for now

This is the Bayview Campus of Johns Hopkins U. Hospital. The second floor of the Burton Pavilion here is designated the Lakeside unit, and seems to be all about geriatric (or pre-geriatric) patients with pharmaceutical adjustment needs in the psychiatric category. (It took me a few looks to find the lake in the hospital’s urban setting–I guess it’s the small rainwater overflow pond with a little spraying fountain in it that you can spy out the window of rooms on Jeff’s side of the hall.)

You stop at the front desk on your way in, sign the book, and get a paper wristband from the on-duty person before taking the elevator to the second floor. Once off the elevator, you are in a small foyer where you must push a button which elicits an electronic doorbell noise. Then someone from the nurses station inspects you by means of the built-in camera and pushes a button to unlock the door.

You enter a busy unit where, generally, several older people are nearby in wheelchairs or recumbent rolling chaises. Usually they are fussing about something or other. There are two lovely parakeets–one green, one yellow and orange–in a large glass terrarium by the window. They seem very happy and chirpy even though a little old lady told me “no,” they were not happy, “they want to be free.” Maybe they do, but I suspect there was some projection going on.

Then you go down the corridor to the right and press another electronic chime. This one plays the opening strains of “Für Elise,” then nothing happens. Nothing connected to the chime anyway. Instead, you catch a staff member on her way in or out and enter on her coattails. Jeff shares room 248 with Mr. R. Mr. R isn’t independently mobile, and is often situated in the small day room, which is actually a regular hospital room which happens to have a couple chairs and couches instead of beds. Many days, I find Jeff in the day room dozing in a chair.

They are still trying to regulate Jeff’s medication so that he is at least semi-functional, but not apt to pull cords out of the wall on a paranoid tear, while blocking the access and egress of nurses and aides whom he may have mistaken for tranvestites and/or robots.

As of today, we’re a little bit on the side of too-medicated. Today was better than yesterday in that he did not topple like a tree trunk into my lap face first, but it still took some work to get his entire lunch into him. Then I snagged a chocolate ice cream cup and a tiny carton of orange juice from the fridge down the hall, and fed him those. Those things are favorites. He still muttered a fairly on-going stream of non-reality-based observations (we need new boots, that’s a nice forklift...things like that,) but he sat with me in reasonable contentment while I read a snippet of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, by Bill Bryson, aloud to myself.

When I called to make arrangements for Jeff to check in for a med adjustment (due to his disastrously escalating aggressive, delusional paranoid episodes,) they were very clear with me on one point—they are NOT a long-term care facility. He WILL be discharged. No argument on that point from me, but I suppose it must be an issue they deal with–families who do not wish to take their difficult elders home, med adjustment or not.

Yes, I expect Jeff to be discharged. I just do not know when, and in what cognitive condition.

this is long

I wonder if one of the greater attractions offered by religion comes from the fondness we human animals have for narrative. We sure like stories. Ambiguous endings (ever see Picnic at Hanging Rock?) may be fodder for philosophical discussion, but our blockbusters almost invariably offer roundly satisfying closure.

Religion may offer a means of thinking about our otherwise confusing lives as stories in which, somehow or other, the struggles must make sense. Personally, my nature requires me to reject arrant materialism (by which I mean the philosophical, not consumeristic sense of the word.) There is a bit too much synchronicity in the universe for me to utterly discount the experiences we tend to categorize as “spiritual.” Whether there are guides at work, or whether it’s a matter of the ineffable magic of quantum entanglement, there is interaction on a plane that has always prompted humans to imagine beyond the absolutely tangible. I’m just not going to try to tell you exactly what, and I don’t think that’s anyone else’s job either.

All this is just a way of saying that—whatever I proceed to write in the following paragraphs—I maintain a meta-view of the whole business as inexplicable and quite possibly nonsensical. Or, to put it another way, when I describe states of “mind,” or things which occur to my own brain, I am as aware as anyone of the weaknesses inherent in that particular organ. Caveat Cogitor.

About 13 years ago, when I was 37, I was struck—quite instantaneously—by a calling. I’m going to call it a calling, because I don’t know what a calling is if not that. A sense that you’ve been handed a destiny...please proceed. Because it is the only calling I’ve ever downloaded from the cosmic cloud, it is unique in my experience. It was to write. It didn’t come with any further instructions, which is kind of a nuisance.

Thomas Edison is reported to have said that genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration. When that ripe patch of my neurons lit up with my “calling,” they fished around a bit, but couldn’t find the missing 1%. Apparently (I had to assume) it was either invisible, or to be provided later. So I proceeded to do the 99% part. You can find that 99% at my website, www.emilygillespieclement.com. Don’t do that right now. There’s something missing there. (hint: 1%)

Meanwhile, Jeff got unwell. It may not be obvious, because I am of a fairly stoic persuasion and do not like to cry at movies and so forth, that Jeff was, for 20ish years, the ballast of my emotional schooner. People who know Jeff will understand this. It’s true.

Ok, so here’s where ballasts, missing percents, and narratives all fall into the same stewpot:

A few years after that light bulb moment I refer to as a calling, Jeff began to malfunction. Within a very few more years it was hard to dispute that his malfunction would be progressive and terminal. I won’t go into excessive detail here about what that realization meant to me, except to say that an essential and depended on nutrient had been yanked from my diet and I was going to have to learn to live without it.

And somewhere in that confusing fog of years which contained increasing failure and a hard road to diagnosis, I accepted a sort of plea bargain with the cosmos (or at least my sense of it) in an effort to recapture a whiff of purpose. (As someone recently said to me, purpose is largely imaginary, isn’t it? Probably so, but it does help feed that yearning for a narrative.) Anyway, it went something like this–While there was no parity whatsoever in the exchange, I reckoned that in losing Jeff I would at least not be left without a life objective. Because, see, of that calling. Obviously I was supposed to write, and obviously the cosmos would provide some sort of external validation for that, sooner or later.

