Rev. Marcia Klepper-Smith on a poet’s view in the ICU

Karol
(a confession)

I composed this poem after having been involved in this ICU scenario, which was challenging for all of us who were involved. It is obviously about cultural issues, but more, about being pushed out of one’s own box as a professional, and about the deep impact of family bonds in the life process as it is lived out in the medical system. I have changed the name of the patient’s son in order to ensure confidentiality.

I come in to the ICU with all
our agendas. Karol, moving
from his mother and bed
side, smiles sadly, knowing
what I know. He greets me
again, the same way as everyday,
with no words to speak of,
as if language misses the point,
which it does. He is Polish,
Lithuanian from birth during a time of earth
shifts and death camps.

Secretly, I pull out my agenda, knowing
from the doctor and, of course, all the nurses
where he stands in these forced decisions
loaded upon him. He stands there
for his mother, 90 years of life, claiming
it for her “to the very last drop.” He refuses
to be persuaded otherwise. It is the other-
wise I have been called here to address.

We, Karol and I, skate our way so far
on ice, thick enough to hold
us both. He speaks to me of God’s hands,
into which we all fall. He speaks of faith,
that there is a God in command in this place,
no less than every place. He trusts
that even his physicians, godless
though they may appear, are members
of this holding.

Try though I might, I cannot move
him from his insistence on his mother’s life.
I am only just beginning to see the fault line here:
My idea of cruelty is not his own.
And, every day, so far, our conversation, his
and mine, ends the same way. His benediction
to our every visit becomes, for me,
his statement of faith:
“God’s hands are holding us.”

Today, having come looking for Karol
in the ritual of my daily routine,
my pockets are full of physicians’
prophesies. The doctor in charge here, having grown mighty
with his own insistence, has just informed Karol,
prior to my arrival, of things terminal, blatant,
and inflicting. As I approach him, Karol stands
stunned, this new opening cut into him. I hold my agenda close,
apart from my heart; I can see him sinking. Even so, I enter,
prepared to speak to him as though he could suddenly
step over the chasm to this far side. And so I fail
to reach him in his falling.

Instead,
a glimmer of spirit strikes
and takes its hold,
moving me over to ask him to speak to me himself
of the doctor’s words. My one eye
is upon his understanding,
the other temporarily blinded
by the place that holds him.

On course again, and not minding me, he answers
in words his own, still salted with “God.”
He believes, I see,
that I have come to him
on common ground: He trusts
I am the chaplain here. I am moved
by this echo of my own calling: It is my place,
in this trust, to take care,
not charge, of both sides here.

Yet, once again under obligation, returning to the
dark of the place, I try speaking
of things true, not kind. Listening
to myself as I speak, of wild
and vicious things like CPR, and DNR,
of in- and extubations, no less
than trauma perpetrated
on this, his mother’s 90-year-old body,
I notice my words
skitter and slide along the ice
we are standing on, thinning.

It is thus, with a final fit of my own unease
that I watch myself hold
out my final meager offering to him:
“There are times,” I say, “when we may get
in the way here.” An apology
I immediately regret.

We are, however, Karol
and I, close enough at this juncture, after days
of moving toward each other from our long
distance, that I am gradually the recipient
of something greater. Speaking of offerings,
he hears, and suddenly invites me into the opening
he has held back from me til now:

He begins, at home at last in his own words:
“My father died young, he was not well,
you become ill in the concentration camps.
He came here but he was not well ever after.
My mother joined him here in this country years later,
with me, too late to have more children.
I am alone here.

There was a time, my first memory, when I was very sick
so sick, so young that I went to sleep; she took me
to a place and a man poured water over my head
and sent us away then to go home again together.
I woke up well.
There was a another time, my mother and I
were in the woods, we were refugees fleeing;
those were hard days, and again I fell
asleep and she fell with me into the water, and she held me
up; she could not swim but she held me up,
and we survived, I don’t know how.”

He spoke to me of his life, of soldiers invading and beating
down doors, of shovings and separations, of bombs
blossoming nearby, of near misses, of a terrified 5 year old
boy only saved by his mother and her determined
courage.

And then he finished:
“There was a time, later, I asked her why
she held me up, and didn’t let me go--she couldn’t swim--
and she told me, because she would fight her whole life
for my life, to the very last drop.

I must do this for her, to the very last drop.
She would do the same for me.”

He then reflected back my own words to him,
now translating them for me:
“Trauma” transformed to “suffering”:
“And what is suffering? It is part of our lives, we suffer all our lives long;
my mother would know this.”
“Medical treatment” resurrected into “God’s gift”:
“To be used by us as a sacrament, a blessing!”
“Prolonging life” passed into “What we do, of course”:
“There are no flowers on the road here.”

Thus I felt myself moved, yet again,
to another’s ground: Who was I
to try Belief, whose very roots
and knots were formed from a life, this soul,
outlasting even survival?

All along his story telling, I watched, and witnessed,
the waters that brimmed to the well of his eyes
as he spoke of her, his mother, his life,
his altar, the common sea below us somehow
holding us up, we three, together.

At last, we meet.

I speak. He listens to my final vow:
That I will honor his mother, his devotion,
and his insistence to allow this choice, his God
in hand, to be the final resting site in this foreign place.
At times, I see, it is enough to trust
that “all will be done” is meant to be
“Thy will be done.”

Now, knowing this conversation
has come to its close, Karol asks me, finally,
as he does in every visit,
to bless his mother, and then him:
This, our daily bread.

Weeks later, comes the time of parting.
Both Karol and his mother will go out from here, alive,
to another place of care, surprising all the prophets in this place.
And still he calls me
to him and to her, to pray. I come as called,
bearing his forgiveness as my stole.

The social worker, present now,
and respectful, has joined us at the bed,
ready, beyond both the words she has sown
and her own unease, for prayer. She and I both know
without saying that I will handle the doctors,
the nurses, and her dilemma, all three,
in their own time: I will answer their unison
voice: “The son’s faith will be in our way unto the end,”
with a liturgy of the spirit:
“And there is so much more.”

And so now, I pray, finally
hoping, just short of trusting,
that it is some greater source
speaking, not I. And I find myself, at last,
without my shoes.

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