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This guy walks into a bar and says... - Oct 1, 2004 - Printable Version
- This One is For the Nurses
by Ken Shade
Did you know that I came and looked into the room where it happened? I had to. I don't know why. I just knew that I had to face that room again. I came one night when visiting hours were long over. I went up to the second floor, through both sets of double doors, and went right up to the entrance of ICU-2. I didn't go in. All I wanted to do was look into room 231, and I knew I could accomplish that without entering. The windows line up perfectly so that I could see it from the hallway.
There was another patient in room 231, and a family member was sitting by the bedside. I always appreciated how you let family members stay after visiting hours if they weren't being a nuisance.
The family member, and older woman, perhaps a mother, got up and began smoothing the sheets around the patient. When you're by the bedside, you have to do things. Every move you make is either a gesture of hope or a desperate attempt to positively change something. I couldn't tell which was her motive, of course.
Part of me wanted to go in and tell all of you how much I appreciated the way you cared for her, but I was afraid nobody there would remember who she was. Nurses have so many patients. You couldn't remember them all. But I couldn't take the idea that she could ever be forgotten by anybody.
I also wanted to tell you all about her. I wanted to introduce you to the woman whose life you tried so hard to save. You never got to know the real Karla, and that's sad. I used to love introducing her to people. I was so proud to mention offhandedly in conversation some accomplishment of hers. "It's amazing that you don't get confused among all the languages you speak," I would say to her in front of somebody, embarrassing her.
As I sat there, looking into the room, I felt like I was looking into the dead eyes of some monster; evil to be sure, but no longer a threat.
Did you know I was sitting there looking into that room which is, to you, like any other in the unit?
Did you know that I would gladly have changed places with the worried old woman at the bedside in order to go back to a time before it happened?
You saw her mother and me there every night for hours on end. I heard one of you say to another that I was a good man for being there, but where else could I be? It's easy to look like a good man when your wife is the kind of person who could inspire devotion in anybody. I wasn't necessarily a good man for being there, but I wouldn't have existed anywhere else.
Did you know who she was?
Did you know that she saw with eyes that looked into you, and not at you? She looked into me and saw things that others, even me, couldn't know were there. When she met me, I was trying to make my way as a stand-up comic. When I wasn't working at that, I paid for my crappy little one-room apartment by selling newspaper subscriptions on the telephone. I was fat, underemployed and had never finished college, yet she looked into me and saw...something she loved. It was the first time in my life that I ever felt completely accepted as I was. That acceptance was the final motivation I needed to go back to school, become healthier and make something of myself. When the woman you love more than life already thinks you're special, there's not much pressure.
Later, when I was stricken with MS, she never wavered. To Karla, I was special even when I had fallen on the floor in spastic paraparesis.
Did you know that she was a fabulous cook? You probably didn't. The woman you saw was so sick from chemotherapy that she couldn't even eat, much less cook. Most of the things she made weren't even recipes, nor did they have names. When one of the kids asked what was for dinner, she would say "Just something I made." We knew it was going to be a delicious evening.
Did you know that she loved to travel? Probably not, because you didn't see her come in, or leave. She had been all over the USA, and also to Japan, Guam, Mexico, Hong Kong, Canada and Barbados. She soaked up other cultures like a brilliant sponge, and always appeared to be completely in control in any situation, no matter how foreign it was to the Chicago Heights neighborhood she grew up in. In Hong Kong, people would stop her to ask for directions. Why would they ask an African-American tourist where things were? Because she just looked like she'd know. She always did.
Did you know what a good mother she was? Not likely because, when I was allowed to bring the kids to ICU, they were intimidated and frightened by the strange machines, antiseptic procedures, and by seeing Mommy not acting like herself. You probably didn't know that, when Karla was to become a mother, she prepared for it the way she prepared for everything. She read every book she could find on the subject. She needn't have bothered. She was a natural. She loved, protected, taught, urged, inspired, chastened, cheered, calmed, nurtured and dreamed with as much passion, strength and tenderness as any woman ever has. Before she had the baby, she was known to say that she felt inadequate to be an infant's mother. "I don't do the 'goo-goo stuff,'" she'd say.
She nursed that baby for three years.
