Enrique is in isolation in the ICU and they tell me that, if I want to see him, I have to dress up like the doctors attending him. I do want to see him. I mean, that’s why I came to the hospital. So, I step into what looks like an airlock, a little ante room where they’ve set out a cart of disposable hospital gowns, surgical face masks, and enough hand sanitizer to fill a bathtub. Is there an order to this? I take off my bag and coat. I cinch the gown around my waist. I tie the mask around my face. I slap on the hand sanitizer, and the sterile-sweet smell, frankly nauseating, rises through the mask. So, I’m ready. I guess.
I push through into the cool, darkened room where I find Enrique, a young man who has been on my caseload for a couple years, laid out on the bed, propped up, tubes and wires running from his mouth and arms and bladder. His lips are swollen. I will always remember the crusted blood in the translucent mouthpiece connected to the ventilator, the machine that’s making him breathe.
Enrique’s out. Sedated to oblivion. The room is quiet, except for the chirp and whirr of the machines he’s connected to and the papery shuffling of my hospital gown as I step to his bedside. I look him over, and he’s skinnier than when I last saw him, which was at his apartment, a subsidized studio—a block from this very hospital—in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. It’s a place where I maintain a caseload of twenty or so disabled and formerly-homeless adults, including Enrique. His HIV+ status has developed into full blown AIDS. Now, here he lies.
Silence, a human silence, quickly draws itself across the room like a skin of ice on a pond. It bugs me in a way I can’t describe. Maybe the feeling is what it’d be like at a family reunion of introverts. Somebody should say something, shouldn’t they? Well. Who? There are only two of us here. And one of us is unconscious. I gaze down at Enrique and notice the bulge of the surgical mask at my nose and I say the first thing that pops into my head: “I look like a duck, don’t I?”
It’s clumsy and desperate, yet the sound of my voice in my own ears—no matter the words or their meaning—smashes the tense silence. At least momentarily. But thirty seconds later, the silence returns, and the awkwardness ratchets up again—so, I start blabbering. About how it’s good to see him, and how people miss him, and they hope he gets better, and anything else that sounds like something appropriate to say to a person laid out comatose on a hospital bed.
Finally, when my verbal tank is empty, I leave. I toss the apron and mask into the trash, and the feeling that perches on my spirit, like a crow bogging down a telephone line, is pure inadequacy. Why did I say all that stupid stuff?
~
I’ve heard the term “blessing of presence,” and I take it to mean that one’s best gift to another—particularly another who is suffering in some deep way—is simply an active coexistence. Life lived in the ready position, in proximity to he or she who is hurting. Ready to listen, ready to fix a drink, ready to say a prayer, ready to pick up the dry cleaning.
There’s a powerful scene in the movie Lars and the Real Girl, where Lars, an oddball in a small town, has fallen in love with Bianca, a sex doll. The town’s other residents, though aware that Bianca is inanimate, accept her as they accept Lars. They decide to see her as he sees her. But—spoiler alert—Bianca “dies,” and the grief Lars feels is on par with the grief of one who’d lost an actual spouse.
The townspeople, rather than take Bianca’s “death” as an opportunity to steer Lars back to reality, come to his house. They sit with him in his living room, feeling no compunction to talk him out of his grief. Their offering is themselves. Their nearness is the greatest mitigator of the real pain Lars feels. It’s sopped up by the healing silence.
~
I visit Enrique at the ICU often, blathering each time. Each successive visit is shorter than the one before. I pray out loud and read the Bible to him, unaware, given his state, if he can even hear me. I do it, though, because it feels like I’m supposed to.
At one point, his health rebounds. They move him out of the ICU, and even out of the hospital, to a nursing home. I figure, since his health is on the rebound, I don’t have to visit him nearly as often. But finally, after some weeks, I finally make it out to where he’s staying.
“Where have you been?” he says. “Why did you stop coming to see me?”
It’s a question that will haunt me the rest of my life. I realize that the answer, mainly, is that I’d run out of things to say. The right words—whatever they are and whatever they’re supposed to accomplish—elude me. Never does it occur to me that I could shut my mouth and just be there. That silence could be spiritual. That in quietness there could be a strength of presence that actually matters.
The writing on the wall is scrawled all over this piece. Enrique’s health declined. Precipitously this time. He died. The last time I saw him, at the hospital again, was like before: He’s out of it, hooked up to wires and tubes. His body is alternately bloated and skinny, swollen and frail. All I can do is look at him. It may be that I’ve finally realized the vanity of my own voice and words. It could be the blend of awe and fear that attend those who attend the dying. Or some combination. Whatever it is, though, I find myself as I should have been all along: Silent.
