothings, just more; the painful ones where I was at my worst and the ones with memories past. Still, I am making the change to another place to store these things. Things changed in the switch. The pictures that disappeared after I graduated college, leaving behind the storage space they gave us, now appear as little boxes. Font and color and width are different. To preserve certain things, I had to change format. For a long time I had an entry title, then a photograph, then a titled link that you clicked to see the actual entry. I can't do the titled link thing here, so sometimes I put whatever words were in the link in parentheses after the entry. If I felt it was important; I didn't do this for all of them. Didn't think that was straying too much from the original, since in any case I had to change what the original looked/felt like. This probably makes no sense unless you've seen my old entries on Livejournal (which are still there, where they started). Couldn't transfer comments from the few & faithful; those stay on LJ as well.
I got pretty proficient at copying and pasting, even after word verification was required for each entry, so the old words flew by me. But having to type out each title, write in the date, and scroll through to highlight made for a re-experience. Even though everything is felt differently, slightly or by a whole lot, it's still very much there.
A very good friend told me on New Year's Eve that she reads life too symbolically, that she takes everything as a sign to apply to her life. She thought it was a bad thing, to let the outside and inanimate influence how she feels, but I think in the end these things come from us. A couple weeks before break I sprained my right ankle running in the rain (not from one motion but from repetitive accommodation of slippery road), so that it hurt to just walk, and it recently recovered around Christmastime. On New Year's Eve, in an excited dance move a very large man brought his foot down on my left, and the pain I thought would wear away slid into the new year, in the form of a bulging purple fourth toe.
And so while I look forward to new things, more changes, bettering and likely lapses and more bettering, with this blog and with 2009...I also know I carry everything. They don't completely shed their old coverings but they find another kind of place, and it's all connected by synaesthesia. Someday I'd like to more subtly, accurately express this in a story.
It's near dawn now and I'm growing tired, the effects of the evening's chai tea wearing away. This time and from now on I don't have to change the date on my automatically dated post, and so here's to continuing.
I thought for a long time about how to make this transition, mostly about what I wanted to do with my old entries. My instinct was to import my Livejournal, begun in April 2004, to a new site. But after settling on this name and URL, I looked at the fresh, empty pages and thought maybe it would be better, and easier, to move on.
But I've never been built to forget, or to compartmentalize. So since there is no easy way to import my old journal to blogspot, I copied and pasted every old entry into this new blog (I did find a program that purported to import, but as computer illiterate as I am, figuring this out would take as long as my way). With each entry, I had to change the date to reflect when I wrote it, and after posting thirty odd entries, blogspot made me word-verify each entry (and some of those are so hard to read, I feel like I'm taking a test). I'm uselessly adaptive when it comes to doing monotonous tasks for extended periods of time, so that I can finish something I've set my mind to, even though it could be done more efficiently. Though the day, month and year of these past entries are accurate, the hour and minute reflect the time I recently posted them. So I traversed 4 and a half years in an hour and a half, as you can see by the 2:53 AM posting of the first entry, and the 4:25 AM posting of the one before this. I'm up this late because I was compelled to be, and because there is finally nowhere to go tomorrow.
I left everything as it was. Kept the silly beginning posts, when I wrote often and about nothing at all; the less frequent, longer posts that were also nothings, just more; the painful ones where I was at my worst and the ones with memories past. Still, I am making the change to another place to store these things. Things changed in the switch. The pictures that disappeared after I graduated college, leaving behind the storage space they gave us, now appear as little boxes. Font and color and width are different. To preserve certain things, I had to change format. For a long time I had an entry title, then a photograph, then a titled link that you clicked to see the actual entry. I can't do the titled link thing here, so sometimes I put whatever words were in the link in parentheses after the entry. If I felt it was important; I didn't do this for all of them. Didn't think that was straying too much from the original, since in any case I had to change what the original looked/felt like. This probably makes no sense unless you've seen my old entries on Livejournal (which are still there, where they started). Couldn't transfer comments from the few & faithful; those stay on LJ as well.
