REENTRY: Life After Near Death
When they discharged me from the hospital, the nurse asked me if I wanted the clothes I was wearing when I came in. I had no idea what those were, but I replied “Sure” in an automatic kind of way. Was it good luck or bad to keep the clothing you wore when you almost died? A celebration of victory over the SUV that pinned me to the wall, or a morbid attachment to it?
These were the thoughts in my head as I waited for a delivery of neatly folded mystery clothing, but the nurse returned with a trash bag in her hand. I didn’t look in the bag until I was outside of the hospital doors. The leather biker jacket, which had once been my stepmom’s, was on top, ripped in half down the back. With a visceral shudder, I realized they cut the jacket off me as they were trying to save my life. I walked over to the trash can and threw the garbage bag away.
I hailed a cab and returned to the apartment on 103rd and Lexington, walking up the same steps where I had almost lost my life. The pain was already starting to nag at my consciousness and I was ready to get inside so I could take one of those awful pain pills that put me into a death-like slumber — no dreams, just nothingness.
It felt surreal to stand in that little apartment again. I was worried about how I’d manage to care for myself physically, yet excited to be on my own again. I felt afraid that life wouldn’t be like I remembered, yet overwhelmed with gratitude that I was alive and so many people loved me. Conflicting emotions swirled in my body. I told myself the only way to handle it was one day at a time.
My dad arrived from Virginia the next morning in his military surplus coat and blue jeans. He picked up groceries and cooked for me. He helped me change the bandages on my right leg, which looked like some kind of Franken-flesh, soft and grayish and stitched onto my thigh. He paced the apartment like a caged animal when we weren’t watching TV.
He hated New York, never understood why I’d live in a concrete jungle. But after a week, the guy at the bodega remembered his name and how he liked his coffee, and I could see the affection setting in. I laughed when he used his bloodhound-like sense to find the cheapest happy-hour beer in the entire city, at the little Dominican restaurant around the corner.
I wasn’t drinking on account of those awful pain pills, but I sat with him anyway, giving him a break from playing nursemaid in an apartment barely bigger than one room of his house. I was proud of the old man for being so tender and nurturing. His soft side reminded me how much he loved his daughter, how afraid he had been of losing me.
We walked home from the Dominican restaurant very slowly, as I hobbled on my Franken-flesh leg. People on the sidewalk streamed past us endlessly, rushing on their way to work, to a hot date, to pick up the kids, to make it to an audition, to cop some drugs, and all the various motives for New York’s endless sense of urgency. I felt like a stone forcing the river water to take an alternate path on its race to the ocean.
I used to be one of them, I thought, impatiently rushing past elderly folks and moms with strollers and girls who’d just gotten out of the hospital like cats with nine lives. Would I return to that state of being one day? Or would I remain connected to the time when I was the slow-moving blockage on the sidewalk, and remember that life is too short to rush so much?
