* This narrative is the subject of a larger project. I spent a few months with residents at a hospital in New York City in the fall of 2019, looking to learn about them and offer a kind of creative therapy. As noted below, I was unable to introduce a solution to any of their problems… I have kept the name of the hospital and subjects anonymous to respect privacy.
My conclusion for this project is quite different from my beginning intentions. After our first meeting weeks ago, I left deciding to integrate ideas from my senior thesis project into a larger community project. I am writing about food as a significant commonality, and how eating together and sharing food can help overcome social division; particularly in an urban context. I envisioned facilitating a kind of “dinner party” on one of the hospital floors. I wanted to bring people together to eat, to further emphasize my belief in food as a connection point. This, however, changed over the course of working with the community members and learning about the realities of hospital life (on terminal floors). Walking through the Huntington’s Disease unit, it became clear that my project would not help these patients. It would not even prove manageable as most people were strapped to beds, unable to control their movements, let alone feed themselves or eat solid food. This was disheartening, though my larger takeaway had a different focus… I reevaluated my purpose in being at X. It was difficult to think about my “intervention” for a class project, when most patients we encountered were in poor health and nearing death. I felt privileged to be alive in my own able-body. I felt fortunate to be young. I also felt guilty, inappropriate, and without the resources necessary to make even a small change in a person’s life here.
After coming to the realization that any project I would “create” would impact the patients very little, I decided getting to know them would be most helpful. This seems insignificant, but I believe that our small interactions can accomplish a lot. This is also at the core of my food and community building thesis. The patients at X have interesting stories to tell and what seems like not enough people to tell them to. From what I observed over the course of the semester, the nurses are always busy and short-staffed and the patients do not always have visitors to come see them. I am interested in listening to people and learning about their lives, so my project is about meeting with willing participants and having a conversation. I tried to refrain from imposing my will on these people.
A Conversation With “Anonymous” (A)
I find A reading the newspaper in bed, listening to a kind of Spanish music I do not know the genre of. We had only informally planned to meet, about two weeks ago after I met him. A is in his pajamas and unready for me, but agrees to have a conversation anyway. It is difficult for him to walk, as he sustained a hip fracture over a year ago, but A moves a chair closer to me, and sets up an area for us to talk comfortably. He did not want to speak to me from the bed.
I feel immediately as if I am intruding on his space. I must admit, this project unsettles me a little. I am so interested in what people have to say, and yet, I am sensitive to “using” them for my own means. I so want to preserve a degree of respect and comfortable distance (less for myself and more for those working with me). I begin telling A that I have a few questions written out, but mainly, I care more about hearing what he has to say…. About anything. I tell him the tone, the subjects we talk about, and the length of the conversation are all up to him.
Where I might have been hesitant to ask, A begins telling me about his upbringing. He tells me from the start, that he’s made mistakes and thinks about going back and acting differently every day. He looks me in the eyes, but also looks away frequently, exuding a kind of shy but honest energy. A tells me about his childhood and his parents first. He loves his mother but says that she changed a lot after his brother was hit by a car and killed. A was about twenty when that happened. “After that, she got sick. The doctors didn’t say that it had anything to do with her suffering but it did. My brother’s death took a lot out of her and ultimately killed her.” A also says that his mother is his conscience today. “At night, I think about everything I’ve done, and I just don’t feel good.” This lead us to talking about A’s father. A has posters of cars all over one side of his wall. I learned that we both love cars because of our fathers. His father was also a mechanic in the Lower East Side and taught him how to drive stick at about nine years old. He told me about his father falling in love with an Italian woman and leaving his family to move to Far Rockaway early on. Though he didn’t talk about this as something that was difficult to experience, he told me about how unbearably long the A train took to get there from downtown Manhattan.
A moves on to telling me about his heroin addiction. After describing his family, the Lower East Side, and his love of cars, he tells me why he is here and where he was just before his collapse on the Delancey Street subway platform. He says, “I’m not gonna lie to anyone, I’m married to heroin.” Before finding himself on the street again, he tells me about the apartment he lived in, in Woodhaven. “Something happened to the building and the landlord kicked us all out.” A then lived in S.R.O’s where, surrounded by people in difficult situations, he began to use again. Eventually, he fell off the subway platform and was brought to the hospital after fracturing his hip. He came to X just two days before Christmas in 2016. I could tell the story was not pleasurable to recount, so we move on to talking about what makes us happy and gives us hope.
A and I both love music. The second time I tried to talk to him in his room, his stereo was up loud enough for half the floor to hear it, and 50 Cent’s “Best Friend” was on. He says he listens to everything. Music and cars (and women, as his back wall is covered with magazine cutouts of women) are what make him happy. He also has a plant climbing up the wall. He likes this because it reminds him of his Woodhaven apartment where he had plants all over and tended to them each morning. Before I leave, we talk about getting up early in the morning and watching the sun rise. A says he starts every day early and reads the paper or watches the news. I show him a video of the deep orange sunrise I recorded last week.
A is frail but powerful. He has a tattoo of a panther on his arm and wore flannel pants that I could see his kneecaps poking through to the surface. A wears glasses to read. He is reflective and often thinks of his mother. Sometimes his sister comes to visit him, but right now she is struggling through his brother in law’s battle with cancer. He shows me a picture of them sitting by the window; rosary beads draped on the corner of the frame (he has numerous beads throughout his room.) A folds his laundry neatly on the chair or windowsill. He is organized and cares about what his side of the room looks like. He tells me everyone in his family dies of cancer, so he refuses to get certain screenings. He is afraid to leave because he does not know where he will go or what he will do. A says he keeps to himself to avoid conflict. Between the nurses and patients though, he feels very alone here. We agree to meet again next week, though this never happened. A stands over his walker as I go and says that I have made him feel comfortable. I still do not think I have ever received a better compliment.