Change your thoughts and you change the world.
:: Norman Vincent Peale ::
A small dark hole in his temple. And that was all.
He was probably in his late seventies. He lay tangled in his suspenders as the resuscitation team packed down. We were in the process of intubating him, which was proving difficult and things were not going well. The room seemed unusually quiet to me.
Despite the urgency of the situation I was having trouble concentrating.
The paramedics told us that the man had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease some time ago. And, as his world began to slip, he had come to the decision that he did not want to place any burden on his grown family.
Up until this point he had been living independently with his long-time companion an 11 year old boarder collie named Bobbie.
So he put his affairs in order, surreptitiously bid farewell to his children, chose a time.
And this still winter evening took Bobbie down for a walk behind the shed.
Shot his dog.
Shot himself.
I could only imagine the scene. Calling him over. A last hug with his best friend.
Dog looking up at him, paw raised, tail wagging, head cocked to one side looking quizzically up at something strange.
The dull pop of the gun. And the longest, saddest, loneliest of moments until there was nothing left but nothing.
There are moments rare as stars in the day when mask and gloves fall aside and a flash of raw intimacy crackles in the space between us and our patients.
Pay attention, and you might just be lucky enough to glimpse one such moment.
Be brave, and you might just be lucky enough to have one.
Samsara is a Sanskrit word that can be loosely translated as “continuous cycling” or “journeying”. It is one of those words that is best understood by holding up to your ear.
Listen closely…Samsara….. the sound of a circle.
In Buddhism it is used to describe the cyclic nature of existence. Life and death. Creation and dissolution. Except it isn’t just a linear sentence, but rather it is a dynamic roundness. Within the dissolution is the very action of creation. Within the nascent moment grows the energy of decay.
The circle of life.
And as with all circles you can never be sure if you are at the beginning or at the end. A case in point, Samsara at the waterhole:
at our house there live
a girl, a dog, and a yardful of newly planted
flowers
The dog came free, the girl is priceless
and the flowers cost three hundered dollars,
a cozy scene but complicated
in that
I love the girl, the girl loves the dog
and the dog
loves to dig my flowers
and I
do not love the dog
creating a dilemma in which I
who crave even the illusion of control
am stymied between my needs
for the orderly completion of my desires
and
the beam of joyous fire
in the eyes of the girl,
all of which
says more about the complexities of love
than the training of neurotic dogs
and I’ve just discovered
in writing these lines
that
the dharma of this dilemma
has less to do with my training the dog
not to dig my flowers
than the dog training me
to love
the girl.
:: william larson ::
Too content sitting amongst the soft grass to fetch a jumper, the cooling day raises goose-bump braille and wraps a dusky shade around my shoulders. A windhorse breeze turns the spread of Sunday papers, folding the Burma shame across a plate of almond-cake crumbs.
Over against the wall of the house, I watch as a plastic bag, puffed like a lung, spins and stutters its way up a chimney of lift. A page of print peels off across the lawn, with the dog in pursuit, and unwraps memories of a life without a lid.
There is no doubt that the health system is in a crisis.
Why the hell do emergency department nurses continue to turn up day after day?
This is why……
[ Explicit content warning.]