Sooner or later. My function--because it was the only part over which I had any control--would be to keep applying the 99%. So I did. The results are there.

Okay, so as it turns out, those four books basically stink. I can accept that, and I can die whenever that becomes an appropriate move without being mad at myself, because I did my part. (And I don’t mean anything by making that past tense. I’ll almost undoubtedly keep trying.) I would be mad at myself if I got to the end of the road and could make no sense of the narrative because I’d failed to produce. So, if you ever wonder why I keep doing it, that’s why.

Inspiration, the elusive 1%, must come from somewhere. If it doesn’t, well...someone/something/some ethereal other didn’t uphold its end of the bargain.

I have used my Salieri (from the play Amadeus) analogy before, but that’s because it fits. Yo...cosmos...don’t go handing out callings then fail to deliver inspiration. Not to worry. I will not try to poison Mozart, or Philip Pullman, or Louis Sachar, or any of the local writers you wish to point out to me who are being featured in the Annapolis paper. But I will be reminded of the 1% that isn’t there, and I will need to find a quiet way to quell the anger it stirs up.

Nonsense, of course. This is all a misunderstanding of life, flowing from my very human preference for a narrative. Meanwhile, I have fine things to enjoy, in the form of some of the loveliest people to have ever borrowed some of my DNA. Not to mention plenty of other folks. No argument.

But maybe this explains, a little bit, why I think it’s more therapeutic for me to think about spiritual practices that are more about relinquishing attachment to outcome. I guess you might say I pray sort of...but never as a petition, or adoration, or expiation, or any of the ways by which prayer is classically defined. I’m looking more for a sense of openness to whatever is, and also I don’t like going to bed alone. As for the tradition in which I grew up, it seems to like to place too much emphasis on narrative. And narrative, as far as I can discern, is a booby-trap. Let’s leave that to fiction. Preferably, fiction forged in a mind where the 1% actually made a pitstop.

Ok Fontaine, you're goin' down.

Tomorrow I will probably kill Frank Fontaine and thereby complete the PS3 game BioShock. Can you believe someone who is presumably a standard-issue half-centenarian would play BioShock? I mean, especially BioShock. Epic Mickey was one thing because there are plenty of people who have never outgrown a taste for Mickey Mouse, but BioShock is, frankly, kind of gross. It is (in the parlance) a first-person shooter in which you are constantly beset by murderous crazy people in an underwater Objectivist utopia gone to dystopian seed. It took me about half the game to adapt to that. The violent part, that is. So, based on a case study of one, I conclude that video games do not make humans more inclined toward actual violence, but rather they simply make humans less sensitive to video games. Don’t base a sociology paper on this study please.

It is a distraction, is the thing. These days I am spending about 2 hours each mid-day visiting with Jeff and overseeing his lunch at Bayview Medical Center where he is an inpatient in the geriatric psychiatry unit. Well, no...64 is not exactly geriatric, but his condition is, so that’s why it’s a fit. It may take up to 3 weeks for them to conclude that his medication regimen is sufficiently adjusted so that he can be a newly functioning assisted living resident who will pose no danger to himself, the residents, the staff or his wife. Or it may take 3 weeks for them to conclude that he is pharmaceutically intractable, and then I don’t know what. He says he wants a job. Where can one send a severely brain-damaged person and say...”Voila--there’s your job. Enjoy.”? A submarine? No, feeling trapped will make him throw people around. Seattle, his dream city? No, being impaired in visual processing, he will walk into traffic and cause accidents. I’m out of ideas.

So tomorrow I’ll be back on the second floor at Bayview helping Jeff not miss the ice cream when he goes for it with his spoon. Either before or after I kill Frank Fontaine.

I do some other things too. Such as walk the dog, do basic housekeeping, and walk in slightly hyperactive circles. This chapter of life has taken me from slightly out of focus to lost in inscrutable static. I think my head will clear up during some future year and I will do at least something. Although I think, for now, it will be best to accept lack of purpose. I hope purpose is highly overrated. Pulling one out of thin air has never been my strong suit.

The Wonder Games.

It is on my schedule to meet some folks at the mall early tonight to see The Hunger Games. At this moment, I intend to go. Since Jeff went crazy on Friday morning, he’s been at Baltimore Washington Medical Center for...a medication adjustment, I guess you’d call it. It just is not a stint that feels like it’s being overseen by any medically authoritative practitioner, so I might characterize it more as: Time away from Sunrise in the hopes that a quadrupling of Seroquel will make Jeff into someone who can live there without episodic eruptions of his wanting to put furniture through the windows or use wrestling moves on people trying to calm him down.

Ok. He had a hospital-provided sitter here in room 599, 5th floor West until 2 hours ago. Apparently, no facility, including Sunrise, will take him back until he’s been “sitter free” for 24 hours. Ostensibly, if nothing horrible happens, this could mean he will be discharged tomorrow.

I don’t know if I have an opinion about that. I do have plenty of confusion about that. Since arriving here at 9:30 on Friday morning he has remained tranquil, if delusional and completely disoriented. Thing is, nothing happens on Saturday and Sunday. I presume that tomorrow, Monday, I’ll be able to re-establish some form of contact with the neurologist and the nurse at Sunrise to discuss whether those parties have agreed on whether Jeff’s new medication regimen has the stamp of approval or not.

Personally, I don’t know how you can feel sure. I guess you can’t, in any 100% kind of way.