My Purple Heart

August 31, 2015August 31, 2015 ~ sehaldorson ~ 2 Comments

In college biology, we saw two cadavers,
regular people who donated their bodies
to science. One was a man, the other a woman,
but so much the same once opened up
for our cautiously curious eyes. Our professor
explained the man’s heart
was enlarged due to years of abuse–
I think, maybe Big Macs and milkshakes
and years of sitting in a corner office.
The woman’s, by comparison, was petite,
compact, like the hearts of the chickens
butchered on my childhood farm.

If my chest were sliced, ribs spread
open, organs exposed, what would my heart
look like? Stretchmarks, for certain,
veining my heart walls since
the day he was born, instant expansion
as I looked upon his face, felt
the heat of his new body burn
my hands as I held him.

Would the students who gather and gaze
at my fragile egg of a heart see
the fine cracks feathered faintly
like a net? Each fine line
a record of days, despair and disappointment
tap-tapping a pattern
on its walls until only a membrane of will
holds it together? Would they see the scar tissue
tough like rind? Bruises
deep purple and still pulsing.

In my poor tired heart, there is a chamber
carved out like water does to rock,
worn down and empty from each wave
of terror that sluices through
when he is ill, when his body seizes,
and his mind retreats, reboots,
when I sit in waiting rooms, doctors’ offices,
beside pulsing machines that scan and probe
his brain. Perhaps someday a “why”
will work to heal this crack in my heart,
but if not, scientists will marvel
at the phenomenon that, for years,
my heart kept beating while broken.

Lucky Girl

August 30, 2015August 31, 2015 ~ sehaldorson ~ 4 Comments

There are nights when I first lie down in bed that I wish it were morning already. That admission hints to a sort of optimism, doesn’t it? It makes me sound like I’m an early to bed, early to rise, tidy kitchen keeping, porch swing tea sipping optimist who can’t wait to take the next day’s tiger by the tail. Instead, it’s my biological warning system that tells me it’s going to be a long night of insomnia, of my feet being too hot and my arms too cold, of my mind already being smack-dab in the middle of tomorrow, of my feelings being too raw, all jacked up on the caffeine of worry. Worry about my son and whether he will sleep through the night, whether the long-dreaded, but no doubt inescapable seizure will strike, as he sleeps next to me. Or I am too conscious of my husband, sleeping or not sleeping in Noah’s bedroom, now my husband’s sick room that is starting to smell stale with lack of movement in the air, of his body. Nights like those, I can feel my heartbeat in my ears. (Zoloft has helped; I don’t have any problem admitting that, even aloud at the brunch table or during a meeting. And it’s doubtful anyone looks at me askance because it’s pretty well-known that if anyone needed some drugs to make it through the day, it’s me.)

Ridiculously enough, I consider myself a lucky girl. And that may be the true test of my inner optimist, but I’m not sure if that’s a result of my brain chemistry or my brain on chemistry. Still, I have few complaints despite my many challenges. If I skim through the pages of medical campaigns on gofundme.com, the community fundraising site, I know in my bones that it could be worse. That’s not just a cliché. There is one woman who has had the majority of all of her limbs removed due to a late-diagnosed case of Rocky Mountain Tick Fever. You can’t tell via the page her relatives created, and obviously I can’t ask her, but I assume she still wants to live, and that’s saying something.

Me, I’m astounded every day that I am someone with a story. Sure, everyone has a story. And I’ve always had a story to tell, about my own adoption, my surgeries, the deaths of my parents. But now I have the kind of story that can be donated to, and that meets the criteria for state assistance. (I mean, we have a freaking case worker! Don’t “other people” have case workers?) Our gofundme campaign earned $7500 in 5 days. The story is this: my husband has recently been diagnosed with leukemia. My son, 10 years old, has a seizure disorder and global developmental delays, and more relevant to anything, needs attention; he is not toilet trained, he would stop eating after 3 bites of breakfast, lunch or dinner, if we didn’t feed him, spooning food into his mouth, or hooking his G-tube up to a bag of non-food food. I joke that if there is something for him to run into, he’ll run into it.

Still he’s kind of a typical kid. Just a young one, for his age, cognitively a toddler, but with a will to do things he cannot do. He loves to swim, but can’t actually stay above water. He wants to climb to the highest point, but he doesn’t really know where his feet are when he places them on the rungs of the jungle gym. He loves the zoo, but his vision impairment prevents him from seeing the animals. He demands a lot of energy and patience. I joke (again with the jokes) that he is 1.5 children, so it’s a challenge to be outmanned by him when you are caring for him alone.

But here’s the deal: I’m not sure what I expected. What does anyone expect from life, when you have no idea who you will be as you age, or what will happen on the way? At some point you learn, if you don’t look too carefully at your sorrows, if you glaze your eyes over just a bit when giving them a stare-down, the edges are dulled and you can run your mind along them, like your finger on the blade of a knife, without feeling the cut.

The Gun

August 30, 2015August 30, 2015 ~ sehaldorson ~ Leave a comment

The kids unearthed the gun on an ordinary Thursday. Digging in the sand with their feet and hands like little crabs with toes calloused from a summer spent barefoot at the lake, they hit pay dirt. The gun revealed itself shyly. The intricate designs of the barrel emerged first, and the oldest child dusted away the dirt with eager fingers. This was no delicate dig but an urgent uncovering, a need waiting to be satisfied. They used plastic shovels to scrape around the edges, and more silver became exposed with each swipe.

The barrel of the cap gun was broken, half the tip eroded away either by time, sand, or rough twentieth-century play. The design imprinted on the silver barrel read, Buffalo Bill, and the parents could only deduce that the gun was old and the children who played with it had been children when they were children. The youngest boy loved the gun. He had never been allowed a gun to play with, but this toy was different. This was a relic, his mother said, and somehow that made all the difference. He could cock the lever, pull the trigger, point the gun at his big sister and not get yelled at once.

The gun was unlike anything he saw in his cartoons: laser weaponry that decimated whole planets. This gun was heavy and metal and old. Being nine, old was something to be behold. His mother, his grandmother, they were old. His sister, she wanted to be old. The villains in his cartoons were mostly old. And ugly. But not this gun. This gun despite it’s broken barrel and useless trigger was beautiful, so he held it in his palm when he could, and he hid it in his plastic fishing box below the few lures and weights his father allowed him to call his when he was called in for dinner.

By the end of the summer, he will have forgotten about the gun. At some point he will have quickly put it down on a shelf in the shed he’d been investigating to run down the dock toward his father’s boat and the opportunity to go fishing across the lake. Maybe he’d catch a big one. When his grandfather dies, and his grandmother, who can no longer navigate the many stairs from house to lake, sells and moves into a home where women in colorful smocks and hard-soled clogs will help her dress and clean, he will find the gun again. His sister won’t remember having ever played with it, even says she didn’t remember where it had come from, but he doesn’t believe her.

The gun will be smaller than he remembers. At fifteen, he goes hunting with his father, has just graduated from using a .22 to a rifle, though he prefers a bow. More challenge, and somehow more honest. The gun’s barrel is in his palm, he pulls back the lever, and pulls the trigger. The gun lets off a resonant but purposeless click echoing in the now emptied shed. He knows then that he will toss the gun into the rented garbage bin now parked between the shed and the house as he walks away. But he wishes for a moment he might bury it, bury it in the hard, hard dirt below the sand, so he can stumble upon it again as when he digs his calloused toes into the cool sand.