a book of ordinary people

یه روز بهاری قشنگ عموایرج وخانواده سرزده اومدند
 خونمون..دکترابراهیمی هم اونجا بودوشروع کرد به کردی خوندن. یکهویی عمو ایرج با چشمهای اشک آلوده از جا بلند شد و رفت بیرون و بابا هم رفت باهاش. مامان وخاله ناهید به هم نگاه کردند وگفتند : غلام...
غلام همکلاسی کردشون بود  و رفیق جنگ عمو ایرج وشاگرد اول پزشکی وجراحی.اواییل انقلاب کشته شده بود..
رفت وحسرت لذت بردن از موسیقی کردی روبه  دل عموایرج گذاشت...
یک آدمهایی وقتی میرند تا آخرعمرت از خودت می پرسی: دنیای من چه شکلی میشد اگه مونده بود؟
بعد دایم میگی کاشکی مونده بود حیف این همه قشنگی دنیا که نموند و ندید
حیف این همه عشق آدمها برای این آدم که داره هدر میره..
چند سال بعدش هم دکترابراهیمی رفت سرطان بود
همیشه باسوز کردی می خوند مامان می گفت همیشه دلتنگ کردستان بود

   Today for a moment I wished that we were still college kids and would go on a crazy road trip together again...
  One of us would drive throughout the night, and then in the morning we would stop at some random road stop and get crappy breakfast and pretend its a King's feast and then go on with the rest of our trip. We will have crazy adventures and get in trouble, we will get drunk and call our other friends who could not join us. We will stay at crappy and cheap motels and dream about the time that we are done with school and have money and can afford a nice hotel room.  Who knows if get lucky we have a brush with law-enforcement and stories to tell for the rest of our lives...
  I then looked up and realize that now we are 30 something year old professionals, who are too busy to go on a road trip in the summer just because we are bored. And we all have enough money not to share a crappy motel room anymore, plus who wants to go on a road trip when we can all afford trans-Atlantic trips? And on top of it all, its summer the season for weddings, baby showers, backyard BBQ s and all those, so who has time for a spur of a moment road trip to middle of nowhere?
  Above it all, there is not much of us anymore. Some of us have decided to stay and start their own families, some of us have moved on and barely talk to the others anymore and who knows what's going with them or where they are? And then some of us are stuck in limbo somewhere between staying here and moving on with our lives...
   And yeah life goes on and with it we grow and change, and at the end of the day it's all good. At least we are all intact and alive, even if some of us are nowhere to be found...
    And its alright if once in awhile one of us gets nostalgic for our crazy road trips, sometimes in life you just need to digress and live in the past for a moment before coming back to the reality and getting on with life...

Some days I think this one place isn't enough. That's when nothing is enough, when I want to live multiple lives and have the know-how and guts to love without limits. Those days, like today, I walk with a purpose but no destination. Only then do I see, at least momentarily, that most everything is here.

Gretel Ehrlich, writer, Islands, the Universe, Home

You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words "I have something to tell you," a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

Brian Doyle, writer, "Joyas Voladuras"


  When I was in Paris I told her that she should leave this town soon, before her heart gets completely broken. Because that is what big cities do to people, they break their hearts.  The next time that we met up was in my house in the small town that I live in. I was beyond heart broken, I was bruised all over. I thought that I have figured it all out, I have played it safe. I have followed all the right advices, even my financial planner gave me a thumbs up when she went through my portfolio. I am taking my career to the next level, Thursday nights  couple of us meet up at a local starbucks to draft the business plan for own venture, and it is moving forward. I have a cute town house, I have tons of friends.  I have , I have , I have....
    And yet I am full of fears, full of hurt, and still afraid of rejection.  Every step forward in life, brings out unresolved issues and painful memories. It is as if the more you accomplish in life the more you mess comes out...
   In such situation I would usually get on a plane and go away to a far away and exotic land, and at this point both time and money are tight.
I thought I had it all figured out, I had all the safety measures in place. I even outsourced the tasks that I thought I was not good at. I assumed that I had everything under control and turned out it was all nothing but the sand castles made by kids at the beach...
  Things started falling apart, people started turning against me and I was too fragile to be able to handle things with grace.  At one point I even started avoiding my own family in fear of an unprecedented dramatic blow up, not that anything dramatic was going on but I just knew I couldnt handle anything. Hell I wasnt even going to confined in them about my pains and trials , in fear of hearing something judgmental .
 