Did you now how educated she was? Probably not. Most of the conversations you had with her were all about why she should take those gigantic horse pills she gagged on, or why she should eat again right after she vomited. You didn't know that she had studied at universities in Japan, Hawaii, Mexico and the US. In fact, she attended Waseda, known as the "Harvard of Japan." She spoke Japanese, Spanish, English and knew American Sign Language. Her Japanese was so good that it made Japanese people flip out. She'd say something, and they'd go "WUH!" ("WUH" is Japanese for "Holy shit!") They didn't expect to hear that voice coming out of her lovely, dimpled, African-American face. They would talk to Karla, but look at her Japanese-American friend, Susan, while they were doing it. It helped them deal with their cognitive dissonance.
Speaking of friends, when she made a friend, they stayed a friend. Yvonne, Susan, Kathy, Joyce and all the rest were her friends for many years. The night she died, Yvonne saw Karla waving "good-bye" to her, even though Yvonne was in Phoenix. Susan came all the way from Japan at a moment's notice to attend the funeral. Kathy, who lost a son a year or so back, is certain that Karla is in the afterlife, chewing the boy out about being such a careless driver. Joyce left the school where they worked together. She couldn't face the same old library walls without the partner that made it bearable.
In the seventeen years she taught, she changed the lives of many, many students. They still call her "sensei."
She was beautiful, too. You couldn't tell, because her hair fell out and she lost so much weight, but she was a head-turner. I remember men who saw us walking hand-in-hand and couldn't resist saying things like: "You're a very lucky man, sir." Remember Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out With Him?" Well, that song could have been written about us. Make-up free and casually dressed, she still glowed. She didn't flash, she glowed. THe Japanese would say "shibui." It means "when beauty achieves great subtlety."
I wanted her to look more like her beautiful self at the viewing, but that was impossible. When the entire ICU-2 unit, including most of you, were administering CPR for thirty-seven minutes, you hit her in the chest so much that she swelled up.
Also, we had to put a wig on her, and it didn't look near as good as her luxurious hair had before the chemo.
My mother and I told the kids to look mostly at her hands. They were still the same.
In the seven plus years that we were married, we never once had what I'd call an argument. We didn't agree all the time, but we didn't yell. Some who knew us both might say it was because we feared each other's verbal arsenal. I don't know what the reason was. I tend to think that it was just the way our personalities meshed. I've argued with every other person I've ever loved, but not her.
You never saw how witty she was, either. She was so disoriented by the meds, that she thought the people on TV were in the room. That's too bad. You would have enjoyed her quick wit, lucidity and insight.
You don't know about the terrible hole in our lives that she left. Once she was gone, you gave the room to another patient and stayed busy with your calling: caring for people. This is as it should be. If you thought too much about the wreckage left behind when the worst happens, you wouldn't be able to work.
The last time you saw me, I was lurching toward the door in shock and blinding pain. When I made it outside, I looked around the city. Cars were going to and fro as if the worst conceivable tragedy hadn't just happened. Didn't those people know that they had no business talking, driving, shopping, laughing and going about life as normal while she was being taken down the elevator with a sheet over her face? Didn't they know that the sun had gone out; that the Earth no longer turned on its axis? Didn't they know that I was hoping in vain that the children would be asleep when I got home, so I wouldn't have to tell them, and they could spend these last few hours of peaceful sleep before their world was torn to shreds?
The night I finally conjured up the nerve to look at that room, I walked out the same door. The cars were going to and fro, advertising signs were flashing, and the world looked just the same as it had on 19 April, 2001.
This night, though, I wasn't angry at people because they could go on living. I had learned that I could do it, too. I could do it because I really had no other choice. I could do it because the children had lost too much already, and they needed me. I could do it because that moon was so bright...so beautiful. I could do it because old Bill Cosby records still made me laugh. I could do it because Abbey Road is still so perfect that it thrills me to tears. I could do it because I could still imagine people walking down the charming streets of towns all over the world that I might never see again, but that I loved.
I could do it because the world is still, in so many ways, a beautiful place. The hearts of those of us who knew her are more beautiful because she still lives there.
I wish you could have known her, too.
I could tell you a thousand other things about her, but maybe now, in a few small ways, you do know her.
Maybe that's why I had to face the room, so I could get on with the business of introducing her to all the people who never really knew, and of telling you and everybody I'm OK.
I wonder.
Not everything that is complete is completely explicable.
One more thing....thank you.
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