We Are All Perfectly Fine

by Dr. Jillian Horton

  The surgeon with the brace limps in. His leg buckles a little with each step. When he’s finally at the cushion, getting settled is a production. He sits down, folding one leg beneath him, and hoists the braced leg from the hip, bringing it up to the platform and leaving it out straight in front of him.

  How has he put up with that for four days? The meditating, the walking. His leg must be swollen. Forget emotional discomfort, what’s it like to sit here in deep physical pain? Hobbling back to the threadbare room only to toss and turn most of the night? How can his mind possibly do anything other than scream for Tylenol on schedule?

  Mick is rambling about something now, using a bunch of Buddhist words like dharma and mettha that annoy the hell out of me, because I keep having to try to remember what dharma and mettha mean, which seems like an unfair extra step this early in the morning.

  What happened to Wendy’s brace? Did my parents throw it in the garbage?

  How could they have just thrown it in the garbage?

  What were they supposed to do with it?

  Just that idea, that vision of my mom or my dad, setting that old piece of plastic in the trash, no leg left to cradle. And then the word cradle makes me think of her when she was a baby. Even then she probably still had that damn cancer growing in her head, just a little raisin, poised to cast a shadow for almost fifty years, for longer than that, really, because my children will always know that mommy had a sister who suffered, who had a bad thing in her brain and as a result liked country music and screamed and swore more than her fair share but loved the things she loved fiercely. All because of that first uncorrected mutated cell, one small thing gone horribly wrong. And mommy, as a result, always waiting for the next disaster, the dropping of the other shoe. Even when no one is wearing shoes.

  Why am I here?

  To learn to breathe, or to stop holding my breath?

  I hear a sniffle a few cushions over. It’s the woman who was my mirror last night. She’s crying silently, trying to maintain her posture while she breathes and chokes back tears. I wonder if her mind is showing her a short film about medicine right now. I wonder what movie it is. I have Mike, Roy has Brian, Joss has the little girl who drowned. And then we have our personal collection of films: I have my sister, Ikiru has her mom. I don’t know what films the others have. Different versions of the same script, though. It’s in the early stages of dawning on me that if you could tap the phone lines of most of our private monologues, they would largely be full of indistinguishable chatter.

  “We’ve been in silence since yesterday evening,” Mick says. “You’ve had the chance to sit with whatever was present. Sometimes themes become apparent. Perhaps noticing now whether there are patterns that continue to make themselves known to you.”

  Mick, I know all about patterns, and not just because Roy got me thinking about it yesterday. I have what the shrinks call a drive for symmetry. I used to organize my dollhouses, my bookshelves, for hours, curating them to perfection. Dolls with expressionless resting bitch faces, positioned perfectly in front of food they were incapable of eating. Books arranged alphabetically and by size, sometimes by colour, less often by subject. It wasn’t so much that I liked to have things organized. I liked to look at things when they were organized. I liked things around me to be perfect. It was a way to compensate for a chaotic environment. And now I work in a place where I can’t compensate for chaos. Where there are holes in the plaster walls in patient rooms. Where people in stretchers are often parked out in front of the nursing desk the way you might leave an idling car. Where monitors beep, alarms sound, call bells ring, patients holler, and families line the hallways and sob. Where there is no order, only ongoing pandemonium.

  Constant chaos on the outside. I can’t do anything about it.

  But what about the inside?

  Mick takes a long, raspy inbreath, as if he’s momentarily choking on his saliva. Good thing there are so many doctors here. We all sit in front of him, waiting. He clears his throat again.

  Enough. These few words are enough.

  If not these words, this breath.

  If not this breath, this sitting here.

  This opening to the life

  we have refused

  again and again

  until now.

  Until now.*

  Now wait a minute. I haven’t “refused” anything. I didn’t choose this, the way I am.

  But I don’t want to keep living like this.

  That thought, like a gunshot. Not something you say with a sigh to a friend over a coffee break, or in a late-night semi-drunk text with your face glued to the white screen light. A realization, the sort of life truth that explodes like a Technicolor wasp’s nest when you finally stumble upon it. Something you can never really put back in the box, once it’s out in the daylight. Not a threat. Not idle words shouted in the throes of emotion, in a heated argument or a fit of exasperation. A real, fundamental truth. A basic, simple, noble truth.

  A life I have refused.

  Something huge is about to come to me, something bigger than this room and the viridian-Buddha-head hill that is just being illuminated in the dawn. Something uncomfortable I might not want to hear.

  That I’m contributing to a lot of my suffering. That some is unavoidable, but some is a wall I’ve been running into at full speed. I crash, and go reeling, then run at it again, thinking I have to get through. As if that suffering could settle an account with the universe, the one where I received all those payments in error. Never considering that I could build a ladder to climb over that wall. That there are other ways to reach the other side.

  * * *

  BREAKFAST IS IN the dining room, in silence. Hard-boiled eggs, salt glistening on the thin membranes of skin covering the whites. The yolk, rimed with a dusky grey, breaking apart into lemony yellow pieces. Knives and forks against china make a pleasing, cafeteria sound. The sound of the herd grazing on its food, consuming in silence. I’m sitting with Greg and Jodie and the surgeon with the leg brace. I’m oddly comforted by their presence, even though we don’t make eye contact. I like just knowing they’re here. I think this is attachment.

