A friend from my days of living in England, the lovely Lou Lancaster, asked for more information on my wife Nancy and how we met. The short answer is we met on Match.com in September of 2018.
But the much longer version actually started several months prior by an experience I had at work that provoked me to sign up on Match.com in the first place …
The message on my phone said it was a high priority. The hospice case manager had called to request I visit Peggy right away because she was talking suicide, the folks at her facility were all worked up about it – and they wanted me to “fix it.”
So, because talk of suicide should never be ignored, I postponed my other planned visits for the day and drove the hour to Peggy’s Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF). It’s really not a bad facility as far as SNF’s go. Older than most, worn around the edges, but the place has a homey feel and a caring staff.
I had met Peggy several weeks prior and found her to be a streetwise feisty woman who simply did not want to be warehoused in a SNF. Sitting cross legged on her hospital bed wearing a purple baseball cap wrong way round, and huge glasses on her round gaunt face that made her look like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, she had told me then “There are many broken promises in a place like this, and they usually end with ‘I’ll be right back.’” All that Peggy really wanted was to live with her dog and be allowed to smoke cigarettes – both of which were not allowed at the SNF. Requests, by the way, I do not deem unreasonable for a woman dying on hospice care. But in our safety driven, policy laden world of care facilities, Peggy’s voice was not heard. Being no fool, Peggy knew what buttons to push to assure a hearing and suicide talk is one of the most effective.
When I found Peggy on my second visit, she was in the Activities Room waiting to get her fingernails painted. She and several other residents were foraging through a tan plastic tub filled with used bottles of polish looking for just the right shade of pink while waiting their turn. When Peggy saw me, she smiled, and wheeled her chair over to a nearby table where we could talk a little more privately. It was a long plastic fabricated folding table the kind used by any number of institutions. At the far end of the table was another woman sitting on a wheelchair silently sobbing. Sobbing’s not the right word – it was silent howl from deep within her soul that was unmistakable, unavoidable, and deeply unnerving.
With some effort, I tried to shift my attention from the woman in the throes of the unknown soul suffering and attend to the task at hand – giving my focus and ear to Peggy. As it turned out, Peggy by this point had made her peace with being at the SNF and promised she would neither commit nor talk about suicide anymore. She had been taken seriously and that seemed to be enough for now.
As Peggy continued to talk about various residents at the facility, the inadequacy of the cuisine, and other annoyances of her diminished autonomy, truth be told, I was only half listening. My attention was seduced by the unknown woman in the wheelchair at the far end of the table. Her voiceless pain sucked me in like some irresistible black hole of emotional grief. She looked as if she had been in the wheelchair for many years. Her body shape had adjusted to the chair, she was heavy, and appeared to have some sort of mental disability.
But it was her silent howling that pierced my own soul. It terrified me. I desperately wanted to look away and ignore her but I couldn’t. Frozen in the mental and emotional tangle of – she’s not our patient, I’m here to care for Peggy, I don’t even know this woman, her pain scares the hell out of me, there’s nothing I can do to relieve it anyway – finally an employee from the facility came to attend to the sobbing woman, in a very patronizing way, which only added to the absurdity of the whole situation.
I couldn’t take anymore. Her pain, his incompetence, and my own fear of inadequacy all conspired to emotionally suffocate me. I bid Peggy an abrupt farewell, and with the tenuous promise of returning next week, escaped to my car in the parking lot.
Liberated from the silent suffering in the Activities Room I was faced with my own voiceless pain.
Tears streamed down my cheeks as I couldn’t get the image of the tortured silent soul in the wheelchair out of my head. Had she always been institutionalized? Had she ever been loved? Had she ever been held, been made to feel special, made love, felt ecstasy?
And I thought about my own life. How I had been cocooning in my work and apartment for the past year after thirty years of marriage ended in divorce. My own incompetence and inadequacy driving me to hide in my own cave of grief.
As I sat in my car sucking for air with tears flowing, for some reason I thought of the biblical prophet Elijah. He too had been fearfully hiding in a cave when God captured him by a silent voice. The sacred text describes how Elijah experienced a powerful wind, earthquake, and engulfing fire – but God was not in them. Then came what is described in the Hebrew as kol d’mama daka, the voice of a thin silence, and the frightened prophet hid his face out of reverence, walked to the cave’s entrance, and heard God inquire, “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?”
That question pushed deep into my own soul. As I struggled to comprehend the emotional earthquake I had just been through – I thought about my life. While the silently sobbing woman in the wheelchair might not have many options for a flourishing life, I did. I still have time to love and to be loved. Maybe her voice of thin silence was the voice of God calling me out of my own cave of grief? Was it time to awaken to life? My life? Would I accept the divine gift given …the push of a thin silence?