In the Hospital Pt. 1 (Children)
March 22, 2021
Dear reader,
this week I’d like to talk about a song I wrote called Children and how my experience in a Behavioral Health hospital helped me complete it.
This song started with me singing to our younger generation and hoping that they continue to act as passionately and fiercely as they’ve been so far. I was especially thinking about the work of repairing this broken earth they are being saddled with.
“Children will you stop the sun from beating down on everyone”
They’ll be dealing with the greenhouse gasses, increasing natural disasters and rising sea levels perhaps long after I’m dead. I’m praying and hoping for them daily.
Then the song sat up on the shelf for a long time… years. I went through renovations, painting walls and mudding rooms, I went through the pain of a marriage separation and then I landed in a Behavioral Health Hospital for multiple things but most prominently because I determinedly did not want to live anymore.
The first two days there I hardly left my bed. I started out in a room with a woman deep in the grasp of a schizophrenic delusional state. After a difficult and emotionally draining interaction with the first nurse I met, I finally got all the hygiene elements I needed to take a shower. I turned to my roommate— it was past 10pm— as I gathered some clothes and asked,
“is it ok if I take a shower?”
“Baby, this is your room, you do what you need to.”
She looked at me with kind and confident eyes. This was one of two times I saw her in a lucid state. I am grateful that I met her this way because of what followed. For the next 5 days she yelled and screamed for hours a day. After that first night I was moved to a different room at the very end of the unit and was glad to find myself placed by a window. Still, 5 doors down the hall I could hear her screaming and wailing all night long. Unfortunately, this precious woman developed a deep distrust and disdain for a particular nurse and ended up jumping the counter to get to her. She perceived her as a threat and in that way became a threat herself. No one was seriously hurt, but damage had been done. I think of her often and hope she has found peace.
I met another gentle and kind young man with Tourettes who was unable to stop himself from shouting profanities and sometimes aggressive sayings. He apologized profusely and often. His eyes were just as kind as my first roommate’s.
I remember being unable to interact socially with anyone for the first 4 days. I just sat in bed and read, wrote or slept. My books: My Brilliant Friend (the first of the Neapolitan Novels) and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. 4 or 5 times a day I would go outside with the smokers and squish myself into a corner of the fence, in the grass and sun, and try and imagine walking in the woods. I read there too. Words, written and read, were my steady, obsessive companion. Eventually I began to open up to the other patients and found a little group of quick friends….
After getting out of the hospital I turned back to Children with a new perspective. I still saw our younger generations and yet they had gained new company. Now I could see those friends, some of which I left behind in that captive place. I felt very clearly that I was singing to them as well:
“Children will you help me find the last place I left my mind. // Slipping through my cracking skin, saving up the wrath within. “
The song began to take it’s final shape as I sang,
“He shouts for nothing, they play the games// She jumps the counter, I watch and pray”
I’m sure I’ll have more reflections in the weeks and months ahead about my time in that place. I’m sure I’ll write many more songs influenced by that time of deep distress, of quirky friendships and captivity as years pass but for now I’m content to have written one song for and about those lovely people, broken, hurting, vibrant and tremendously resilient.
Until Soon,
Remona Jeannine