  A thin mist hovers over the field. Out the large plate-glass window, a deer trots across the pale grass. People look, and see each other looking, and soon everyone’s heads are turned towards it. We watch it move effortlessly, sidestepping the stream and the road, then vanishing into the bushes.

  I finish my coffee and get up to clean off my plate. When I push my chair back, it grates against the floor. Some people are still looking at the woods where the deer disappeared, hoping for an encore.

  I go down the long hall towards the main entrance. That’s when I see a mouse dart across the hardwood and into a guest room. Normally, I’d scream. A C.S.I., 9-1-1 scream, but I don’t, because we’re in silence. Instead, I stand, frozen, probably with an idiotic emoji expression on my face. I always scream at mice. And yet, I just saw a mouse and didn’t scream. There’s an override in here somewhere!

  We have a few minutes before we gather as a group in the great hall. I put on rubber boots and a jacket, and go out for a fast walk around the grounds.

  On the pavement in front of the main entrance is something that looks like a hunk of tire. I go closer. It’s a huge, horror-movie-grade black snake, lying in the sun on the warm pavement, a few inches away from a branch that must have come down in the wind.

  A snake and a rod. Medicine’s ultimate symbol: the staff of Asclepius, that consummate healer. Oh, universe, that’s hilarious. And I don’t scream at the snake either. If this were Saturday Night Live, in a few seconds I’d be face-to-face with a grizzly bear.

  I come to the footbridge that leads to the little mill. The sun is hitting the water, a path of white light moving downstream. I hadn’t really thought about the mill part of this place. All the land was donated by a businessman, Ralph B. Chapin. He lived here, with his family. I’ve seen a few signs, a commemorative plaque. Testimonials to
his character: a good man. A Buddhist. A seeker.

  I stand on the bridge. The mill is in perpetual motion, like a child’s water toy. I watch it spin for a long time. I think about how the force of the water flowing is what turns the wheel. And the force of the wheel turning is what moves the axel, while another wheel hidden from view grinds and pulverizes grains, or stones, breaking them down from their original form, until they are ground very fine.

  Shattered. No longer whole.

  Serving another purpose.

  25

  You Are Still Carrying Her

  So what was that like?”

  Ron and Mick are on chairs at the front of the room, a couple of new-age talk show hosts tossing a question to the live audience. They’ve brought us out of silence with a short meditation, and now we’re debriefing. A lot of hands go up. Some people loved the silence. Some people were surprised by the content of their thoughts. Most agree it was tough not to use a phone, or to make eye contact. They worried about social graces. They wanted to compare notes.

  The surgeon with the brace says, “When I saw the deer, I wanted you all to know about it. But then I shifted my attention to just noticing what it was like to see a deer.”

  I look over at Ikiru. She sees me looking at her and smiles. I smile back. Then I squint and touch my brow.

  Did you take out your piercing?

  She scowls at me. She touches her hair, as if drawing on it with a crayon, then shrugs with her palms open. I give her the finger. She gives me double fingers. Our faces split into wide, goofy grins.

  The woman I was mirroring has her hand up, reaching for the microphone.

  “I had kind of a profound moment with . . . sorry, I think it’s Jill?”

  I feel myself blush a little, a reflex since I was young. I give her a faint wave.

  “We were mirroring each other in the rain. I just felt so close to her. And I don’t even know her. I thought, how little it takes to feel close to people again.” She’s dabbing at her eyes the way she was in the Zendo.

  I’m really touched. I raise my hand without thinking, and before I can change my mind, Mick is coming at me with the microphone.

  “I realized two things.” Everyone around me is listening intently. Even the quality of the listening is indescribable. Doctors normally interrupt patients after ten seconds. I doubt doctors wait ten seconds before interrupting each other.

  “I realized there’s a person who’s constantly getting in my way. An important clue is she has blue hair.”

  Everyone laughs. Roy is looking at me like a proud father.

  “But I realized something serious. I can’t go on the way I have been. Doing call, those long stretches of barely sleeping. The things I tried to do for students. Not seeing my kids or being emotionally available for them. Some of the problem is me, and I totally accept that. But some of it is also medicine, and how we’re teaching medicine. It isn’t right that how we train has to maim many of us permanently. And it’s coming to a head with all these other forces. I’m ready to start questioning everything. I need to tell the people who look me in the eye and say I’m not tough enough to practise or teach that the problem isn’t me. I know it’s not me. It isn’t anybody in this room. Well, except for Jodie.”

  The room erupts into laughter. Jodie is scowling and shaking her fist at me like Statler on The Muppets.

  Roy puts up his hand. The microphone is passed down.

  “I have a confession. I broke the silence.”

  There are a few mock gasps.