  I was not supposed to work that late last night, I mean I was not even supposed to work last night period. I was planning to go to a feng shui workshop and meet up with the interior designer and see if I like her enough to hire her. But then I got called in last minute, it was a favor to colleague who had to attend his son's graduation or something...
   It seemed like a quiet night and I was minding my own business, until another colleague showed me her chart :" Holy crap this girl really wanted to take her own life, look at all the meds that she took." he said. The hotel's cleaning lady found her on the floor of her hotel room unresponsive with a note by her bedside, a hotel in the middle of nowhere.  She was so far out, that they had to bring her to our hospital which is better equipped for her situation.
   The list of the meds that she took went on and on, some of them were her own and some were not. One thing that caught my eyes was long actin insulin, and she was not even diabetic. It seemed like she planned the whole thing for a long time and she knew well too well what she was doing. She really wanted to end her pain.  I looked at her name and I just said :" Oh well and she is Persian too. I bet if I facebook her,we will end up having couple of mutual friends too."  And now I wish I had not said that. I looked at her last name again and something piqued my interest, it was too familiar. One facebook search later and I saw her wedding picture standing next to her father.  He was the man....
    My father said of him :" He served a lot, too many of us, he saved too many lives. I was honored to be his student in med school, and also honored to be his friend."
  I am not sure how did the rest of the night went, but I know I was shocked and confused. I knew that last name well too well, anybody my age who grew up where I grew up knew that last name and had nothing but love and respect for it.  It belonged to a man who did nothing but good to so many people for so many years, saved so many lives in the operating room and yet I was here in ICU witnessing his daughter being intubated and sedated.
   The doctor asked for the social worker to find out who her family is and contact them in the morning. I wanted to tell her, just Google her  last name and her dad will be the first result. I felt like I had to let my coworker about how prominent her family is, where she comes from. I just wanted him not to judge her. Granted she was on tons of meds, for variety of condition. Pain, ADHD, PTSD, depression, nausea and so on... But still, I felt a sense of connection.
  It is one of the rare moments in the life of a healthcare professional when that emotional barrier that you have erected for the sake of yourself and your patients goes down and you become a normal person.  I knew her, somehow we shared same experiences in life, there was a sense of connection.
 I looked at her facebook pictures and I saw the warning signs: the artistic picture of shattered glasses and one from death and those fucking " LIKES," the people who saw her but never actually saw her.
I knew that calling her family is out of question, they have to find out through legal avenues. I am not the one who intrudes or violates privacy laws. I just wish I could have done more, I wondered if I could have gone down to her room hold her hands and say something to her in Farsi, " you think it will be soothing?" I asked my coworker  and he just nodded.. Who knows?
 And then I told him :" I need to find a job where people are happier.." sometimes it is just too much pain to take in.
   When I got off, I called my mother  and then I called a friend. I needed to talk to someone I needed not to be with myself alone.  I went to bed late after looking through her facebook page again crying and had wacky dreams..
   The next day I talked to my sister and she said it must have been more than familiarity that has hit me this hard. Something about her must have resonated deep down...
   I told her I am broken down and tired, and how I almost took a job in pheonix and wanted to leave everything behind. " Nothing is working here anymore, it seems like everything is falling apart..." I told her. She said I had to persevere and try to make things work....
     They say everybody who comes to your life has a gift of compassion, and I wonder what was this fragile, suicidal girl's gift  to me in the middle of a night in ICU?
    Maybe she was there to remind me that I am a human being and its ok to be sad, down and hurt sometimes.. Its ok to feel. 
  I worry about her, I worry that she gets her health back  but then has to go back and face the same things that she decided she did not want to deal with anymore.  And I want her to live, I want her to live her best life. She is so pretty, so young, so artistic. I am afraid that if she leaves us behind all that her father did in his lifetime will mean nothing to him. All those eyes that he gave vision to...
 I root for her and for myself to find our happy selves once again and live the life that we were meant to live...
  I pray for all our pains to go away.....
   