I got pretty proficient at copying and pasting, even after word verification was required for each entry, so the old words flew by me. But having to type out each title, write in the date, and scroll through to highlight made for a re-experience. Even though everything is felt differently, slightly or by a whole lot, it's still very much there.
A very good friend told me on New Year's Eve that she reads life too symbolically, that she takes everything as a sign to apply to her life. She thought it was a bad thing, to let the outside and inanimate influence how she feels, but I think in the end these things come from us. A couple weeks before break I sprained my right ankle running in the rain (not from one motion but from repetitive accommodation of slippery road), so that it hurt to just walk, and it recently recovered around Christmastime. On New Year's Eve, in an excited dance move a very large man brought his foot down on my left, and the pain I thought would wear away slid into the new year, in the form of a bulging purple fourth toe.
And so while I look forward to new things, more changes, bettering and likely lapses and more bettering, with this blog and with 2009...I also know I carry everything. They don't completely shed their old coverings but they find another kind of place, and it's all connected by synaesthesia. Someday I'd like to more subtly, accurately express this in a story.
It's near dawn now and I'm growing tired, the effects of the evening's chai tea wearing away. This time and from now on I don't have to change the date on my automatically dated post, and so here's to continuing.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
changes and happenings
A lot of things have happened. While not everything has been smooth or even pleasantly rocky, I feel the heaviest kind of lucky. It's quite sappy how consciously lucky I feel every day to have everything I do, how much it holds up even the worst days. To inadequately recap. I spent the summer in Vietnam to work on a public health project. I traveled to the center and south, and lived in the north. I stayed in a rural town for a couple weeks, visited my dad's old village, and lived with my uncle, his son and his son's family in the city the rest of the time. My cousin's wife, quite possibly the sweetest person I've ever met, cried at the airport when I was leaving.
I spent three full days at home in which my dad told me how he planted a near dying cherry tree in the middle of our yard and my mom armed me with hoisin sauce to bring to New Haven. You know how parents are cute to everyone but their own kids? My parents are so cute even I think so. I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving, and having a full week with them (and all the brothers, so I think it might be our first full family Thanksgiving ever). My mom keeps reminding me we'll make the turkey together (she made her first one only a couple years ago) and that she'll make my favorite meal too. She and my dad keep asking me if I need funds, something they haven't done in years. I'm guessing they're asking now because they think I've run out, which I was worried about too, but it looks like I'll be able to ride out at least this next year on residual income and aid, which is another part of the luck. But it's funny to me that my mom tells me not to worry about buying a dress for the semi-formal because she doesn't want me to "suffer" (literal translation).
I drove cross country with Allison. We stopped in Tahoe, Lovelock Nevada, Salt Lake City Utah, Denver Colorado, Wall South Dakota, Madison Wisconsin, Rockville Maryland, Lancaster Pennsylvania and arrived here after ten days, 72 hours which were spent driving. We saw lots of rocks and castles, real and figurative. We saw salt and sunsets and my new nephew. We talked a lot, and laughed an unfathomable amount. We played lame games and took pictures of nothing (on the hour). Silly things happened, like our Wisconsin adventure which included bruises and a flooded bathroom. Beautiful things were seen, like Utah and the beautiful beautiful Badlands, which are not castles but make you feel royal, but also small. I'm so so glad that we took the trip and that Allison was the Thelma to my Louise, because how often do you get to do that and more rarely, have it be quite perfect? When in your life you feel both brave and unsure and open to emptiness, drive across your country with your Thelma.
Upon returning to New Haven, I embarked on a scrambled unique honeymoon with the wife, traveling in a 14-foot U-Haul to retrieve and move furniture. First time I've bought real furniture, first time I drove a U-Haul. It took me a full week to get everything and unpack, a week in which I ignored all things school while realizing in class that we were already supposed to have learned in that week what would've amounted last year to a month of material. But it doesn't matter, because I love our new home almost as much as I love the wife. We live on a street lined with restaurants and little shops like the camera store and the random stuff store and the art store and the Art School, and two coffeeshops, including one that's half a block away and owned by Asians who already know how much I love chai. We're on the first floor of an old brick house with hardwood floors and white walls encased in darker wood, with a big kitchen and the homey feel I knew I wanted when we were looking for an apartment. It's just that much farther from school, and that much closer to downtown. Jen and I cook, and Nupur has a bread machine.
