red.

Skin. it was red. Hair was red. Eyes were red. Neck was red. I worked him over, cold hands all over his warm skin, feeling his disease between my fingers.  Red-blotches pock-marked his red face. Red lines, tell-tale red irritated lines horizontally raised across his neck. I felt for his trouble, I touched it, saw it in his skin. Naked, I stripped the gown from his sweaty skin. Bathed him, red head to red toe. Stiff, immoveable body and spirit, he kept me shut out of his world even as I washed every inch of his skin. I asked but couldn’t understand the story of his body, functionality for him was limited to gross arm jerks and head bobs. So, it was impressive, how he ended up stuck in the hospital with me that day. With his history, they should have known better. It took a lot of creativity, I credited him in my head, for a quadriplegic to finagle that noose of telephone cords around his own neck.

Garbled words spilled out of his mouth like Suessical marbles, but his eyes spoke quite fluently.  Hatred that wasn’t directed at me, but at the fact that he and I were both alive. An Old Yeller–ish crazed fear, not of death, but of life. Fear that he was going to endure another day of living hell, trapped inside a broken body, unable to move his own limbs or verbally articulate his own thoughts. It took me most of the day, but once I learned to understand the language of his eyes, I heard more of his story.

A friend once told me that I could hold an intimate conversation with a tree; true about me, very true. I didn’t need response from him to dig deep into his heart. He was pissed when I first walked in and threw open the dark shades flooding the stark white hospital room with warm natural sunlight. Glaring at me from across the room as if he were tossing daggers straight through my annoying smile, my upbeat stream of excited thoughts and ideas for his day as noxious as acid to his livid stony countenance, I am sure that if looks could kill, I would have been deader than a random pathetic rapscallion attempting to take on Bruce Willis. Working hard, I would put my ear a hair’s width from his red lips, listening, asking for repeats over and over, working hard to make sense of each painfully formed word. Like a student studying a new language with each garbled utterance needing translation, I pulled hard, trying to extract the story buried in him. Frustrated, he would often give up even trying to make me understand what he was feeling or attempting to communicate, and slip into sultry stubborn silence, his escape, his safe home.  But I am stubborn too. And I kept pulling. And smiling. And asking. And letting the sun in.

I wondered, as I touched his body. Touched his red skin, when was the last time he felt love. Felt love in a touch. Felt home. Felt wanted. Seen. Known. Remembered. Valued. Wondered, as I watched his stiff angry reactive red body slowly relax, if I, a strange woman in a hospital giving him a bed-bath, was the closest encounter he had with love. With touch. In a long time.  An angry red quadriplegic man with severe expressive dysphasia, alone in his 30’s. A hopeless case. Surrounded by and absolutely dependent on paid-workers for everything that touches him, food, movement, speech, everything. Who touches him? Who listens? Who fights for him when he doesn’t have the strength to fight for himself? Would he live out the remainder of his life lovelessly lonely?

He remained absolutely flinty in his stoicism. I remained absolutely all smiles in my fountain of hope. And fought him in a bizarre battle for breakthrough. Swinging hope madly above my head like a sword. Wildly hacking away at the wall of stone around his red heart. Refusing to let his suicidal red win.  Smiles and sun smothered by his smoky glower, I swear I caught a glimpse of a slight break in his wall after I bounced in the next day, when a slippery subtle curve tugged the edges of those firm red lines of his.  Laughing and talking about movies and music and making fun of him for liking Prince, spilling joy like an exploding two liter of Coke freshly shaken, my hands washing away his bitterness with warm wet white washcloths on his flaming red skin, he lost. Broke. Couldn’t resist any longer. By the end of the day, he was smiling, joking even, as I held his hand and talked about the next day’s plan for discharge. He surprised me. He was funny. And clever. And intelligent. And I would have never known.

There are a few patients whose faces and stories are etched deep in me. So strange the deep intimate connections I have with complete strangers. Washing his naked suicidal red body, hands all over his forgotten limp limbs, sharing sacred moments with a strange man I would probably never see again, I passionately fought for him to feel worth something. To feel valuable. Even just for those few short days, if he never did again…to feel and experience what it felt like to be alive, and not regret the fact that he was.  He was sent out to an outpatient therapy center for the severely depressed and actively suicidal patients.  Red fingers dwarfing mine in a death-grip, I had to pry myself from his grasp as the stretcher took him away. One more smile spilled out as I leaned in and whispered, my lips touching his red ear, “You are going to make it. You are worth it. You have so much to offer. I wont forget you.” Excited and in a rush, I couldn’t understand the last thing he whispered frantically back into my ear. He said it over and over again, but I didn’t get it until after he was gone.

Laying in bed that night, his red skin and red face in my mind, I googled the phrase I thought I heard him say, “I would die for you…”

And this is what I found…never knew a Prince song could make me cry.

 

I Would Die for You

Prince

All I really need is to know that
you believe…
Yeah, I would die for you, yeah
Darling if you want me to
you – I would die for you
No need to worry

No need to cry

Be your fire when you’re cold

Make you happy when you’re sad

Yeah, I would die for you…

 

Funny, the dramatic impact of a few drops of love on a dry unloved heart.