THE VIEW FROM MY WINDOW (Hospital Thoughts 3.)

Mass General Hospital, originally uploaded by Huihua Ding.

This was the view from my room during the second week I spent in the hospital. To the left, I could also see the Tobin Bridge. When I walked the long hall to the other side of the building, which I did as soon as I was able, I could see the Charles River, slowed by glittering ice floes, and beyond it Boston's gritty, elegant skyline. Since I was a child, the sight of that skyline has always excited me, and it still did. But this time it had become a kind of moving picture--one I could see, but could not enter. I looked on it--and on my own recent active, happy life--with nostalgia and awe.

In the moving picture outside the hospital, people navigated the badly plowed streets and sidewalks on their way to work. They went through the motions of holiday shopping with the usual joy and frustration. They ducked into Starbucks across the street for a respite from the cold, or grabbed a drink at the Harvard Gardens. Ted and I had stopped there one afternoon after a particularly grueling appointment. The french fries were deliciously crispy and there was jazz on the stereo.

Inside the hospital, a different kind of life went on. The second night I was there, they wheeled in a new roommate. She had been hit by a car in the crosswalk of a city street, and had several broken bones. It took thirty-six hours before an operating room was available to repair her badly shattered ankle.

Though she was Chinese, and there was something of a language barrier between us, we became a great consolation to one another. Late at night, when they finally turned out the lights, we would share our litany of suffering, taking turns in the dark. We didn't so much complain of our pain, as speak of it with wonder.

Weren't we supposed to be outside, among the crowd in the street? Weren't we part of the moving picture that is life? How had we landed here? Surely, there was some mistake.

Every night ended with the same question. "Why are we suffering?" my roommate would ask.

"I don't know," I'd say. "But we just have to accept it."

The last night I was there I was almost asleep when she asked her question. I was too tired to respond, but she no longer needed to hear my voice. I had begun to coast into a dream when I heard her answer herself three times.

Don't know; just have to accept.
Don't know; just have to accept.
Don't know; just have to accept.

In her voice, the words sounded like a kind of poem, the limited human answer to so much of the mystery that is life.

Outside, the snow continued to fall, and people continued to travel through the moving picture in the street, eager to get where they were going. My friend and I, temporarily stopped by pain and indignity and tedium, were them. And they, whether they knew it or not, were us.

It's something I hope I don't forget.