School is intense. I can't learn this much this fast. We're learning in modules this year, and we've started with the heart. One of the most interesting, and complicated. Apparently in a month we're supposed to understand the diseases, know the treatments (what do you give first? what's a last resort? what do you give to diabetics?), comprehend how an EKG works and what it's supposed to look like in every kind of dysfunction of your heartbeat (do you know how many different ways your heart can beat?). All this makes me again grateful for being here, without real exams or grades, so I'm still able to appreciate how intellectually satisfying the science is and remember how lucky and awesome it is to pursue something that works your mind and heart. The year's going to be a bit insular, all of us cooped up studying, which sounds kind of sucky but there will probably never be an excuse again to just be cramming in knowledge (hopefully) without other obligations.
At the very least I like the people I'm cooped up with, and through everything else I feel most lucky for the sheer quantity and quality of the people in my life. My college blockmates are all really happy and kicking ass in their respective areas of work/study, and that makes me really happy, to think of everyone growing through the ups and downs of the post-grad years with such grace. It's even crazier to think on the growth with my high school friends who are still some of the best people I know. And in New Haven I have the family I adopted (or who adopted me), people who really love me and at the lowest points (which have indeed already been experienced in the past few weeks) remind me I have absolutely everything I need. Anything that's been hard reminds me also of how there are things I still don't know about myself, and how the more painful experiences force you to know yourself. How you're built, what you value. I know better that honesty matters to me more than acts, that there are things I know I deserve even as much as we hate to use that word on our own behalf, that for as much as I communicate there's a whole lot I miss about even people I know really well and so I need to work on that, that even if you're supposed to pick your battles I will never be able to give up on a person that gave me reason to start trying in the first place. In the end, even if what you find makes things harder--not so much the realization but you yourself--there's good reason for being how you are, and good reason for how each person is.
Reading this over confirms the sap that gratitude makes you produce. But another point is just--so things are quite different. I don't think I'll be blogging much from now on, because I started writing a tiny bit over the summer and I think I want to try as much as I can to continue that, and this year forces me to choose. I'm not sure what happened, but I think it's been this accumulation of gratitude that's pushed me to finally put some things into stories, or rather, clumps. I'll return somewhere in between clumps.
I spent three full days at home in which my dad told me how he planted a near dying cherry tree in the middle of our yard and my mom armed me with hoisin sauce to bring to New Haven. You know how parents are cute to everyone but their own kids? My parents are so cute even I think so. I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving, and having a full week with them (and all the brothers, so I think it might be our first full family Thanksgiving ever). My mom keeps reminding me we'll make the turkey together (she made her first one only a couple years ago) and that she'll make my favorite meal too. She and my dad keep asking me if I need funds, something they haven't done in years. I'm guessing they're asking now because they think I've run out, which I was worried about too, but it looks like I'll be able to ride out at least this next year on residual income and aid, which is another part of the luck. But it's funny to me that my mom tells me not to worry about buying a dress for the semi-formal because she doesn't want me to "suffer" (literal translation).
I drove cross country with Allison. We stopped in Tahoe, Lovelock Nevada, Salt Lake City Utah, Denver Colorado, Wall South Dakota, Madison Wisconsin, Rockville Maryland, Lancaster Pennsylvania and arrived here after ten days, 72 hours which were spent driving. We saw lots of rocks and castles, real and figurative. We saw salt and sunsets and my new nephew. We talked a lot, and laughed an unfathomable amount. We played lame games and took pictures of nothing (on the hour). Silly things happened, like our Wisconsin adventure which included bruises and a flooded bathroom. Beautiful things were seen, like Utah and the beautiful beautiful Badlands, which are not castles but make you feel royal, but also small. I'm so so glad that we took the trip and that Allison was the Thelma to my Louise, because how often do you get to do that and more rarely, have it be quite perfect? When in your life you feel both brave and unsure and open to emptiness, drive across your country with your Thelma.
