Boat On A River
I needed to take a break from the hospital and took three mental health days to stay home and lighten up.
I might have been imagining it, but it seemed like my friends were reaching out less and less, which was understandable, because all I could talk about was AIDS, AIDS, AIDS, grief, grief, grief. I was full of stories about the patients and those who loved them and were afraid of being left behind. Day after day after day, the numbers kept expanding, the sadness mounting. I could see what burnout did to people who worked on the ward too long. They stopped caring, couldn’t care anymore, couldn’t hold it, couldn’t watch it anymore. They went in and out of the rooms saying as little as possible, looking down, looking away, looking anywhere but at the person laying in the bed. They just couldn’t carry it anymore.
Someone had given me a cassette tape called Boat on a River and I smoked some grass, popped it in the boom box, and laid back. A man’s mellow voice told me that building awareness around my thoughts could be helpful, and that the purpose of this exercise was to practice observing my thoughts without getting caught up in them.
“Lean into curiosity,” he whispered, “knowing that maintaining a non-judgmental stance is key to creating distance between your thoughts and your reality.”
I rolled over on my side and pulled the blanket over me and started to slip away.
“Imagine yourself next to a slow moving river as a boat gently passes by.”
I tried to do that.
“As your thoughts arise, put them on the boat.”
I placed the thought that this tape cassette was a little too woo on the boat, and then quickly added a bunch of others as well.
“What am I going to do with myself, what should I eat today, who can I talk too, why can’t I cry anymore?”
“Every thought you have, pleasant or unpleasant, goes on the boat,” the soft voice whispered, and I thought there aren’t enough boats and then had to put that on the boat too.
“Allow the boat to float. Don’t try to push it away. Let it stay until it’s ready to go.”
I couldn’t quite see the river or the boat.
“You don’t like boats?” Mr. Mellow asked, and I thought get outta my head.
“You could do this with leaves on a stream,” he whispered, “Cars on a highway. Clouds in the sky.”
I remembered sitting at the Woolworth’s lunch counter with my mother when I was just a boy. After you ordered the waitress wrote on a piece of paper and put it through a window and then a few minutes later a little door opened and it appeared, moving along on conveyor built. Apple pie, tuna sandwich, cup of coffee, chocolate cake, they all appeared and moved along, like a little train, until the waitress grabbed them. I remembered watching an ice cream sundae going round and round, over and over, but the waitress never got to it in time, so it never went to whoever ordered it.
I got sad, remembering mom and I sitting at that counter, so long ago, while the ice cream went round and round and round as it melted away, and I finally cried and fell asleep.
Nowhere near the AIDS ward and it still found the grief anyway, through an ice cream sundae going round and round because nobody got to it in time. Sounds like your body knew what it needed before you did.
While whoever was the voice on that tape might’ve meant well, the AIDS crisis unleashed a tsunami of grief there weren’t enough boats for. Aircraft carrier-scale vessels were needed…but there weren’t any.
My vivid sense - however feeble it still is - was that it was left up to you and others in your straits to build the vessels that were needed, when you had no materials or other resources, or even the skill, to do so, at the outset. That they eventually got built was a miracle - and even there, I can see there was a lot of flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants - you, and so many others, were dealing with a catastrophe that was unprecedented, that the medical establishment was paralyzed over, that governments either didn’t take seriously or if there were any that did, had no clue as to what to do.
Time, and reflection, leads to the profundity you show here. But it has taken you this long, with this much pain, to get down in words. Thank you for this understanding, and bless you as you go on, Ed.