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I was unprepared for an illness of "unknown origin." My neighbor took me to the emergency room and stayed with me for six hours. A nurse, too busy to sit and chat, sat and chatted anyway. A headache woke me at four in the morning, signaling another storm. I called my husband and said, "Please come." He came and stayed, put his cool hand on my forehead. I needed someone to be with me.
I needed a doctor who listened and asked good questions to help me say it better. I needed someone to acknowledge that I was scared. I did not want to die alone in the night in a hospital bed. When I saw people carrying on in the normalcy of the ordinary, workaday lives, I wanted to shout, "I have things to do, too!"
I wanted people to know who I had been -- a healthy, active woman -- before I was a flat-on-my-back, moderately hysterical patient.
This brought back memories of a friend during her hospital stay. Stretched out on a treatment table, her back to the door, she heard a doctor enter the room. He told her he was about to insert a drainage tube into her chest cavity. "Whoa! Wait a minute", my friend said. "I am Sue M, a wife and mother. I am working on my Ph.D. in public health. Who are you? Please come around so I can see your face. Tell me who you are." And he did.
Before my friend died, she had fought for her just due.
Once home, I struggle to make sense. I wander into my office, look at my books, and see at a glance that I have lost interest in most of them. If there is no answer to my illness maybe in my choices over which books I get rid of and which I keep there are answers to what the illness has meant to me.
As I heave books into boxes I wonder what the decades of studying, exploring unanswerables about God and human suffering was about. How did my search, riffling through pages of logical arguments, help in my hour of need? Still, my faith was challenged by loyalty to my agnostic parents and the predominant Western "seeing is believing" mindset. I needed good reasons for my faith. Yet, I no longer want these books. Eventually, five hundred books are packed up, ready to be carted off, to be donated to my alma mater.
In the hospital I realized that I am not as afraid to die as I thought but it kept coming to me: not now, not yet. Illness snatched me out of the middle of a serious exchange with my husband. We met as teenagers, have known each other fifty-eight years, are not done working things through, and the biggest obstacle to the intimacy I want is a pattern I have carried from little on up: withholding, the fear of the risk of engagement. In the hospital, I lived through a nightmare of unpreparedness. I had left home without saying all I wanted to say to the one I love. I wanted to go home again. I had things to say.
Books that contain the notion of a remote, distant God "out there" or "above it all" are gone, packed up and out the door. Writers who speak of the suffering God who enters into a relationship of passionate participation with the world remain on my shelves.
"How embarrassing for us to find that though we claim to have been created in the image of God we still claim that we can't see God." I keep Abraham Heschel's books.
In the hospital, I scoured the face of every person who walked into my room, hung on their every word, the woman who scrubbed the floor, those who drew blood, made my bed. I wanted to know who they were, where they lived, what tune they were humming. I blossomed into an irrepressible extrovert, pressed people into engagement. It mattered more than anything: I wanted the other to be fully present to me. I wanted to be a person, not solely a patient in a hospital bed.
In one of his books. C. S. Lewis takes up the problem of pain. In another, he writes of his own grief after the loss of his wife. I toss the first book and keep the second. I keep writers who bring spiritual realities into the everyday by way of their encounters with God and others and the painful and grace-filled particularities of their lives.
It did not matter how much time a doctor spent at my bedside. It could have been an hour or five minutes. I needed a doctor who was present and able to imagine what I was not saying. One physician said, "You're scared, aren't you?"
My husband heaved a book once. He found me curled up behind a book, grabbed it, hurled it across the room, and said, "I am sick of seeing you behind the covers of a book." Even after that, too often he found me behind the covers of a book. He must have given up. It might be another reason I shipped five hundred books out of here. I am ready to respond to Kenny's footsteps outside my office door as a signal that it is time to put the book down. It is time to step out of the shadows and to be fully present to him, to our children, to others. It is time to speak my heart and hear the other's heart.
Two months after my hospital stay, there is still no answer to what took me there. A part of me feels vulnerable. Mostly, feeling well again, I welcome each day, am glad I am able to say what wants to be said, glad for my husband's warm body next to mine, glad for the harsh winter that, though unwanted, readied us for the coming Spring.
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