Upon returning to New Haven, I embarked on a scrambled unique honeymoon with the wife, traveling in a 14-foot U-Haul to retrieve and move furniture. First time I've bought real furniture, first time I drove a U-Haul. It took me a full week to get everything and unpack, a week in which I ignored all things school while realizing in class that we were already supposed to have learned in that week what would've amounted last year to a month of material. But it doesn't matter, because I love our new home almost as much as I love the wife. We live on a street lined with restaurants and little shops like the camera store and the random stuff store and the art store and the Art School, and two coffeeshops, including one that's half a block away and owned by Asians who already know how much I love chai. We're on the first floor of an old brick house with hardwood floors and white walls encased in darker wood, with a big kitchen and the homey feel I knew I wanted when we were looking for an apartment. It's just that much farther from school, and that much closer to downtown. Jen and I cook, and Nupur has a bread machine.
School is intense. I can't learn this much this fast. We're learning in modules this year, and we've started with the heart. One of the most interesting, and complicated. Apparently in a month we're supposed to understand the diseases, know the treatments (what do you give first? what's a last resort? what do you give to diabetics?), comprehend how an EKG works and what it's supposed to look like in every kind of dysfunction of your heartbeat (do you know how many different ways your heart can beat?). All this makes me again grateful for being here, without real exams or grades, so I'm still able to appreciate how intellectually satisfying the science is and remember how lucky and awesome it is to pursue something that works your mind and heart. The year's going to be a bit insular, all of us cooped up studying, which sounds kind of sucky but there will probably never be an excuse again to just be cramming in knowledge (hopefully) without other obligations.
At the very least I like the people I'm cooped up with, and through everything else I feel most lucky for the sheer quantity and quality of the people in my life. My college blockmates are all really happy and kicking ass in their respective areas of work/study, and that makes me really happy, to think of everyone growing through the ups and downs of the post-grad years with such grace. It's even crazier to think on the growth with my high school friends who are still some of the best people I know. And in New Haven I have the family I adopted (or who adopted me), people who really love me and at the lowest points (which have indeed already been experienced in the past few weeks) remind me I have absolutely everything I need. Anything that's been hard reminds me also of how there are things I still don't know about myself, and how the more painful experiences force you to know yourself. How you're built, what you value. I know better that honesty matters to me more than acts, that there are things I know I deserve even as much as we hate to use that word on our own behalf, that for as much as I communicate there's a whole lot I miss about even people I know really well and so I need to work on that, that even if you're supposed to pick your battles I will never be able to give up on a person that gave me reason to start trying in the first place. In the end, even if what you find makes things harder--not so much the realization but you yourself--there's good reason for being how you are, and good reason for how each person is.
Reading this over confirms the sap that gratitude makes you produce. But another point is just--so things are quite different. I don't think I'll be blogging much from now on, because I started writing a tiny bit over the summer and I think I want to try as much as I can to continue that, and this year forces me to choose. I'm not sure what happened, but I think it's been this accumulation of gratitude that's pushed me to finally put some things into stories, or rather, clumps. I'll return somewhere in between clumps.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
my "new haven"
It's square with white linoleum squared tiles. It has a near-full-wall window looking into the courtyard, across the door, into which sunlight seeps and pours. From afar you can see brick across the way, from up close you can see grass below. There is a ledge wide enough to sit, so you can lie by the window. The sink has a polished mirror that reflects the window if you are looking at it from my desk, like I just did. There are built-in shelves around the mirror, which are my favorite part of the room because it's homey, and not necessary. The desk is very wide, and the furniture is a deep rosey wood. My boxes have arrived from across the country. There are familiar things, but they're being put in new places.
It feels new, and that doesn't just happen by nature of actually being new. So for the first time this past week, I am genuinely happy.
It feels new, and that doesn't just happen by nature of actually being new. So for the first time this past week, I am genuinely happy.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
pre-Asia
I've been waking up early, not of my own accord, the past few days and I feel anxious about leaving for Asia very soon, in a matter of hours. I'm really sleepy, but thought wins the battle over fatigue. I wanted to think about the past year before I travel, because I think post-travel SF will be different from pre-travel SF. It's been good to me. I waver between talking about it generally because I'm a little weary from ending things, and talking about it with some more shape because I might see it differently now than in five weeks when I return.
