Quilting

To be of the opinion, to have a way of thinking, a sentiment.

This is where the word "sentence" comes from. 

"In my opinion your son deserves 13 years", said the judge, unsentimentally.

No tender feelings of emotion, just a motion, sealed by a gavel.
That is 4,745 days, during which no pizza is delivered, no joints smoked (well, as far as we know). No studying for exams, no kissing girls, no tossing a baseball with your old man.

I often wonder if people in prison have a plan.
For getting through each day, I mean. I have heard some thrive because in all their prior years
there was no structure, so the structure is a relief of sorts.
I can relate to this, being a lover of structure who is oxymoronically also the least organized creature in the universe. By loving structure, I mean anatomy and histology were like water to a fish or air to a balloon or milk to a hungry baby for me. When I studied these things, I saw nerve bundles in tree branches, liver cells in sidewalk splotches. I walked around my medical school campus in Madison and named your forearm muscles when you waved or flipped me off. By structure I mean I like to know where I will be sleeping, when I might wake up and whether I have enough clean running bras to last through my next day's run. I like to know my hospital orders are being carried out and making someone better instead of worse. I like my family to leave a note if they won't be home when I expect them to, and to text back instantly so I know some ditch somewhere has not claimed them as its own.

My disorder lies in the state of my desk on any given day, by the moat of books that tends to form around my bed, by the piano music lying open in competition for my attention. I am entropically gifted.

I am nearly halfway through a year of running every day. What happens on day 366?
Running has become something of a fix.
Fixing my broken parts. I have always wished to be a quilter. Someone who can make a lovely whole from smaller bits of oddity and beauty. I once did house calls on a quilt artist who saw the end approaching and quilted like a cyclone in those final months, harnessing and sewing pieces that were swept into her eddying energy, fueled by chemotherapeutic fumes.

On day 160 of running I realized something, in-between sneaking peaks (hoping not to burn my retinas to a crisp) at the setting sun drowning in the Pacific Ocean.
I am making a quilt.
Metaphorically lame, yet the thought stopped me for a moment.
Quite literally I have a picture of each day of running thus far. I pick one that most captures my senses. I notice things. Those pictures form a sort of story. Seasons, state of dog grooming, flora, fauna, urban austerity, travels, darkness, all captured.
But what made me stop in my tracks on run 160 was my brokenness that feels like it heals just a little bit more each day I run, like pieces coming together, even in the physical strain and fatigue, the admonitions of too much running and the potential harms, even in the days I fall and draw blood. It reminds me of how Wendy sewed that shadow back on Peter Pan. Ouch, but he needed that thing.

Running is hard, I suppose. Tonight it was cold, rainy, and my work day had been stressful. A couple of weeks ago my femur was screaming in pain. Have you heard the screams of a bruised bone? Angry skeletons are scary as shit. On days when I work a 12 hour hospital shift, the run will be in the dark on one end or the other, and usually the morning end because 12 hours is a nice thought but usually that will become 14 or more. I am not a morning person, really. There are two professions to avoid if you are not a morning person:
1) parent
2) physician

I am a mourning person, as are we all or as we all shall be if we are lucky enough to ever love.
The dopamine surge of exercise is a nice temporary ticket to planet Happy, but that is not why I run. Running is not my cocktail of choice. I do sometimes wonder how I got into running every single day. Once a colleague pulled me aside, and bored his almost black eyes straight into my soul while whispering with Slavic accented mystery "I see you running so much. What are you running from?"

Dude, sometimes running is just, well, running.

I am not sure 365 days is the right goal. Because my structure-craving side needs a goal, that seemed like a reasonable one. But the thing that has me most broken these days, that makes me mourn, is the 4,745 days my son has been dealt. Just desserts? I don't know. He's a kid who screwed up. And I am a Mom who cannot fix it.

So, although my running is by no means a prison sentence for me, and in fact is about as freeing as anything I can imagine in life, it is something I can show up for every day in some solidarity with my child. Maybe I will run for 4,475 days. And hope some of the beauty and hope I feel when doing so will transmit to him through that unruly bond we share called family.

If we get early parole or the proverbial bus takes me out before then?
Well, then, hopefully someone will finish my quilt for me.

Flames, Failure and Falling: Advice to My Children

If you were to substitute I in falling, you get failing. I prefer to keep the El in falling though, because without it I would feel like a failure, and would know I had lost my connection to my superpowers. The superpowers that let me get up every single day.


Falling, like failing, is hard to define. Unintentional travel from a higher place to a lower place might sum both up. With falling, everything can fall apart in an instant. Failing might occur more slowly, sneaking up and standing next to you for awhile before you give it the side eye and realize with a start, oh man, that is Failure next to me!

