Never Walked In High Heels

It was the last purposeful thing I ever remember my grandmother saying before she was permanently pulled below the waves of dementia. The entire family was gathered in my uncle’s living room, waiting for his last daughter to be married. My mom’s mother had been going in and out of our world and her own for the past several years, but in this moment she was perfectly balanced on the boarder of our harsh temporal planet and her universe where time was cyclical rather than linear. My grandmother turned to me, introduced herself, and then acknowledging the harpist hired to play at the wedding said, “if I had to live my life over again, I would learn to play one of those.”

I think of that statement often when I lay on the sofa in the home of one of my dearest friends and she plays her harp. She is newly married and nesting, the elegant harp looking slightly out of place amongst the used leather couches and prefab furniture. She looks positively angelic as her fingers leave the strings and she straightens her back in a way that shows her immense beauty hidden by her everyday posture. I open my eyes to look at her and for a split second I am jealous of her talent.

“I have got to sell my harp,” she declares walking away from the instrument out of frustration. “Every time I look at the thing in my living room I feel guilty because I know it should be played in a symphony orchestra and not be here to fiddle around with when I feel like it.” She quickly explains that she’s not about to give up playing, she simply wants to sell an otherwise brilliant piece of equipment to someone who could appreciate the music it makes on a consistent basis. She says that as she was learning to play the harp, she always was a disappointment to her teachers who wanted my friend to turn professional rather than play the harp for enjoyment.

And I am instantly reminded of my grandmother’s statement right before a vacant expression overtook her eyes forever.

I often wonder what talents I will regret not sharpening thirty years from now. Sometimes I swear to myself that I will try every activity that strikes my fancy at least once. And then I look at my friend’s harp and my uncooperative hands, a pair of toe shoes, or even the wii at our local pub, and I know such a promise is impossible to keep. The nature of this vast and seemingly endless world is one that might just give you the freedom to race towards all your dreams but it certainly won’t give you the time. Thinking of my grandmother growing up on a rocky hill in the Ozarks, the opportunity to learn how to play the harp was as slim as me learning how to dance en point. And at the end of her life, she still had unrequited dreams which she wanted to announce to someone she thought was a perfect stranger.

My friend begins playing again. For her, as for any of us really, with her talents come great responsibility to use her talents not only to the best of her ability but also with discretion. For her that means selling her professional harp to a musician who will use it professionally. More often than not we take the talents that we do have and, taking them for granted as commonplace, wish we had other skills in our capacity. If something comes easy to us, we tend to think it is easy for everyone and thus unimpressive. For my grandmother, at the end of her life, it was the harpist sitting in the corner of her son’s living room that represented second chances and unfettered dreams. For my friend playing the harp, keeping up her skills is not simply a blessing, but also a burden of responsibility. And for me, my jealously of other skills robs me of my time, so that, if I am not careful, by the end of my life, I will turn to a stranger and say what I would do differently, if I had to life my life over again.

A short story about life, death, and roadkill.

“God’s in an Art Deco mood today.” The sky was a perfect split between pink and blue. Airplane trails had streaked across the sky, and light sprayed over the earth as the sun rose to reveal its full shape. Every day has its own smell; today it was particularly overpowering. The morning air filled one’s lungs and scraped the old air from the inside. It was not a typical springy morning with birds and fresh creek water flowing against age and towards romance. It was more. But not in the car. The car air was stale despite the dawn. It had become difficult to move as the two drove throughout the night only to have more hours of driving ahead. They had fallen into silence for a few minutes until now.

“Shut up.” The intimacy of the car had annoyed her long before now. Yellow lines passed them at a constant beat. Buh-bum. Rest. Buh-bum. Rest. Buh-bum. They had become hypnotic to her as if the yellow lines acted as a baby mobile. She had a good mind to crash the car. At least that was she could get some sleep. She turned on the radio.

He kept talking about life and goals and fluff over the music. She gave up trying to drown him out and turned the radio off. Shaking her head, she rolled down the window to wake up. The fresh air rolled over her body and achieved its desired effects. Except now he started talking about how wonderful the morning wind was and gifts and such. She was losing her patience fast.