As amazing as I know it will be, going to Asia and heading into this personal and physical transition makes me aware of finishing the year here. The more transitions I experience, the more I realize how much they stand on their own, even as they flow into before and after.
I will miss so much about my life here. I worked up until the day I'm leaving, and I'm sad to leave a place where I learned a different kind of responsibility and day to day routine. I became competent at my job, and I had a good though stressful time finishing things up and training the summer person. I'll miss the organic thought, as well as the concrete procedures.
San Francisco is half my true love, my counterpart to New England. Because of the drives between SF and Fremont, as driver and passenger, I've grown less weary of bridges. During one moment when you're on the upward slope it becomes all water to your sides, and your rearview mirror reflects the ocean behind, so you're surrounded. Then the city peaks up in front of you, more and more until your car is level again.
I love my street and my neighborhood and my apartment. A blue preschool with handprints in the window marks the corner of my block where I turn right onto 10th Avenue. The houses stick together, distinct through their odd colors, differing balcony and window designs, and random shapes on their exterior (in my case, trapezoids). I have Mount Sutro from my brothers' windows and the peaks of Golden Gate and sunset from the right window in my living room. I have a long hallway, a closet with folding shutters, and wallpaper in my kitchen and bathroom. Ocean Beach is a long straight walk in one direction, and Baker Beach holds the Golden Gate in its sand like a sturdy lightweight Lego structure.
I've soaked in days of roaming, of polaroid pictures, of steps and hills, of food food food and delicious company. The fullness of days full of nothing really. Something about the mixture of sun and fog is conducive to this haze, but the crispness keeps you cold and aware of your skin. Houses sit next to restaurants; Irving Street is multipurpose for errands and food and shopping and quirks and people; a million distinct neighborhoods are compressed in this seven by seven mile place but feel expansive.
The sleep deprivation makes it hard to know what I want to say at this moment. I want to hang on to something because I know this trip will be wonderful and challenging and it will give me new feelings and I want to remember the feelings of now.
So, what do I feel now?
-Love for this small big city, in the way that you love things you feel you are and want to be.
-A scared excitement for what comes after Asia: newness. A new thing, new people, new school, new city. Yes, an old coast and old structure, but the new dominates.
-Gratitude for all the things the people in my life give me, for the ones who are still there. How each one offers something valuable that makes it natural to give back.
-Some pride in a year's work and some disappointment for lack of time to tie loose ends. Glad for the real and more vague things I learned about work, scientific thought, patients, disease, jobs well done, after-work dinners and nights.
-A fierce determination to meet the challenges of this trip which include, among many things: not fighting too much with my brother and renewing aspects of our past closeness while understanding our newfound differences; travelling alone and exploring well and growing from the solitude; winging substantial parts of the journey; completing rough parts like climbing Mt. Fuji or our two-day boat trip to Laos; surviving the backpacking; relishing the rainy season. And most of all, to take this time to do this at once: look at what's come before and what's to come, and to be away from all of that.
So I'm off, but I'll come back.
As amazing as I know it will be, going to Asia and heading into this personal and physical transition makes me aware of finishing the year here. The more transitions I experience, the more I realize how much they stand on their own, even as they flow into before and after.
I will miss so much about my life here. I worked up until the day I'm leaving, and I'm sad to leave a place where I learned a different kind of responsibility and day to day routine. I became competent at my job, and I had a good though stressful time finishing things up and training the summer person. I'll miss the organic thought, as well as the concrete procedures.
San Francisco is half my true love, my counterpart to New England. Because of the drives between SF and Fremont, as driver and passenger, I've grown less weary of bridges. During one moment when you're on the upward slope it becomes all water to your sides, and your rearview mirror reflects the ocean behind, so you're surrounded. Then the city peaks up in front of you, more and more until your car is level again.
