Anesthesia

Sometimes when I left the hospital I’d feel so heavy I’d have to sit on bus benches on my way home. Several times the driver on the 49 Mission slowed down for me and I stood up and kept going. It wasn’t easy, watching people walk their dogs, sipping their lattes, pushing their children on swings in Precita Park.

“Higher mommy, higher!”

I wanted everyone to stop, just briefly, and have a moment of silence for the young man who’d just died in Room 8, his head cradled in his lover’s arms, his father running down the corridor, looking for someone to help them.

I knew it was grief that created this heaviness, this weariness that sleep couldn’t relieve. I’d read that after Lyndon Johnson died his wife Ladybird couldn’t move for hours. She just sat there by his side.

“Grief,” she wrote, “carries its own anesthesia. It gets you over a lot.”

Maybe that’s what this lethargy was, this fatigue, a drug that numbed the pain at first, allowing me to slowly come back into the world again. I knew it wasn’t fair, asking everyone around me to have a moment of silence, especially since I’d undoubtedly walked by countless others who’d just lost someone.

I hadn’t stopped for them.

I sat on the bench in front of the corner store on Folsom and Bessie and watched people go in empty handed and come out with cartons of milk, cans of cat food, bags of Cheese Doodles until, after a while, there was a strange comfort in their indifference, one I’d felt before, when it became clear, once again, that in the end, life just went on, people just went on, everything just kept going on, even as I sat there, too sad to move.