A patient of mine has a young son. He knows that his mom is dying. When I asked how he’s dealing with it, she told me how he will tell her things he is sad about: trivial things, matters it is likely easier for him to pour his sadness into than the imminent loss of his mom.
When I have been visiting this patient, working sometimes in vain to manage her symptoms, I often drive away with frustration and despair as my companions. Some days it is too hard to carry the weight of it, the futile endeavor of trying to make her comfortable, increase her quality of life, buy her a little more time with her kids. I have noticed that on my drives away from her house, the idiosyncracies of my 20-year-old car become less endearing than usual. In fact, they handily become the target of my frustration and sense of failure.
Take the absence of a driver door handle. The cable that controls these handles tends to snap when your Jag is more a couple of decades old. The first time it snapped, my mechanic found me a new door handle in a junkyard. Okay, it wasn’t quite the same color as my car, but it worked and I was so delighted to actually be able to open my car door like normal people again. Then that cable snapped. I wasn’t about to plunk down another $350, so I decided to live with the quirkiness of it. No big deal, to just leave my driver side window open enough to reach in and open the door from the inside. Okay, it may look to a lurking cop like I am breaking into my own car, and yeah, on rainy days the driver’s seat gets wet, which is more than a minor inconvenience since the leather also has a big gash into it so rain gets into the foam of the seat and really soaks me if I unwittingly sit on it. But hey, small price to pay.
The trouble builds when I have to drive on the freeway. Since the electric window controls are also broken, I can’t put my driver side window up and down from the inside. (Are you still with me? This is getting sort of tedious, I know, but persevere, there IS a point to the story.) So if I have to drive on the freeway, it gets really noisy and on cold days, really cold. Jessie and I have devised a sleek and streamlined solution to this problem that I feel speaks to our innovative problem-solving natures. When we need to drive somewhere with the windows closed all the way, so we can actually hear each other speak, she gets in the passenger seat. I stand outside the car and I lock the driver door, which on old Jags means all the windows close. When the windows are closed all the way, I quickly UNLOCK the door, turning my key just enough to unlock but not bring the windows down. Then Jessie leans over and opens the driver door for mom from the inside. I gracefully enter my car and we drive away, quietly chuckling at the absurdity of our lives. At least we never have to describe to anyone, we both think, the ridiculous measures we have to resort to just to drive around and hear each other talk.
I think my point here, started long ago up there in the first paragraph, was that sometimes we are dealing with stuff that’s too big for us. So we put it on smaller stuff. That way it’s easier to deal with. I’m about to head off on my Climate Ride. With the bookending weekends, plus Memorial Day, I will be gone for 10 days. More than one of my patients may die while I am gone. This is almost unbearably difficult for me to consider. One way to deal with this is to get really really mad at my car for being such a heap of junk. It uncomplainingly drives me around all day long, starting up without a sputter every morning (this has not been true of all my cars, thus I am secretly grateful every time it is true of a vehicle I own) and really asking very little more than periodic coolant and motor oil top-ups (bit leaky on both counts). And yet I can get verbally abusive at the lack of door handle or the way the cup holders don’t reliably hold cups when I turn a corner (hot coffee in the lap more than once).
Still, better than having to face up to the fact that when I return to work on May 29th, some of my patients may not be around to welcome me back.
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