I love my street and my neighborhood and my apartment. A blue preschool with handprints in the window marks the corner of my block where I turn right onto 10th Avenue. The houses stick together, distinct through their odd colors, differing balcony and window designs, and random shapes on their exterior (in my case, trapezoids). I have Mount Sutro from my brothers' windows and the peaks of Golden Gate and sunset from the right window in my living room. I have a long hallway, a closet with folding shutters, and wallpaper in my kitchen and bathroom. Ocean Beach is a long straight walk in one direction, and Baker Beach holds the Golden Gate in its sand like a sturdy lightweight Lego structure.
I've soaked in days of roaming, of polaroid pictures, of steps and hills, of food food food and delicious company. The fullness of days full of nothing really. Something about the mixture of sun and fog is conducive to this haze, but the crispness keeps you cold and aware of your skin. Houses sit next to restaurants; Irving Street is multipurpose for errands and food and shopping and quirks and people; a million distinct neighborhoods are compressed in this seven by seven mile place but feel expansive.
The sleep deprivation makes it hard to know what I want to say at this moment. I want to hang on to something because I know this trip will be wonderful and challenging and it will give me new feelings and I want to remember the feelings of now.
So, what do I feel now?
-Love for this small big city, in the way that you love things you feel you are and want to be.
-A scared excitement for what comes after Asia: newness. A new thing, new people, new school, new city. Yes, an old coast and old structure, but the new dominates.
-Gratitude for all the things the people in my life give me, for the ones who are still there. How each one offers something valuable that makes it natural to give back.
-Some pride in a year's work and some disappointment for lack of time to tie loose ends. Glad for the real and more vague things I learned about work, scientific thought, patients, disease, jobs well done, after-work dinners and nights.
-A fierce determination to meet the challenges of this trip which include, among many things: not fighting too much with my brother and renewing aspects of our past closeness while understanding our newfound differences; travelling alone and exploring well and growing from the solitude; winging substantial parts of the journey; completing rough parts like climbing Mt. Fuji or our two-day boat trip to Laos; surviving the backpacking; relishing the rainy season. And most of all, to take this time to do this at once: look at what's come before and what's to come, and to be away from all of that.
So I'm off, but I'll come back.
Monday, January 15, 2007
new year
new year
I don’t usually reflect on past years or think much about new ones come January. Mostly because the calendar year seldom signals any change for me. I think more in terms of the school year, or my age. This year is the first that I’m not in school, and the first in four years that I haven’t been busy with exams and papers. 2006 was also an “important” year: we graduated, I left a city and group of people that were my home and love and escape and reality for four years, I committed and applied to medical school, A. and I loved and traveled and broke up, I moved into an apartment in San Francisco, I started my first full-time job and derived a new sense of failure and also a new kind of fulfillment, I found myself more distant from my family than when I was 3000 miles away. I was able to organize my photographs and mementos from the past couple of years, I had more time to keep in touch, I had to choose what I wanted to leave at home and what to take for my new place. It was difficult, because I wanted my place to feel different from college but I hadn’t accumulated or done anything new yet, and I felt a step behind my new life. For these and other reasons I can’t quite discern, this year is the first that feels like a new beginning, or at least a time to think about what I’ve been and what I want to be.
Perhaps this comes from learning more about myself and people this past year than I have in a long while, maybe ever, and growing in ways I didn’t anticipate. It’s scary, and comforting, to think there’s so much we don’t know. So what is it that I learned? Nothing novel or anything I haven’t thought before, but the thing that was special about 2006 was it wasn’t mere thought, it was actual experience (even if much of that experience happened internally).
The last stretch of Harvard in 2006 was so much more difficult than I foresaw, and so was post-graduation, not because it was bad but because it was so full of everything and many times I felt too small to hold it. No other year have I seen my flaws more deeply and clearly, things that worked against me and what I wanted for others. Getting fixated on little things, being stubbornly self-contained, not being able to get past things and improve, taking advantage of some love and not even recognizing other forms. It's amazing how you can be so aware of your faults but still struggle so much to change. I do think that this happened because of the challenges I accepted and created, and so, it was a byproduct of something necessary. And the faults aren't so bad when the ones you care about seem to like you anyway, and when you know that you, like everyone, are fine and can always keep trying. It was the best surprise to know someone who pushed me to make these efforts, not with pressure but with the steady force of just being there.
