by Jessica Watson
Speculation itself is a site of departure from our usual way of truth-telling, but so long as our thoughts blend past, present, and future, they contain speculation.
The faces of the living and the dead surface in episodes, abrupt and clarion, like strange objects that suddenly appear hovering in front of me. They often dissolve as soon as they appear. But sometimes their faces stay with me for the day. Their faces are artifacts surfacing from a middens on the shore of Lake Harney, or drowned in the sinkhole of Little Salt Spring that divers probe and retrieve: an arrow-head, a stone knife, a piece of clay flue. Sometimes the vividness of the image is shockingly pleasant, the memory a thing of marvel. At other times, I sink into trepidation that lasts until the memory fades. Gaunt-faced, round-faced, pale, bearded, cherubic, jaundiced, ashen. Kind faces, lonely faces, friendly, warm and cold.
Within the first year of my first nursing job, I learned the post-mortem checklist by rote. I became adept at rolling people into body bags, remembering to zip the bag head to foot so that those that followed, like the mortician, only had to unzip an inch to check the toe tag. Perhaps in an effort to exert some type of order on the situation, I always made an attempt to tie the chin-strap included in the post-mortem kit, in a bow tie to keep the mouth closed, but sometimes people had been intubated for so long that their jaws were too stiff. In the quiet moments at the bedside, room stripped of IV poles and pumps, bedding balled up and tossed in the hamper, shoes squeaking where IV fluids leaked, after family had left with the contact info for the morgue, as I prepared someone for the afterlife, I felt myself begin to unfurl.
From out of this feeling of death, I went home and the neighborhood trees bathed me in peace. When I stood in their proximity, watering the passionflower climbing my chain link fence, or sitting on my stoop, calm swept over me. I could begin to forget those faces, the ones that went to the morgue, the ones that suffered through encephalopathy, sepsis, organ failure. Strangely, my heart would patter excitedly with hope and anticipation. The trees made me anticipate something that I wanted dearly. When I stood on the stoop at night and gazed at the giant live oak across the street I felt a channel of communication open up. All I wanted was to pry it further open.
Recently, I moved across state. I’ve left the job and the tree, but my memory brings me back again and again to those sites of departure, where my self split in two at the locus of each choice. Choices like branches, branching and branching again and again until I can no longer see the ground below me. I’ve thought more than I should about the trees and the unit where I worked. Every time I remember, the memory runs through the same valley in my brain, like the moles that burrowed under the house and through the yard, leaving mounds of tunnels that collapsed like pastries under my feet, pushing up pieces of glass with their naked shovel hands. Memories are like moles that way. One night you go to sleep and the next day you wake up miles away, standing at the bedside with the chaplain.
From across the state, I like to imagine the tree still standing there. I can picture it fully, candelabra limbs loaded with resurrection fern spiraling upwards into the blinding sky. I imagine the boughs still strung with the same lineage of 19th century Spanish moss. If I listen, I can hear the tree creaking, stretching its limbs even wider still, wider than a house, wider than a city block. The sulci of its bark becoming more deeply etched, prop roots bulging, gigantic arms straining to hold their weight as new communities of fern and moss, weevils and treehoppers, red-tailed hawk and blue jays, cover the tree with life. I like to think that when people walk past it, coming from the new restaurants and brewery a few blocks away, having arguments or worried about their future, that they become flooded with calm at the same moment they fall into its shadow. For one moment, their feet tread over layers of the past tangled in its roots, and a channel opens up.
This essay begins with recurring visions of patients I’ve cared for in the past. I recognize how much my dreams and memories of these experiences as a nurse have collected and formed a life of their own, seeming to exist in a separate reality at times. As I attended to a landscape of memory (the faces of my patients), I thought of landscapes I’d visited with historic links to the past. In this essay, I imagine sites of departure, not as escape from reality, but as points of connection between people, moments and places that command our attention: the bedside, memory, dreams, nature and the vestiges of history around us that remind us of a shared past. Speculation itself is a site of departure from our usual way of truth-telling, but so long as our thoughts blend past, present, and future, they contain speculation. In this essay, erasure represents the opposite of remembering, the opposite of conjuring and attending to a moment in time, a person gone.
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Jessica Watson is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of South Florida. She holds degrees in Nursing and Ecology from UM and UCONN, respectively. Her writing themes include mental health, music, the body, nursing and nature. She's currently working on a book of essays that embody one person's experience and observations as a nurse of illness, medicine, and mental health. You can read her previous work in Mud Season Review and Sweetlit.