“Your love makes me feel alive,” she says, eyes on the floor, blank faced, looking anything but alive.
This once bubbly girl with a jazzy soul and a voice bursting in major chords, weeping over the beauty in Chopin’s Preludes, as lights soared beneath her slender fingers moving across ivory keys. Who attended college until her senior year only to suddenly withdraw with a forest fire burning through her mind.
“It happens at this age,” a doctor had said. “When the circuits of the brain knit together, these synapses sometime misfire.”
Except there’s been a mistake, I say. This wasn’t on my list of motherly concerns. That a daughter finishes college, establishes a meaningful career, meets a loving partner, lives a fulfilling life.
My list scatters as I sit across from her, on an orange vinyl chair beside a finger-smudged glass top, in the Quiet Section. No television, no music, no flimsy boxes of puzzles.
To my left, a psych nurse sits behind a large glass window, one eye on her computer, another on us. My daughter’s blonde bangs hang like heavy curtains across her blue eyes.
Last night nurses had dressed her in a sheer lavender hospital gown, after the police had arrived, after they’d strapped her down, angled the metal gurney into the back end of an ambulance, delivered her to this hospital’s pale, empty room. Sedated. Eyes shut. Hands that once cradled kittens drawn out from either side, wrist-bound like a crucifixion.
This morning she sits across from me, wearing a discarded black oversized NASCAR sweatshirt. I struggle to compose myself.
Don’t ask questions, I remind myself. Don’t make her talk. Just tell her you love her. I lean forward, touch her hand.
“I love you.”
After a pause, she says, “I think you can leave now.”
I rise, stunned. Reluctant to leave, after clearing security downstairs, after an escort brought me in a locked elevator, signed in at the nurses’ station. But as staff approach she follows, allows me to embrace her once more. I hear a mechanized whir as the automated metal doors sweep open, then lock shut.
On the Open Side, patients are free to wander. Tattooed women my daughter’s age braid each other’s hair, giggle. Canned laughter from day time television spills into the community room where staff wearing royal blue scrubs sit around tables covered with puzzles to help patients find the missing pieces.
Kathy Swearingen
Haslett, Michigan
5 thoughts on “Missing Pieces”
This so powerfully evokes the poignancy of a parent seeing your child so lost in ways completely unbidden and unexpected and of feeling so lost yourself in the fog of not knowing at all how best to help. Thanks for saying it so well!
Mary,
Many thanks, my friend. You understand the myriad, complex challenges of being a parents for children with challenges they never asked for. Your journey has inspired me. We need one another through the twists and turns of life. Thank you for being with me on this road.
Love your energy and living with your heart forward.
I’ve been there, and was with you in your description of a daughter so wrapped in her own despair and isolation, that nothing you know to do reaches her. I wish you the strength to.accompany her on her journey out of the datkness, and I wish for her the strength to conquer and come out of the experience whole again.
Thank you very much. I am happy to let you know that our daughter,– with wrap around therapy, helpful medications, and support she is feeling more alive, calm, and motivated. I appreciate your kindness, understanding and compassion. I hope anyone reading this will witness that healing is always possible. I thank those who held hope for us when I could not. May you and your loved ones be well.
Oh my goosebumps. Brought it all back for me. So grateful to have this articulated. To keep company in a too isolated despair, where too many of us feel much too much alone.
Love your work Kathy.