And I tried really hard this year. Seems like an odd phrase because I can't quite follow it up with concrete phrases of what I tried really hard to do. Sometimes to stay the same despite everything, and sometimes to be better because of everything. Vague. Through it, I found that I am capable of reaching out after all, and the people who you really love and trust will be there waiting for you. These are few and rare, and thus all the more deserving of the inner effort it takes for me to ask for them. It’s okay to need things from people. I didn’t feel weak, like I feared. It sounds so obvious, but I really did feel more human, at my most broken and torn and confused. I hope that I’ve given a lot of myself. It will always be my nature to keep certain things close, not because I don’t want to share but mostly because I’m not naturally good and open with explicit expression. I also find more and more that this is the way a lot of people are, or at least the people close to me, and that everyone wants/needs signs that you care and want to know before they reveal themselves. And I care and want to know, and there are other people who do too, and they’re worth it. There’s still a long way to go, and all this was the main theme of the story I wrote for creative nonfiction this past semester. It ended: “Still scared, but feeling more capable, I continue.”
At the same time, it’s okay to feel and be alone. During certain moments, it was hard to be away from the bustle of school and the cove of company that keeps me busy and warm. It was odd because before this I’ve always been fine with being alone, but I guess this was a different kind of alone. Feeling loneliness then was new, and though sometimes that did make me feel weak, I ultimately grew to see it again as a human vulnerability. As lonely as that was, I’m glad to have gone through it. Knowing that some things exist independent of environment and other people was something I couldn’t have really felt otherwise.
I’m also glad to have been immersed in college and then be removed from it in the same year, as hard as that also was. Because even though I can’t avoid defining some things as inextricably tied to the college phase and that time in our lives, I can see better now how we are beyond that, not just now after graduation but even within those confines. Yes, the people I know and love do define my college experience, but they themselves aren’t wholly defined by the experience, and neither am I. One of the things I’m most thankful for is the perception of life as a thing that stretches and expands. It helps me find the balance between appreciating what’s past and what’s now, and what can come.
I’ve never made resolutions either. I always thought that kind of thing should be an ongoing process, but I can see the benefit of having a defined time and reason to say, I’m going to do something. I’ve also seen how unrealistically ambitious I tend to get when making lists of to-do. So this year I made some concrete resolutions that will be hard but not impossible: learn to (somewhat) play the guitar, cook a new recipe each week, and get to know San Francisco even more. And those harder conceptual resolutions? I resolve to try to remember all this, to be open, to be more patient and take things one at a time when I’m overwhelmed, to be good to other people and less self-involved, to be the “sort of person upon whom nothing is lost.” I suppose it may be a cop-out to say that my resolution is to try, but 2006 taught me that it’s quite a hard thing to just try, and I don’t want to overlook my own weaknesses in making too bold of a resolution.
So this year, in summary? It has been my happiest, my hardest, my loveliest, my saddest, my best, my favorite, my most. It’s not the last.
I don’t usually reflect on past years or think much about new ones come January. Mostly because the calendar year seldom signals any change for me. I think more in terms of the school year, or my age. This year is the first that I’m not in school, and the first in four years that I haven’t been busy with exams and papers. 2006 was also an “important” year: we graduated, I left a city and group of people that were my home and love and escape and reality for four years, I committed and applied to medical school, A. and I loved and traveled and broke up, I moved into an apartment in San Francisco, I started my first full-time job and derived a new sense of failure and also a new kind of fulfillment, I found myself more distant from my family than when I was 3000 miles away. I was able to organize my photographs and mementos from the past couple of years, I had more time to keep in touch, I had to choose what I wanted to leave at home and what to take for my new place. It was difficult, because I wanted my place to feel different from college but I hadn’t accumulated or done anything new yet, and I felt a step behind my new life. For these and other reasons I can’t quite discern, this year is the first that feels like a new beginning, or at least a time to think about what I’ve been and what I want to be.