  “But I think it was the right thing, because we’ve been silent about so much for so long. Can I tell a short story, actually? Very short.” He waits, and no one stops him. “It’s the story of two monks standing at a river. Ron and Mick, you must have heard it before. A woman comes and asks if the monks would help her cross. One of them says no, because they aren’t supposed to touch women. But the other one decides it’s more important to help than to follow the rule. So he carries her across in his arms and deposits her on the bank on the other side. And the first monk is pissed. He won’t talk to the second monk for days. They’re eating supper almost a week later, and the first monk says, ‘I’m still mad at you because you carried that woman.’” Roy turns to the group. “Does anyone know what the second monk says?”

  He waits.

  “He says, ‘But you’re still carrying her.’”

  The room is silent. Roy is animated, passionate, no longer the sad old man I picture in a rented apartment.

  “I’ve been thinking about one of my new friends here, and about all of us in the last twenty-four hours. Why are we still carrying all the people we’ve helped? This doesn’t have to be the price of service.”

  Greg puts up his hand. “I like that story, because the person who is actually helpful doesn’t get caught up in it. It’s the monk who’s obsessed with the rules who gets stuck.”

  “And we just might be a group of people who get obsessed with rules,” Mick says, to widespread chuckles.

  Greg nods so vigorously I’m afraid he’s going to sprain his neck. “Both these monks live in my head. And they bicker until I want to just take a sedative to shut them up.”

  Ikiru raises her hand now. “I don’t want to give them a sedative, because there might be merit in each of their views. I just don’t want to get stuck on a passenger train with them.”

  Greg and Ikiru are both right. These guys live in my head too. I give them constant airtime. And all the thoughts they generate—I chase those thoughts like rabbits into holes. Judge something. Crave something. Do something. Get something. Change something. Then things will be better.

  But better than what?

  I think of all the patients whose lives I regularly implode with terrible news. If I died tomorrow, nothing would look as precious as today. Today would look like paradise.

  Actually: it is vaguely like paradise. The slightly fucked-up, shattered-but-still-whole world of Jillian Horton. All of it. My family. My life back home. My new friends, who after only four days together are wearing their hearts on their sleeves. This place in the woods, with its smell like forest and coffee and patchouli and floor wax, and ponds and streams that amplify the rippling of the light. My own little room at Chapin Mill, with a bed and a warm blanket and a desk and lamp and window that looks out onto a hill.

  Except I have to leave it, just as I’m clueing in to what it was.

  But instead of descending into a pit of mourning, I notice the thought, and I wonder, Why am I always pivoting from joy to grief? Why am I always making that my story? Couldn’t I possibly just exist in this one moment, for this moment, and be at peace?

  Wasn’t that what my old piano teacher asked me?

  Could I have a good life?

  * * *

  I HAD THE most beautiful patient last year. In his twenties, trans, telling me I should refer to him as “he” for now, down from one of the northern reserves you can only drive to in the winter, when rivers and lakes freeze into ice road. His family decimated by addiction, violence, systemic oppression, intergenerational trauma. Using whatever he could get his hands on to dull the pain of his unspeakable excuse for a childhood. Heroin, liquor, Lysol, meth. A binge visiting cousins in the city. Admitted for a few days, vomiting up blood, his face puffy and miserable. Such a sweetness and tenderness about him, lying on the bed in his hospital gown, bemoaning its ugliness, rifling through his bedside table so he could find a lipstick and show me what he looked like with his face on. Then telling me quietly, with downcast eyes, that he wanted to be a hairstylist; embarrassed, as if he had just confessed something totally unattainable, like he hoped to become an astronaut. His shy, peculiar request that I let him see me with my hair down.

  Then, when I went to see him the next day, showing me a picture in one of his magazines, a cut he thought would be just right for me and the shape of my face.

  What did I write on his copy of the discharge summary, adding it at the last minute? A secret, h
eartfelt note, like one you might have passed to a friend when you were young:

  Please look after yourself. It’s ok to have a good life.

  Bequeathing the words Don gave to me, even if I still couldn’t believe them myself.

  26

  I Did Not Forget About You

  Michael, would you be glad to know I still think about you? Your ’70s glasses and your bad mullet? That I still have your postcards and the mix-tape you made me? That whenever I visit Toronto, I walk by the Chinatown store where we went one Saturday, you looking normal despite the gruesome sternal scar and the MedicAlert necklace, hunting for the weirdest collectibles ten dollars could buy? I’d like to tell you that in the Zendo, on these chilly mornings, your face comes to me. I’d like to be able to write that I see you, or I talk to you, or that we have a conversation, but that wouldn’t be true. All I see are pieces of you. Your barking cough, the basins of mucus you produced before the transplant. That stupid shirt: Nixon—he’ll get the job done.

  If I could talk to you, I’d tell you I’ve always remembered what you said when it was finally clear you were on the mend and you’d survive the transplant, that you’d leave the hospital alive. We walked together to the end of the hall, to sit in two chairs on wheels by the huge glass window, to eat sawdust-like birthday cake off paper plates, cake I had really brought to celebrate the fact that you were alive. You rushed ahead of me to sit. I told you to slow down, because you were getting winded.

  I know. I have to learn to breathe.

  Would you believe I’m finally learning to breathe now too, Michael? It took me a really long time to get here, but I’m learning.