When there is nothing left to say

I made an unplanned visit to a hospital today. Not for myself, but for someone else. A relative was riding his scooter on Saturday, when it was so nice here, with his wife. Something happened, they slipped on some ice and crashed. The relative is fine. His wife is not. Both were wearing helmets.

After I got done with the U.S. Attorney, I walked a few blocks over to the Hennepin County Medical Center, to what I believe is the severe intensive care unit. They took her to HCMC, because it is renowned for its trauma center, as well as it's neuroscience/brain injury department. I don't know specifics, I don't know much of anything, but I saw a woman lying in a hospital bed. She is in a drug induced coma, with a ring of staples encircling her head where the doctors removed part of her skull. Her brain needs room to swell, so it had to go away for a while. All manner of tubes snaked in and around her every extremity, the mechanical sound of a ventilator quietly wheezed away.

Now, I've seen people in hospitals before. Last year, I had the unfortunate distinction of seeing both of my grandmas in hospitals, neither in a particularly good way. But you know, I have never, ever seen something like I saw today. It was, for lack of a better term, absolutely shocking. I had no idea what to say; I don't think I could have said anything. All I could do was just look, and try and comprehend.

Her husband, who by some unknowable twist of fate left the scooter accident unscathed, has been at the hospital constantly. He had a look in his face, no, his entire demeanor; a look I won't soon forget. A look of grief, and guilt, of an unimaginable magnitude, it could not even be described. All he did was just hold her hand and look at her, so utterly vulnerable. All I could do was just stand there.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the "real" issues of life; of love and living, of pain and of hope, of those things that you think will never happen to you because they seem so melodramatic. Apparently though, such melodrama isn't reserved for the movies. I wish there were intelligent, rational ways to approach these things. But you know, I think you eventually come to a point where there is nothing rational to fall back on. You think you can steer the ship, you want to, but in the end, you find yourself adrift in a raft, not knowing what is going on. Eventually, the waves of life just take you away, and you simply don't know what to do. Both in periods of pain and of joy, you just have absolutely no idea what to do.

I've spent some time now in this raft, a position that became realistically and suddenly apparent the second I walked into that hospital room today. Completely different situations, but both in that category of being all too real and all too immediate. I don't even know how to react, I don't know if I should hope, cry, move on, try and stay strong, or any other of the thousands of responses possible. Sometimes, you just don't know what to do.