Don't Blink

So, I apologize in advance.  I wanted to write you guys a nice happy entry, with all of the fun free community outings we were going on lately and explaining all of the awesome adventures I've been having.  But then, something happened last night that changed what I'm thinking about and, well.  That's life I suppose.  A turn of the dice.

Last night, I had to go into work because we had a group of high school students from Seattle Prep volunteering for Urban Plunge. I was really, really excited about them -- I miss working with kids and teens, and I was happy to be given the opportunity to lead them.  They were serving dinner and talking to the residents - it's part of a bigger program at their high school. I didn't even mind coming into work on a Sunday night - I was going to be a part of these kids' experience with homelessness and the other half.  I felt like I could be influential.  Maybe they'd remember me, or something.

The kids themselves were adorable.  Their eyes were as a big as saucers as they walked into the Wintonia, and I could tell how nervous they were as they began serving the meal.  One of the boys had braces, and looked like a giant puppy, all arms and hands and legs.  They did well, though, and talked with people and shared their food with them.  All in all it looked like it was going to be great night.

As they were getting their food and I was supervising the dining room and food line, a man (we'll call him John, even though that's not his name) suddenly went stiff and couldn't speak.  I recognized immediately that he was having a seizure.  He's an older man, probably in his late 50s.  Everything seemed to freeze. I broke into a run, sprinting down the hallway to the front desk and shouted at the front desk staff that John was having a seizure.  He hesitated, and then sprinted away from me into the kitchen.  "Call 911!" he yelled over his shoulder.

I grabbed the phone and punched in the numbers.  (I am continually surprised at how calm I am during a crisis.  I've had a few medical and other emergencies in my time, and I am always struck with how calm and in control I am while in the moment.)  The medics are used to coming to this building, and sometimes take their time because they are called on so often.  This time, they hurried.  This man's life was on the line, and I made sure that they knew it.

I went back into the dining room, and a terrible scene was in front of me.  John was laying on the floor, white as a sheet, turned on his side.  He was no longer seizing, but had bit his tongue and so was bleeding quite profusely.  I think he might have hit his arm when he fell, too.  A crowd was around him -- though, the residents had a strange reaction.  Some of them were quite worried, and gathered around him, and yelling at him to hang on.  Others sat in the back of the room and ate their dinner quietly.  When I questioned them to see how they were doing, they shrugged.  "That's the way this life is," people seemed to feel.  With as much pain and death that they have seen in their lives, they were unfazed by the situation in front of them, and it seemed to cement their resigned feelings.  It was eye-opening, in that way.

Meanwhile, the sophomore high school students were watching the whole scene play out.  I tried my best to keep them distracted.  I paused dinner, and sent them out into the dining room to talk with residents so that they would be able to have personal contact with the people they were serving. To be honest - I didn't really know what to do.  John stopped breathing multiple times before the medics arrived, but he still had a pulse.  But, there's something about the human spirit that knows when another is leaving this world.  He was dying, and it wasn't hard to see.

The medics arrived and did their best to take care of him.  Years of watching Grey's Anatomy still didn't quite prepare me for the real thing.  No cute doctors sipping coffee here.  The sickening reality is this: alcohol will kill your body, and will kill you.  Years of living on the streets, years without doctor's visits, years with the deadly combination of drugs and alcohol, lack of nutrition, etc, etc etc -- those things take years off your life.  A body can't handle it.  And so, it gives up. It moves on.

They took him to the hospital last night, and that was the last I've heard of it until this afternoon.  My first update this morning, my supervisor told me that his family opted to take him off life-support.  Around 1:30, the manager came into the office with my supervisor and I and told us that he had passed on.

As I drove home last night, I stopped at the lookout by my house.  There's a place on 12th Ave that lets you see the entire city.  It was slightly rainy, dark and damp.  The city glowed through the darkness.

I'll admit it - I was pretty upset.  I felt weighed down upon by all of the hurt in the world.  A heaviness had settled somewhere between my ribcage, and all I could do was cry it out or drown.  I cried for everyone - for John, for the high-schoolers.  For my residents, so caught in their addictions they cannot escape.  For their families, who have to deal with it.  For myself, so far away from everyone and everything I know.   I cried for everyone who has ever been broken, and cannot or will not crawl out of the brokenness.  For everyone who has ever felt alone or forgotten in the world. I cried for the invisible: the funny, charismatic, friendly people I work with every day who are stuck in a cycle of poverty and addiction.  I cried because I cannot save everyone.  I cried because, at the end of the day, we have to save ourselves.

Why do bad things happen?  We have been asking this since the beginning of time.  Job fought God on it, all those years ago, struggling with the same question we all do every single day.

I wish I could tell you that I found some dramatic realization answering this question last night, as I prayed through my tears. I wish I could tell you that everything is always going to be okay, and that everything happens for a reason.  I wish I could write something life-changing, that makes everything nonsensical make sense.

Sometimes, things just happen.

And, in the words of Albus Dumbledore:  "We must try not to sink beneath our anguish, Harry, but battle on."

This morning, I walked into work this morning from an e-mail from an acquaintance I had in middle-school.  "Thank you," she writes, "for your kindness."  She wrote that I was the only person that she recalls being nice to her, and she remembers it, all these years later.

Goodness.  Badness.  Why does any of it happen?  Will we know?

I'll leave you with the words of Sam Shepard, who wrote A Lie of the Mind, which I had the privilege to see last week.  It is the final line of the play, after three hours of pain, heartbreak, and despair.  It is the only thing I thought of last night, when my tears slowed and I looked towards the Seattle skyline, lit up against the dark, dark sky.  The mother walks into the blizzard, and looks out into the darkness.

"There's a fire in the snow," she says.  "How could that be?"