"Compassion is the ability to snuggle up to pain."
I received this quote from my spiritual director last weekend on our Ignatian Spirituality retreat. I was explaining my role at Miriam's and how torn I feel sometimes between opening myself up to being hurt or let down and heading full speed into broken-ness. She gave me this quote.
Compassion is the ability to snuggle up to pain.
Tonight I think of three men, three very different men, who in the past 48 hours were FD-12'd at Miriam's Kitchen. An FD-12 is a forced detainment of someone who is likely to hurt themselves or someone else. It's when a person's rights are taken away and the person is usually admitted into a psych. ward for evaluation. These three very different men have touched my heart in ways I never thought possible.
Man #1: A lot of internal stimuli and is usually re-enacting Vietnam battle scenes in our dining room. He yells and scares me often because he can be very impatient but once in a while he'll surprise me, and I catch him singing. I catch him humming the songs from Soul Train or Studio 51...ghosts of his past and I wonder. He leaves me wondering, "what was he like before shipping off to Vietnam?" He was FD 12'd and detained for about three days.
Man #2: A WW2 Vet. who traveled the world in the Navy. This man yells often and shouts at things only he can see. He can be impatient and gets angry very easily when asked to repeat himself (which I have to do often because I cannot understand his mumbled, low voice sometimes). He has a fascination with Michael Jackson and was FD 12'd only a few days before Man #1 and was held for less than 24 hours. When he returned to us, he couldn't control his drooling because of the meds he's on.
Man #3: Man #3 is my favorite man to come to MK. He is about 32 and is jumbled. His thoughts are simple and reminds me of a child. Every day, he walks into MK and asks me for two spaceship pictures off of Google images. In those five minutes every day, I check in with him, ask him about his day, his life, his highs, his lows, etc. These are my favorite five minutes every day. On the day he was FD 12'd, we had to wait for the police to come so I distracted him for an hour and a half with the same movie preview of "Prometheus". Scary movie...when the police finally came, it was really sad to see him go. It was sad to realize that this man cannot take care of himself; that this man, who's only joy in the world is space, has slipped through the cracks. He touches my heart. His life has changed mine.
This man is scatter brained, usually yells across the room at our staff and motions his hand like a trigger and fires it off in random directions. He laughs and mumbles to himself, but he has moments of love. He looked at me once and said, with his stutter, "hey, hey, hey, Katie. You got nice hair." and then followed it up with, "for a white woman." My friend escaped from the psych. floor he was on and came back to MK. We had to keep him detained until the police arrived so we gave him a haircut and took about an hour and a half to do so...I watched as he visibly and metaphorically changed in front of me. I watched the ratted and matted hair, full of bugs, come flying off and his unruly and wiry beard shed from his chin and he changed.
When he was taken away for the second time, I went home crying because I was frustrated. I am frustrated that a man has been so left behind. A man has no place to go, nobody to love him and no understanding of that loss. It saddens me and breaks my heart.
I could say that about all three men though. The "system" has failed all three of them. So my challenge is not to flee from this reality. My challenge is to stay and be the person who will be there, who will feed, listen, love and print off spaceship pictures for them. It's my challenge to snuggle up to the pain, no matter how much it breaks my heart.