   My older  sister called me to check on me and see how I was doing
  I told her that it was my 7th day of working 11 days in a row... Technically today I was on call, so could go to my favoraite breakfast place and have some food...
  I told her that I just saved someone from seizures, and she said I guess these are the moments that makes your job worth all the effort...
   I never told her the truth, I no longer draw any satisfaction from this job.... I am still good at it, but at this point the rush and the joy is gone. Its a skill, I am greatfull for it. I still feel lucky to be doing something I cherish and admire. But that love, that joy , that connection it is lost somewhere...
  Sometimes I look at my intern with an envy, if only I could feel their joy and their fear and their hesitations.. If only I could still feel.
   These days all I want to do is come to my house, sit in the backyard and enjoy my garden...
      What if one day you wake up and realize that the very one thing that worked so hard to achieve all your life, the main source of pride and joy in your life is not making any sense to you. How do you go back?  How????

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
US essayist & poet (1803 - 1882)


    It was not so long ago when we were all sitting in the nursing station and Dr.K was trying to console one of the Nurses on her father's recent death. He said he feels her since he too has lost his father, and now is blessed enough to have his mother live with him and his family. Dr.G chimed in and said how it took him a long time to mourn and move on from both his parents death , it takes time he said...
   And now fast forward couple of months and we are sitting in the memorial service for Dr. K!!!! when Dr.G walks up to the podium and reads a poem from Ralph Waldo Emerson in the memory of Dr.K......
  He was only 52, in perfect health, all the numbers on his last check up were perfect.  He was a happily married man with two young kids, chief of staff, a very well respected physician. They went back home for his father in law's funeral and on the way back he had a massive MI in the flight back home and now we are all here remembering him.
   His wife said that sometimes she cries herself to numbness, god has taken her angle away and she doesn't understand how and why did that happen?
  His brother was honest, he had nothing prepared to talk about. But how do you prepare a speech for your older and beloved brother's memorial service? 
  They showed us the pictures of him on his last days, with his kids. They all looked so happy together, the way a family does on a vacation. And I wonder if the kids can bear to be that happy in their lives anymore? Since the last time that they enjoyed the life to the fullest they lost their father the very next day, unexpectedly....
    How do you die when you have not prepared for it just yet? When you haven't send your son away to college, when you haven't had that talk about the boys with your daughter yet? When you haven't seen them grow up, guide them through life and been there for them... How do you leave all these behind?
  I was going to ask him a question about his past, about the time that he said he used to practice in Ahwaz, I had a nagging suspicion that him and my father had mutual friends. But we never got around to talk about them.
   One of the patients went to Dr.G and said that he feels angry about death of Dr. K and Dr.G told him that it was grief that he was feeling and it is absolutely ok to feel sad over such a tragic loss....
   Today I walked around the house, unpacking and crying out loud....
      Dad had to put even more stent and balloons in his coronary arteries last week and this Thursday he was suspicions that he might have had an MI...
    This morning I talked to mom, she assured me that she will come to help me unpack and she sounded so down and tired. I told her that it is not a big a deal and I could come stay with them, if they needed me, the unpacking can always wait.
   Funny it is always him, Dad, who brings me and mom together..  In any other situation I would have gotten mad at my mom for forgetting her promise yet one more time and bailing on me and she would have gotten defensive,  and dad would have jumped in and tried to calm us both down. But this time, none of us cared for yet another round of heated verbal exchange.It is not about me nor her anymore, it is about the cruelty of life and the moment that we all realize that we have no control over life and the rug can be pulled from under our feet at any moment....
   You can keep repeat to yourself that it will be alright and it will all work itself out, but deep down you know it is what is, and there is not much that you can do to change the flow of life.  
  You just know that you can't stop loving the ones that you love and  sometimes you can't even question life, that life is not even cruel it is indifferent and it goes on and you have to roll with it because beyond this moment no moment is guaranteed....