“I love long car rides. They’re so intimate. I always feel as if I know the people inside and out when they’re over. But I feel like I’ve been talking the entire trip. What about you?”

With that, she lost her temper. “Do you have to simplify everything like a two year old?” The car ride had suddenly become much more uncomfortable as the sun rose high enough to annoy. It was low enough not to be affected by visors. Where were her damn sunglasses? She continued her rant. “Name one thing that is beyond your understanding. Everything always turns out just joyfully in your mind, doesn’t it? Listen, in eighty years you’ll be gone, and nothing you have done will matter. That is the only thing that’s simple, predictable, and universal.” She stopped and tried to catch her breath. Her lungs pushed out until they touched her ribs and then collapsed to the motion of the lines on the road.

She almost regretted her explosion. Seeing him with his head rested on the back of the seat, his eyes closed, and his face beaming in the sun made her feel abandoned. The drive had gotten longer and her words hung in the air like a burlap curtain. She wasn’t even sure that he had heard her sine he just sat and stared at the sky. She gritted her teeth and clutched the wheel to straighten her spine. The stillness was deafening as they drove, and time sulked in between the cup holders. She wished he hadn’t told him the truth. He opened his mouth, thought, and then closed his lips again.

“Death.”

“What?” she snapped.

“Death isn’t simple.”

“Death is the simplest thing humanity knows. You simply stop breathing. It’s the end.” She had found her sunglasses and opened them with her teeth. They rode again in silence towards the end of the horizon. He pursed his lips in thought. Looking out the window, he could see her expression in the reflection. Her brown were knitted, and her neck was out stretched like a bird’s. He leaned his head against the glass. The sky now had wisps of clouds stroked across its canvas as if the bristles of a paintbrush had just barely tickled its edge. There was no other car in sight as she hit the gas and the engine roared.

“When I die I want someone to year bright yellow to my funeral. As a celebration.”

“This is depressing,” she shot back, flipping her head so hard to look at him that her sunglasses nearly fell off. She had meant to signify that the conversation was over, but that never stopped him.

“It really is so much bigger than us. I think that is why we think death is so frightening. The fact that at any moment we can be gone is humbling.” She didn’t want to answer him. The silence made the moments lag as the yellow lines spurred past with increasing intensity.

“Kind of a shitty grand finale, don’t you think?” she found herself saying. It was the fact that she even answered that annoyed her. The last thing she wanted on this car trip was to get on a carousel ride the same argument up and down. Turning around and heading away from their destination wasn’t an option. Here they were, in the middle of their trip, where it would take just as long to go home as it would take to get there. Well, one thing was for sure, she was not going to allow him to make this drive into some sort of triumphant conversion experience where she came out with some balanced new attitude. It was either because she was so tired and her eyelids throbbed or because she was so irritated with her company, but she really wanted to crash the car. She could grab the wheel and fling it so the small car would flip so easily. There were wire coat hangers, cigarette lighters, tools, glass windows. At that very second the vehicle became a suicide machine.

“Well, I guess death is never considered as a possibility,” she blandly stated.

“Everyone thinks the sun will rise tomorrow. Nobody can prove it.”

He looked back up to the painted sky and began with his own wide expanse of thoughts. He curled up to the side of the car and squashed his cheek against the window. His thoughts and opportunities made the blue sea above them seem like wading in a tear drop. A hawk flew over the car and into his sight. It spread its enormous wings and floated, suspended in the sky. It glided just over his head so he could see the mouse struggling in its mouth. He could practically hear the small creature struggle in the sky. If freedom came it would only result in a plunge. The hawk tilted, turned away from the car, and soared away from the road.

She squinted from the glare on the road. Putting down the visor to shade here eyes, she took a deep breath and relaxed. The lines had begun skipping playfully along the road. She slowed the car as another came over the horizon. The lines ahead shifted from the heat. Her eyes rested on a lump in the middle of the road. As the car edged closer to the lump, she could make out where the fur had turned gray and the scrawny rat tail had flattened against the pavement. Flies had begun to collect on its rankling intestines. The festering eyes were staring at the sky. Sometimes she wished she weren’t so observant. The car sped past, and it was gone as soon as the intensity was at its maximum. The road was clear and now touched the end of the sky.

