My pulse beats, reminding me to live each minute of my life with enthusiasm and strength.My pulse beats, reminding me that with each passing minute I move one step closer to mortality. My pulse beats, reminding me to take nothing–and no one–for granted.
“We lock the door and shut the curtains, and, when its all clear, we line up in a special order and listen to what our teachers tell us.” –My kindergarten daughter, Zelia
They say work to live not live to work but how do you come home crushed by a forty-eight-hour shift on sixty minutes of broken sleep and kiss your babies and tell them it’s all going to be okay when their school is on lockdown due to a nearby shooting and the suspected gunman is still on the loose as you tend to a patient with suspicious wounds while the world keeps debating nuclear stories around you, and you think this small town ain’t so bad: the knife and gun club has low enrollment compared to the gang-ridden inner city you grew up in where shots fired were barely flinched at (because they weren’t en masse), and hella felons ran through your property with cops and helicopters giving chase.
My patient was dying, and her son was angry. She was eighty-nine and buckling under the weight of septic shock. With his mother failing, her son had lost it. “You will regret letting her die!” he said as he lunged at me. He was intercepted but continued to stare me down. I tried to hold his gaze as softly as I could, willing him not to kill me.
I grew up in a gun-free family and neighborhood. As a child of the 1950s and 1960s, I associated guns with the Westerns I saw at the movie theater or with the Lone Ranger, the hero of my favorite TV show.
Then guns intruded on my life–twice.
A few years ago, after retiring from a long career as a psychologist, and when I was deep into an MFA program in writing, I wrote a poem exploring the reasons, past and present, for my intermittent, middle-of-the-night insomnia.
Sleep became a foreign concept to Dad and me when he began to suffer hypoglycemic attacks. These attacks left him mentally disoriented and physically weak. Without immediate food, they could escalate into a more severe condition, leading to a coma or even death. As a result, I set my alarm to awaken me every ninety minutes throughout the night. I would then prepare a snack for Dad—milk and peanut butter on a cracker, pudding, a glass of orange juice—and wake him up to eat.
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