Recently, I was visiting a friend who was visiting the pysch ward.
He’s been living with PTSD for years (the result of a tour in Afghanistan) and is generally anxious and exhausted by the day-to-day business of supporting his little family. And then last month he lost a good friend to a drug overdose.
And because he was questioning his reasons for living, my friend made the very wise decision to check himself into the hospital.
During my visit, we sat next to a huge window with a panoramic view of the Blue Ridge Mountains and worked on an impossibly saccharine jigsaw puzzle featuring cupcakes with rainbow sprinkles. And, equally as impossible, we found ourselves giggling. And even all out, head-thrown-back, from-the-gut laughing.
Laughing. In this place where he wasn’t even allowed to keep the flowers I’d brought for him. Where he couldn’t have shoelaces. Where a handmade sign dated July 4 and unconscious of its irony, cautioned “Open door carefully, high risk of elopement.”
As it turns out, it’s true what they say about freedom, it isn’t free.
We laughed sometimes. Sometimes he talked about his days there- how he hated the food and how 32 laps around the unit was one mile and how he must’ve walked miles and miles already. Sometimes he’d go quiet and put his forehead in his hands and stare at the floor.
He said more in those silent minutes than I think he meant to.
And I’d remind him he wouldn’t be in this place forever. That he’d get his shoelaces back.
Then he’d joke about how he’d had to convince the staff he should be allowed to keep his flannel shirt.
“What did they think I was going to do, take off all the buttons and threaten to swallow them at once?”
And we were back to laughing.
This song. And the little floating cells. It’s all singing to me right now.
I had this thought on the drive home, that this whole scenario- the absurdity of visiting someone I love in the psych ward and giggling and then holding back tears and then admiring the art another patient had taped to the wall- the whole thing- that’s what life is right now.
That’s what life is all the time, in fact.
And I’m tasked with holding all of it- you know, the pain, the fear, the anger, the sadness, the ridiculousness, the joy, the sweetness, the exhaustion, the confusion, the futility, the serenity- all of it. All of it, I’m holding in my cupped hands.
A while back I took the girls to visit my parents who were staying in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. While there we stopped in town and the girls played in the springs- wading in the cool, clear water trying to catch the tiny fish swimming around.
That’s what it feels like right now, I think. Trying to catch the tiny fish and hold the water as it seeps out between my fingers. That’s this life.
And I keep wanting to sort it all out in my brain. All these various feelings and conversations and events.
Like, how one minute you can be at the swim team pep rally, watching in complete awe and admiration for the 8-year-old girl who shaves part of her head in the name of team spirit while a giant gaggle of friends shriek in glee and then another minute you can be in the bathroom consoling a friend who’s weeping for her friend who’d just lost a child.
The sunflowers are blooming in my backyard and inside I’m fussing at my kids to stop fussing at each other.
Lily’s miserable with swimmer’s ear and Annie’s starting to stand a little on her own and she’s proud of all her new teeth and keeps showing us them in big grins and Jovie putters around the house inventing the best new dance moves and making art that tugs at my soul.
My sister Laura and I had a chance to catch up the other day while our older kids chased chickens and goats and got dirty and bug-bitten and the babies splashed water on each other and got sand in their fine baby hair.
There were so many things to talk about with Laura (there always is with our family). People we love are struggling. No. STRUGGLING. Being wrestled to the ground by life. Having their heads held underwater by it. And all of us trying to figure out the best way to help them in the best ways we know how. And all of us having different ideas about what that might look like. And so then we’re also struggling to reconcile all the different ideas.
We’re all so tired. And that day, my head was only partially in the moment. All day long, I was, I don’t know where. Floating through space.
I was present enough to enjoy the soft muzzle of a little goat eating feed out of my hand. Present enough to giggle at a wagon full of babies patting each other’s heads and drinking each other’s water.
We only barely touched on any of the STRUGGLE in conversation, before it was time to pack up the girls to go home. On the drive home, I continued to wander through the day only half awake and half aware.
It wasn’t until midway through Bob Dylan singing “Just Like a Woman” that I sort of woke up. To the sound of sirens and the flashing of red and blue lights in my rearview mirror. And I definitely woke up when I realized that the cruiser behind me wasn’t trying to pass me, but trying to pull me over.
For speeding.
Then I was wide awake.
The very polite police officer asked me where I was coming from and whether I knew the speed limit to try to figure out how it came to be that I was speeding. And in the lamest defense ever, all I could say that I was tired and I just sort of spaced out.
I was just driving through town and then it was “nobody feels any pain” and then it was the lights.
It was awful. The older girls in the back peppering me with questions about what was going on and fretting that I’d be arrested. The guilt and embarrassment of being pulled over. The shame of it. I didn’t even try to defend myself- because I knew I wasn’t paying attention. I mean, I didn’t know in the middle of the not paying attention that I wasn’t paying attention, but I knew once I was stopped thinking about what I’d done, that I definitely hadn’t been paying attention and that I definitely deserved the ticket the very polite police officer wrote up for me.
And I thought about what I really needed to do moving forward- on the drive home and in life in general.
Wake up.
And slow down.
Wake up to what is in front of me. Wake up to the signs on the road and the expressions on faces and the things that are said and the things that are not said.
Slow down all the racing thoughts and the panic and the worrying and the doing of allthethings.
I will never be able to hold all the things in my hands. There will always be something seeping out and slipping away. So the only thing to do is to wake up and see the things I’m holding, while I’m holding them. To slow down and look at the tiny glistening fish. Really look at them. Then let them go.
Laugh if it’s time to laugh. Cry if it’s time to cry. Sit quietly if it’s time to sit quietly.
Sing if it’s time to sing (especially if Bob Dylan’s on the radio- though preferably not while speeding).
Let all the things have their turn- even if they’re all taking their turns in the space of one visit to a friend in the psych ward.
Lily’s upstairs right now sorting through her Lego sets and periodically going into fits of rage over missing pieces. She’d like each set to have it’s own self-contained box that never mixes with any other set in any other box.
As anyone who’s owned Legos before knows, this is probably next to impossible. Which also seems a fitting metaphor for how we live. As much as we’d love for each moment, each experience good, bad and in between to be given its own box in which it can be stowed and categorized- they inevitably get mixed up.
We don’t live in a vacuum.
(OK, that’s not entirely true. My Dad would probably point out that space is a vacuum and that Earth lives in space therefore we, by extension, live in a vacuum … or something. Sciencey science science… yada yada yada).
Or maybe we do live in a vacuum- but not like the suction-y part. We live in the vacuum canister where all the bits of hair and fur and clippings and dirt and skin flecks and bug legs and bread crumbs and boogers and glitter, etc. et. al.- where all the stuff swirls around and settles into Lily’s worst nightmare.
I digress.
I checked in with my friend the other night. I heard he was being transferred to a different part of the hospital.
“get your shoelaces back?” I texted him.
“Yep. All laced up with nowhere to go,” he wrote back.
And I’m left to sit each emotion. Relief. Sadness. And a giggle.
My friend has always been so damn funny.