The Last Month

This last month before The Date is always hard for me. Every year is a little gentler, yet I still find myself surprised when the most random memories catch me unguarded. There is a dark weight that settles into me about this time, and lasts through August.

I wonder why I have been hearing one of our favorite songs everywhere lately - Walmart, Cities 97, restaurants. Maybe I could call it coincidence - if I believed in that, and unless you consider that the song is a hidden, unlisted and unreleased acoustic track, off an indie album, and a remake of a one-hit-wonder from the mid-80s.

I suddenly see butterflies everywhere. I saw two shooting stars last week. Older model Saturn sedans stand out on the freeway. The most insignificant and mundane thing brings me to tears. More than I usually do, I absorb the smell of any swamp or water that I pass.

It's not only these sidebar pieces of the experience that command my attention. While riding back from a call at work tonight, I was surprised to find myself recollecting one of my most disturbing memories from August 18th, 1999: the cleaning and stitching of my arm avulsion. I remembered in slow-motion the specific sensations of what it felt like to feel my mouth stretch open in a silent scream, to wrench my broken arm away from the doctor, and how my vision went red. I can't recall the specific pain of this moment and I've never been able to. The next thing I remember is my mother, her forehead to mine, telling me to breathe and to let the pain travel down my arm and into her. I am absently staring ahead, focused on nothing, shaking uncontrollably, hearing her words but unable to respond.

I didn't have a patient with an arm injury today...or at all recently. No car accidents. No patients that needed to fly out. I didn't have a patient that was in any type of extreme pain. And so, this memory makes me more curious tonight than anything. It no longer disturbs me like I feel it should.

For a long time, I have been able to just sit amidst a memory like this. No longer does it toss me into inner upheaval. I am so, so grateful for this, because many survivors don't reach this level of healing. Yet I am always surprised to find these unpleasant flashes coming back to me without warning or explanation. Although I don't bid them welcome, I am learning to give space in my being for these ultimately human moments, where I once used to convince myself that they make me a weaker or softer person in a career where toughness is prized. Toughness is overrated; it does more damage than good. This is how I love myself, I think. Just letting the past come, and letting it go. Letting myself just be real, no more or less than merely human, through all the mess of life.