A sad love story in three poems

Links in a Chain
May 2008
This you will not understand
How your face pressed itself
Into a loop, in my mind
Coming between me and my new lover
Not because of what you said
But what you did not say
Because of what you did not hear
Not what you heard
Because your eyes were always closed
You dance to the beat of your own drummer
Like a rat in a maze, always running
Around the same loop
In your own mind
'This you will not understand'
And I don't understand it either

The Gift of Doubt
June 2008
Sometimes the pale sun shimmers behind the morning fog
and I doubt it will ever burn through.
Maybe the order of days has been revoked?

I revisit the question: who am I?
As important as a fly
in the everlasting evolution of the universe.

And who are you? You turn my no into a yes
you turn my yes into a no and squash me
leaving the crazy footprints of my dance upon the sand

leaving me to doubt and know
I will build another castle in the sand
The sun will shine another day, and we'll both burn

in the endless cycle
dust unto dust unto dust

The Missing Peace

April 2009

The space inside my head is quiet

Now I have the missing piece

You gave me, that

you didn't have to give

You thought that the pieces

were interchangeable,

that women were.

No wonder your puzzle

didn't fit together!

You thought what flies with one

flies with another, flies

because it flies

Your world is very broken. You witheld

your whole self, and gave me

just one piece

and shattered mine

Look in the mirror

Look at yourself

You are neither

all good nor all bad.

When you are whole

you can give yourself

over and over

If you give piecemeal

part to me, part to her, part to her

you fall apart, dissembling

what you think you save.

Pick up the pieces!

I thank you for the missing peace,

the quiet space inside my head

Wide open, so much that it hurts

Is this how the sky feels

when the clouds are swept away?

Navel-gazing from dissertation

This is my second doctoral dissertation. When I was writing the first, my brother died of leukemia. He died of pneumonia following a complication of his bone marrow transplant, and I sat by his side as he panicked, distressed and unable to breathe. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. Eventually we said a brief goodbye and he was intubated. I sat by his side, holding his hand and not knowing what to do, while the ventilator pumped air into his lungs until his heart stopped beating.

In the early stages of working toward my second doctorate, I had a chance to remediate that experience by being at my grandmother’s deathbed. She was always a difficult woman, but she had lost the ability to speak, and in many ways this made things easier for her caregivers. We knew it was serious and came when we heard she had punched the orderly in the face who was trying to feed her. I took turns with my mother, sitting by her bedside, as my grandmother, like my brother, was dying of pneumonia. This time, thankfully, there was no talk of adding a ventilator or heroic measures to keep her alive. After two weeks, it was a Sunday when she was evidently about to pass away. The nurse had ordered morphine, but in the UK a doctor had to be called from another hospital to sign for it (see http://painpersonalitypsychotherapy.blogspot.com/2009/03/worst-of-evils.html for a discussion of the power of doctors over the dispensation of opiates). My grandmother was evidently in a lot of pain, although she was unable to use her voice to communicate it, doubly silenced if Scarry is right about the difficulty of putting pain into language (http://painpersonalitypsychotherapy.blogspot.com/2009/03/body-in-pain.html). Finally, the doctor arrived, and I went to her, holding her hand and making eye-contact to comfort her, and said, “The doctor is here, he can give you something to help with the pain.” I tucked her blanket and went to close the door, so she would not overhear the doctor and my mother talking in the corridor outside. By the time I got back to the bed, my grandmother had lost consciousness and never regained it. The doctor examined her and the morphine was added to her drip while my mother and I continued to sit with her, prayer book ready. But it was the gentleness of that last caring communication with my grandmother which I felt transcended my ordinary experiences, in a way that informs my work with patients in pain.