Two Worlds

Dear Eugene,

Feels like Sumi has not been herself forever but it was only two days.  She dragged her steps and the days with them.  She certainly slowed me down to reconsider things.

More than once I thought about taking her to a vet.  There's money in the bank.  If they are going to charge me too much then let the too much be grace I offer however reluctantly.  Peace is costly, bankrupts an unpeaceable soul.  It's ridiculous I was mostly thinking about money.  "In my ignorance and bewilderment, I am fairly representative of those who go, or go with loved ones, to doctors' offices and hospitals."

That last line, my hero Wendell Berry said that.

There's a passage from the same iconic essay that I would recall every time I am in a hospital, even just as a volunteer, seeing no patient and just giving a new coat of paint to some benches.  That world would just slow you down and drag you in.  At least that's how it is to me.

At times you can just brush the "ignorance and bewilderment" aside, like what I did when giving those paint strokes, covering up the dis-ease once over and getting out of there like what Mark the Evangelist would say, immediately, back to the sunny side of the street.

And at others, like the time I took my father-in-law to his colonoscopy, his naked vulnerability made apparent in a hospital gown with convenient opening at the back barely held together by very pragmatic tie-strings, the smell of death lingers long after.  You can untie the dignity of this big man any way you want and from his eyes you can tell he's an unpeaceable stoic but Forget about the philosophizing and let's get the job done.  Like, immediately.

Yes, Berry's essay, the passage, a story I would recall, even yesterday when wrapping Sumi in my daughter's old sweatshirt and holding her tight for a long long time:

On January 3,1994, my brother John had a severe heart attack while he was out by himself on his farm, moving a feed trough. He managed to get to the house and telephone a friend, who sent the emergency rescue squad.

The rescue squad and the emergency room staff at a local hospital certainly saved my brother's life. He was later moved to a hospital in Louisville, where a surgeon performed a double-bypass operation on his heart. After three weeks John returned home. He still has a life to live and work to do. He has been restored to himself and to the world.

He and those who love him have a considerable debt to the medical industry, as represented by two hospitals, several doctors and nurses, many drugs and many machines. This is a debt that I cheerfully acknowledge. But I am obliged to say also that my experience of the hospital during John's stay was troubled by much conflict of feeling and a good many unresolved questions, and I know that I am not alone in this.

In the hospital what I will call the world of love meets the world of efficiency-the world, that is, of specialization, machinery, and abstract procedure. Or, rather, I should say that these two worlds come together in the hospital but do not meet. During those weeks when John was in the hospital, it seemed to me that he had come from the world of love and that the family members, neighbors, and friends who at various times were there with him came there to represent that world and to preserve his connection with it. It seemed to me that the hospital was another kind of world altogether.

Another kind of world it is.  A world of healing that doesn't.

Since that time with my father-in-law I imagined myself having chosen a different vocation, to be a nurse, not a doctor.  Someone who prescribes himself as part of the cure.  To marry the two worlds even knowing some sort of a divorce is inevitable and frequent.  Am I naive?

Jesus is making an unreasonable fool of us.

Yours, Alex