From the moment I laid eyes on him I was stuck by how much the illness had ravaged his body. I had grown up in a place where I had seen my share of AIDS victims, or so I thought. But the ones I had seen, leaning their partner’s arm at an evening benefit for the local charity, was nothing compared to how ill he was. As he sat up in bed I wondered where the rest of him was. Then I realized his legs were still under the blanket. They were just so small that it looked as if nothing was there.

I don’t remember his name at all, which is funny because I swore to myself that I would always remember sitting on his bed. During my time at university, I volunteered to visit individuals who were struggling with the final stages of AIDS. South of the Mason Dixon line, this meant many of those we visited had been abandoned by their families. This is not to say that none of these people had loved ones who regularly visited the ward, but many did not. Given my age, my mother had to explain to me later just how terrifying the HIV epidemic was and the stigma which still remained.

“Don’t you know I’m… gay?” the last word wasn’t even whispered- it was mouthed. I nodded and kept asking him questions about the horses he used to train before he became ill. No matter how sick people are, it’s always stories which provide the most targeted anesthetic. In this case he was telling me about himself, what he did and who he used to be. He didn’t spend his whole life in this bed being nearly invisible, he was someone. And then he went and did something very strange.

“Your shoe is untied.”

“Wha-… oh yeah. I can’t tie my own shoes. Fortunately I don’t really walk much so-“

“Will you let me tie it for you?”

To say I was taken aback would be putting it to moderately. I was shocked. Can you get your shoes tied by a dying man? Was there precedent for this? I hesitated, not wanting him to lose any more of his precious energy.

“Please. I’m a very good shoe tying kind of guy.” I nodded and moved my foot to where he could reach my shoe, his transparent fingers working the magic it takes to tie a shoe, the motions of which I still cannot comprehend. He did it deftly, as every adult I know does. In a flash, he was finished a simple double knot remained which was tied with such determination that it would take my friend seven minutes to undo that evening.

I am here. Even though I am ill, I lived. I am somebody.

Six years later and I still think of him almost every time someone ties my shoes. Within a month he had left his body and someone else had taken his place in his bed. Long after his name was gone from my mind the stories of who he was and the actions of what he did that winter night stay with me. He was a man who desired, like all of us really, to be known and loved rather than to be immortal. Even in our weakest moments we want to touch, interact , and even to serve in order to confirm that our existence will be snuffed out long after the breath has left the body.

In his case, I think that for the rest my life, his existence will keep burning.

Recently, my friends in the UK have been inundating me with horror stories about health care workers taking anything but a patient’s best interest in mind. Yes, I realize that malpractice occurs in America too, and no, this isn’t another health care reform article. My conversations relating the experiences of my mainly able-bodied friends began to make me think about how we, as a society, treat not simply ”the disabled,” but simply the sick, the injured, and the aged as well. Its something even the “experts” can’t seem to get right.

If the mark of how advanced a civilization is how much we have evolved away from barbarism, then surely one definitive measurement of this progress is how we treat the most vulnerable in our society. This, of course includes not only the smallest and the most impoverished but also those whose bodies have turned against them due to either time or condition. And yet, even in our modern age, this level of civility is a standard that has yet to be reached in all but the most exceptional of cases.

This breach of advancement becomes even more despicable when one considers that a breakdown of the human body, in one form or another, is inevitable in all of us. By ignoring or disgracing those whom this breakdown has already occurred in,

what exactly are we trying to accomplish? Perhaps it is that we are afraid to acknowledge that human frailty is everyone’s fate, and the feebleness, the pain, which we see in the eyes of the man lying in front of us from his bed will someday be our own. When we are all faced with our own vulnerabilities, it is within our prideful nature to behave in the worst way possible, particularly when it is embodied not within ourselves but someone else. And so, we go on creating a world which will surly be unprepared for even our weakest days.