Perhaps this comes from learning more about myself and people this past year than I have in a long while, maybe ever, and growing in ways I didn’t anticipate. It’s scary, and comforting, to think there’s so much we don’t know. So what is it that I learned? Nothing novel or anything I haven’t thought before, but the thing that was special about 2006 was it wasn’t mere thought, it was actual experience (even if much of that experience happened internally).
The last stretch of Harvard in 2006 was so much more difficult than I foresaw, and so was post-graduation, not because it was bad but because it was so full of everything and many times I felt too small to hold it. No other year have I seen my flaws more deeply and clearly, things that worked against me and what I wanted for others. Getting fixated on little things, being stubbornly self-contained, not being able to get past things and improve, taking advantage of some love and not even recognizing other forms. It's amazing how you can be so aware of your faults but still struggle so much to change. I do think that this happened because of the challenges I accepted and created, and so, it was a byproduct of something necessary. And the faults aren't so bad when the ones you care about seem to like you anyway, and when you know that you, like everyone, are fine and can always keep trying. It was the best surprise to know someone who pushed me to make these efforts, not with pressure but with the steady force of just being there.
And I tried really hard this year. Seems like an odd phrase because I can't quite follow it up with concrete phrases of what I tried really hard to do. Sometimes to stay the same despite everything, and sometimes to be better because of everything. Vague. Through it, I found that I am capable of reaching out after all, and the people who you really love and trust will be there waiting for you. These are few and rare, and thus all the more deserving of the inner effort it takes for me to ask for them. It’s okay to need things from people. I didn’t feel weak, like I feared. It sounds so obvious, but I really did feel more human, at my most broken and torn and confused. I hope that I’ve given a lot of myself. It will always be my nature to keep certain things close, not because I don’t want to share but mostly because I’m not naturally good and open with explicit expression. I also find more and more that this is the way a lot of people are, or at least the people close to me, and that everyone wants/needs signs that you care and want to know before they reveal themselves. And I care and want to know, and there are other people who do too, and they’re worth it. There’s still a long way to go, and all this was the main theme of the story I wrote for creative nonfiction this past semester. It ended: “Still scared, but feeling more capable, I continue.”
At the same time, it’s okay to feel and be alone. During certain moments, it was hard to be away from the bustle of school and the cove of company that keeps me busy and warm. It was odd because before this I’ve always been fine with being alone, but I guess this was a different kind of alone. Feeling loneliness then was new, and though sometimes that did make me feel weak, I ultimately grew to see it again as a human vulnerability. As lonely as that was, I’m glad to have gone through it. Knowing that some things exist independent of environment and other people was something I couldn’t have really felt otherwise.
I’m also glad to have been immersed in college and then be removed from it in the same year, as hard as that also was. Because even though I can’t avoid defining some things as inextricably tied to the college phase and that time in our lives, I can see better now how we are beyond that, not just now after graduation but even within those confines. Yes, the people I know and love do define my college experience, but they themselves aren’t wholly defined by the experience, and neither am I. One of the things I’m most thankful for is the perception of life as a thing that stretches and expands. It helps me find the balance between appreciating what’s past and what’s now, and what can come.
I’ve never made resolutions either. I always thought that kind of thing should be an ongoing process, but I can see the benefit of having a defined time and reason to say, I’m going to do something. I’ve also seen how unrealistically ambitious I tend to get when making lists of to-do. So this year I made some concrete resolutions that will be hard but not impossible: learn to (somewhat) play the guitar, cook a new recipe each week, and get to know San Francisco even more. And those harder conceptual resolutions? I resolve to try to remember all this, to be open, to be more patient and take things one at a time when I’m overwhelmed, to be good to other people and less self-involved, to be the “sort of person upon whom nothing is lost.” I suppose it may be a cop-out to say that my resolution is to try, but 2006 taught me that it’s quite a hard thing to just try, and I don’t want to overlook my own weaknesses in making too bold of a resolution.
So this year, in summary? It has been my happiest, my hardest, my loveliest, my saddest, my best, my favorite, my most. It’s not the last.
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