I started reading Just Kids by Patti Smith. It describes one artist’s journey to find the best genre for self-expression and a niche in the art world. To say the memoir unsettled me is understatement. More than one aspiring artist has asked “Do I have to suffer, do drugs, experience the dark abyss of depression, lose a lover, to create?” As described in her memoir, Ms. Smith’s young adulthood existed in stark contrast to mine. It forced me to evaluate my own life and to question what makes me think I have a story to tell or the talent to express it in compelling narrative. I never slept in doorways or crashed with a stranger who became an intimate in the course of an introduction. I didn’t drop out or drop LSD. I came from a stable, nuclear family and obeyed most of the rules. When I did cross the line, I achieved the perfect balance of rebellious fun not injurious to myself or the future. I finished college in four years with a moderate amount of social experimentation. Then, equipped with an education and a marketable skill, I went to work and developed into a professional. Dull stuff? When did the conception of the relentless need to write occur?
I have always been a reader and a writer. In sixth grade, my best friend and I competed to see how many books we could read over the summer. I kept a diary, wrote silly stories, and imagined what it would be like to be Sylvia Plath. She had articles published in Seventeen magazine and other journals. That was enough for me. I didn’t know of her struggle with sorrow until I read The Bell Jar. She articulated my miasma of confusion and pain. It felt like the ink from the pages had seeped into my brain, read my mind, and unmasked me on the page. However, I wanted to be the teller of my tale.
My first job I cared for a girl/woman about my age. She and her boyfriend drove into harvested cornrows, parked their car, and “made out.” In the middle of winter in the Midwest, a white rime dusted the dirt. They left the car running. An old sedan, they never thought about anything but the pleasure of solitude and sexual awakening. Exhaust recycled in the car and carbon monoxide seduced them into an irreversible sleep. When I first cared for her, she had the telltale red lips, not of lipstick and flirtation, but of carbon monoxide poisoning. A macabre irony.
That same year, a man with end stage lung disease “died” before my eyes. His respirations became more labored. His color transformed from pale to gray. His heart segued from a classic rhythm to a scribble of lines no more organized than a child’s drawing. I watched the muscle tone in his face turn flaccid. His eye lids closed like a gentle final curtain. Unlike movies and television, death needed no flair for the dramatic, no symbolic closing of the eyes by a bystander. I hadn’t yet learned not to be afraid of the dead, but I busied myself with washing the sweat from his face and notifying the house supervisor. The attending physician started to fill out the death certificate. In the time it took us to dance around the reality of death, the straight line of the EKG monitor started to have an occasional blip. The blips accelerated into a tachycardia and the man gasped. A fine mist burst from his mouth. He resumed the work of breathing. He lived for another twenty-four hours before he performed his final encore.
The first five years of my career I drank to get to sleep. I worried about what I had missed, what I could have done differently or better. I wondered if I would or could ever know enough to do my job. I partied to find oblivion and solace and a way to live with the responsibilities I assumed by my choice of profession.
Forty years later, I am still nursing. Leaving the hospital after work one day, I walked out with a novice nurse I was training for critical care. A man hollered “Hey you!” I turned and stared into a handsome face I recognized that belonged to a man I had cared for when he had a heart transplant ten years ago. I think I remember his name. But I know I remember his positive attitude, his courage, and the gift he gave me just by letting me take care of him.
“I see you’re still doing the good work.” He hugged me. “She’s the best. You take a lesson from her,” he told my apprentice.
I remember the first loss, the first recovery, and many of those that followed. I remember the suffering and joy of patients and their families. I remember the demands of living a life interfaced by a job that required constant learning and emotional commitment.
In deference to becoming an artist, I never lived a life of reckless abandon. But I do have stories to tell.