Carl Benner Doesn't Talk Much

Carl Benner doesn't talk much.  Carl, who I have known since age four as my good friend's dad, spent years walking to and from their home to the hospital at all hours of the day and night.  Carl was a vascular surgeon and in the mind of a four year-old that meant when you played the board game Life and landed on being a doctor, you made the most money.  But in reality, Carl was rarely home and when he was he was usually really quiet.  It wasn't until later in life that I had the fortunate opportunity to talk with Carl.

One summer I had been going to the hospital everyday to check on a good friend of mine, George a 99 year-old man, who was dying.  I had no idea what to do other than go and sit and when he would wake remind him of where he was and sometimes who he was.  Needless to say, I don't think I was very helpful. Perhaps when you get that old the last place you want to be is in a hospital and if you are, you hope you came as someone else.   But for two weeks straight, I went everyday after a writing job I had at a local magazine.  All day working on articles about wood ducks and accessible walking trails, late afternoons at the hospital drinking water out of paper cups and trying to ignore the smell as much George was trying to forget where he was.

I recall going to my childhood friend's house after one of these visits, but only to find Carl.  And maybe it was because I had been in the awkward silent hospital for hours next to a dying man that when I saw Carl, I wanted to talk.  Or maybe it was because I wanted to talk to someone who would tell me what I was supposed to do in a hospital: bring music, cribbage, read the Wall Street Journal or make soup.  I just hadn't been around anyone lying out their last days in a hospital bed and I wanted to make sure I was helpful.  Carl laughed.  He told me that's there is nothing right or wrong to do other than to comfort someone, which seems about what you are supposed to do when someone is just as alive as they are dying.  Makes sense.  But Carl also said, "You know Emily, people walk around all their lives thinking there is this great wall between life and death, but really, really it's just a thin line.  And you or I or anyone can cross it at any time."

I've been thinking about that line a lot lately.  No, not so much in the existential sense, but about the idea of lines we build in ourselves.  Lines people draw against you, lines you draw against someone else, lines or walls we build to have as some social worker told me on a chair lift once, "healthy boundaries lead healthy lives."  We see chalked-drawn lines in political ads, debates, arguments, wars, and as you might have guessed it, lines we create in the process of a divorce.  Again, just try to google that idea.  You can google the ideas of anger and retribution with better results than you will with regret.  A lot of break up songs have lyrics of loss and sadness, but not so much on forgiveness and far more rarely can you find a song that isn't a hymnal about forgiving yourself.  Or as my sister has referred to this stage of loss, "yeah, that's the country western song stage of divorce, when everything feels like an absolute."  And maybe for some people, lines or absolutes are part of the process of loss for something you cannot ever have back.

The photo at the top is from Moon Lake in Glacier Park and I adore the reflection of the mountain and snow in the water.  It's hard to differentiate between reflection and mountain.  Hard to see a clear line between.  And this is where I am today.  Maybe you are too in this early autumn air between the warm sun and the cooling coming of winter.  Seasons help with the abstract concepts of the heart.  They remind us of how real change takes so much time and how lines are really useless. And autumn is such a thin line between golden leaves and winter whites.  But when we can sit with it, just sit with the inbetweens maybe then can we become present, and maybe that thin line Carl told me about, isn't so scary, but more like a gift.

Here is another old poem, but one I hope you enjoy about sometimes the best thing you can do for another, including yourself, is just sit with it.

Enjoy.


Men in Parks

In Kielce, I was mugged
by a man who wore eyeliner.
With three teeth,
he told me I was beautiful.

Here, most men in parks smell
of foul meat, wash their faces
in beer and piss
standing up.

They curse Mary,
their mothers and call out
to Cyclops or buses
they never get on.

One night, I passed a bus
stop and heard a man crying
Przeprazam, Przeprazam,
Polish for sorry.

I just sat with him in the snow
and never once tried
to say anything. I just nodded,
and mouthed the word with him.