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