What We Get

On Wednesday I hiked with the ladies in the backcountry near Figueroa Mountain. We made our way down a narrow trail, then climbed a steep uphill stretch to Ranger Peak. There we sat on the yellow grass, looking out onto the back side of the Santa Ynez Mountains, the shine of Cachuma Lake, the hazy sea beyond. It was a beautiful place to eat lunch, far from the cares of the world. I thought to myself, "I must stop trying to make sense of things."

Earlier in the week I spent four hours in a hospital room hoping to find some flicker of cognition in the young man I have alluded to in previous posts, the one who was in a car crash in October. I sang him simple songs and squeezed his hand and held a mirror to his face. He touched his finger to his nose repeatedly, and I thought maybe it would mean something if he could see himself doing that, so I held the mirror closer and verbalized encouragingly whenever he did it on his own, guiding his finger when he didn't. At one point he touched the mirror, seemingly with interest or intent, and then curled his fingers around its edge, and he seemed to want to take it, so I helped him hold it. What does it mean?

Or the better question: does it mean?

But I thought I saw a light in him. I even imagined his mouth curving slightly upward as though beginning a smile, but the operative word here is imagined, because I know very well how wishing can alter perception.

Then the physical therapist came in and showed me how his body is all folded up and stuck, and she drew him into a sitting position at the edge of the bed and we supported his back. I could see then how his spine and neck have become misshapen, and how much his muscles have atrophied.

Afterwards, a kind-hearted nursing assistant came in to wash him. She told me she was from Peru and has no family here except her patients, and she loves them as though they were her children.

"I see God in their faces," she said. She was gentle and careful with him, and I was grateful that he has such loving people tending to him. "He's doing much better," she said when she was finished. "You'll see. He'll go to rehab, and when he's done with that, he will come back to say hello to me."

The possibility felt so remote it hurt to hear her say it. Too-big hope is a special kind of cruelty.

Back in the world where ladies gab and giggle and hike to hilltops, I told someone a little bit about this situation. It's an awful lot of awful, and I probably shouldn't be so quick to share, but sometimes I just have to say it out loud. (Like now.) This woman, one of the older and wiser among us, listened sympathetically as I went on with my lamentations about how young this kid is, and how many wonders and possibilities he would never know

."We get what we get," she said. And she's right. It isn't cold or uncaring, but rather a simple statement about fate and acceptance. There are no guarantees. Lives go long, short, or in-between. It's the way it is.

Where do hope and acceptance intersect? How do we partition the pain of others from our own lives? Yellow grass, shining lake, lunch on a hilltop...this day is a good one, and that's real too. I must stop trying to make sense of things.