When you fall, get up. If you can't get up, punch your lifeline. If failure is at your side, wrap your arm around its shoulder. If that scares you, it should. I try not to be afraid of anything and am afraid of everything. I try to look tough despite my bleeding heart. I can wear pants like these and still be on top of the world.


The other day, I fell in the literal sense on a trail marked "use at your own risk". 

It is not like I have not fallen before. You can expect this with trail running. But this one left me wondering if a had fractured my femur. I figured not, as I could bear weight after the first couple of nauseating minutes laying on the ground. So.....I finished my run, albeit at an extremely slow pace, such that the banana slugs were passing me left and right. When the next morning found me barely able to walk, I decided to use some modern technology instead of my super Xray vision, and got an Xray of the biggest bone in my body (besides my head). No fracture! So.....I went running, because I am on a streak, people. Day 144 today. It is going to be slow going for awhile though.

Doctorly Disclaimer: never run on an injury. Unless, like me and El, you have superpowers and checkered pants to prove it.

Figure skaters should not fall. They train their whole lives for this 3 minutes of olympic glory, and if they fall, nay even wobble, they fail. I have to watch their leaps and landings through a little slit in my fingers, with hands ready to hide the horror, sort of how I watched the movie It. 

It all brings me to think that we are too quick to judge the value of everything. It is fear of failure, fear of falling and fear of the unknown. It is standing right next to us.

Say, for instance, a skater is on a frozen pond, of the type we used to have in winter in my hometown in Wisconsin. It is dusk. There is no one else around. Skater nails a quadruple axel. If a skater nails a quadruple axel at dusk at a pond where no one is watching, does it count? Does it count less than nailing it in that one 3 minute time slot allotted to the olympic contender?

I have been traveling more in recent years, and finding myself more overwhelmed by how many people there are in the world. People living their lives, just like me, and each and every one of them the center of their own universe. People who will do great and terrible and mundane things on any given day. Some people will die of hunger, some will die of gluttony. Some will have sons who get olympic gold medals, some will have sons in the hole in prison for their own safety after standing up to a gang. Some people *cough Emma Coburn cough*will be leading a race till the last two laps then get spanked by that one woman with the wicked kick, plus a few others that had more left in the tank.

Some doctors will be famous. Some quietly do their care, one patient at a time. Some pianists will play Carnegie Hall. Some will never be able to afford a piano and thus never even unlock the talent inside their brain and fingers. Some writers will be published and some will sit in solitude writing the most beautiful things no-one ever read.

Some need to never fail, never fall. Or at least appear that way to the world. I, for one, grab the hand of my friend failure and take my chances. This is what I want my kids to do too:
Fail miserably, fall often, and live life. Forget about not going gently when death reaches out a hand. Instead, devote yourself to not go gently in all the days leading up to that last. Look up from the hole and see the light, burning from within. Lean in and whisper all that matters. Its your superpower.

This poem failed to win a contest. But maybe it is better just curled up right here in my preachy blog.

Flames

Antiseptic flared my nostrils,
white light burned my eyes.
One hand was balled into a fist,
the other tucked inside my mother's as she led me to say goodbye to my father.
I did not raise my hand to my face to protect myself from breathing fire.
It filtered through me and curled up inside:
an ember, a bomb, a pyre.

A white coat and dozens of notebooks crammed
with a new language.
Greek and Latin pouring light into dark corners of human anatomy.
Anyone could be blinded by my new armor
under the glaring fluorescents.
The man with AIDS laughed with me
as I made my rounds.
I wanted to make a good impression
on my attending. I wrote a beautiful note.
Later when my team was summoned,
we marched where he led: the morgue.
My laughing man was splayed open
on the silver table. Dead.
I did not raise my hand to my eyes
burning with formaldehyde.
The image burned my retinas,
curled upside down and righted again.

Housed by hippocampus, a hotel with many rooms,
Little tombs.
For the black man, first night intern year
who died and died and died again.
I pushed on his chest and felt bones crunch, my own bile rising.
"Good," my senior resident said,
"That's good CPR."
For the young husband, who was losing his wife.
Obviously terminal, she suffered
while he raged.
My words with no power to tame, I learned
Some must go down in flames.
For the veteran who outlived war
only to drop on a nursing home floor.
I ran the code and he lived again, with displeasure.
He's there, curled up with all the others,
tucked in my hand—
but sifting through, falling away,
grains of sand,
dry and warm like the parched lips
I lean into, my own hair graying,
white coat brushing the forearm of
the hand grasping mine.
Whispering all that matters:
an ember, a bomb, a balm.

Jennifer Heidmann, MD