For decades, we have made health and caring for those in need of physical help an issue of politics rather than an issue of humanity. Even if we did have universal healthcare throughout the solar system, it does little to care for people in imperfect health outside of an institution. In this way, would the world outside of hospitals and urgent care center be fairer, or would it simply be cheaper to institutionalize the frail who inconvenience us to be dogmatically watched after? If we mean to fix all our health related issues with improving our respect for the frailty of the human condition, both the politicians and the doctors have fooled us into we our much more evolved simply by keeping our weaknesses out of sight.

Of course the words ‘integration’ and ‘rehabilitation’ are words that we hear those dressed up as reformers on the news shows spout out as well, but there are little visible effects of an attempt to improve the quality of life for individuals who don’t have the most cooperative body. Even the most compassionate health care which costs nothing cannot alter the fact that even today, even in the richest and arguably the most advanced and compassionate nations in the world, some schools still refuse to open their doors to disabled children and architects choose to put steps rather than ramps outside of new buildings because the former “looks more traditional.” This says nothing about the countless small issues of discrimination and even hatefulness that occur at the checkout lines or railway platforms.

If we consider ourselves an advanced society we are grossly mistaken. If we think any sort of government act will force us into being more progressive or charitable, we are lying to each other. Those are the changes to a culture which cannot take place by asking doctors to see more people or even handing complicated issues over to experts so we can keep our hands clean. We do a terrible job taking care of people who we find inconvenient in life specifically because we have built a world where their life is inconvenient. But all to often, by the time we realize how inconvenient the human condition actually is, is the time we’ve succumbed to it ourselves.

            There’s a picture on my desktop of one of my best friends in college. She is wearing a straw cowboy hat and holds a handmade sign. She is just as I remember her, smiling, with a combination of hope and opportunity in her eyes that just epitomizes the age of 21 for those of us who are blessed. She is full of the vibrancy of life, wanting to change the world for the better and knowing it is hers to change. When the picture was taken, she was getting ready to go to Nicaragua for a service trip. The sign she holds reads “do not fear.”

            A few months after her return, her world started spinning, literally, out of control. It’s something  she still fights close to 4 years later. Some days  she wakes up and her world is toppling over and over. She cannot find the ground and getting out of  bed is a dangerous task. She finds even watching television nauseating and reading a book is out of the question. The few times I’ve seen her post graduation I have been shocked at how skeletal thin she is. I know she gets tired of explaining why she has lost so much weight to those of us who are busy with internships, new jobs, and new lives. Several doctors have tried to diagnose her but so far they’ve all just been baffled by it.

            On her bad days, getting to the toilet can prove to be a combination of agony and terror. On her good days, she can’t plan much further than what the moment gives her. Long term planning is out of the question.

            Sometimes I look at her picture on my computer screen and get frustrated. How could this happen to her of all people? Why would a person wishing to devote her life to service, ready to be a force of good, be struck down by something we can’t even put a name to? I look at her holding that sign “do not fear,” and I think what a crock. This is when the force of irony becomes too much to bear. I change my desktop.

            I always change it back.

            It’s because I need to be reminded by her in particular that to fear is worthless. The constant worry of what terrible pains lurk  in upcoming years does nothing to enhance ourselves today. In fact, it stands to rob us of the times of hope and expectation which makes our struggle worthwhile when we need hope to come out the other side. In college she was fearless not because she didn’t know what horrible things there were to fear. Ignorance is not always bliss. But she was fearless simply because  life was hers  to shape into whatever form she wanted.

            We keep in contact the days she feels up to it. On the days she doesn’t I think of her often in my quiet moments. There are many times that I feel my life overwhelming me and I look at her picture, to try and breathe. Sometimes I find a frustrated email in my inbox from her, asking all the same questions I struggle to understand. She worries that she is preaching to the choir. I remind her its ok, there are moments where only the choir understands it. More often than not, life is overwhelming. During those times, all we can do is look around, see the situation the clearest we can, and do our best not to fear.