Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Hermit Walking

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/thr.2023.a903945

1939-9774

Patrick Denman Flanery,

Empathy and Medical Education

Hermit Walking Patrick Flanery (bio) 1. The Page of Cups “This is the present,” my friend the poet says, placing the card with what looks like a slight hesitation, as if trying to decide how to soften the blow. It can represent narcissism or, more positively, self-care, she tells me. In 12 hours, I will fly from Australia to Omaha to try to see my father before he dies. I will not make it in time. For more than six years, my father has been in 24-hour nursing care, at first walking only with the assistance of a frame and an aide, but in the last year hardly walking at all. He held steady throughout the pandemic, never falling ill with COVID, but suddenly, as we approach the 37th anniversary of his mother’s death on Halloween, his body and mind have decided this is the time. He does not make it to the end of the month. I do not make it to Omaha to join the nurses and chaplain for his last breath. I arrive 10 hours too late, pacing around his bed in the middle of the night and talking to him as if his spirit is still present. I do this despite not believing in spirits or souls or ghosts, but this interlude begins a process of talking to my father in ways I have never done in 47 years. Before I arrived, the nurses placed a silk rose on his body and covered his bruised hands with a blanket. I remove the blanket to see the hands that once terrified me, hands that were often covered with the black ink of a reporter’s felt-tip pen and that broke my nose when I was three. His left eye is slightly open but not enough for me to see the iris or pupil. His mouth is closed. The body is already cool but not yet cold. His expression, the waxiness of his skin, reminds me of images Peter Hujar made of corpses lying at rest in Italian catacombs. We are not Catholic. We are, perhaps, Protestant. His parents were embalmed and buried in California; my father wanted his body donated to science but never completed the forms necessary to make this possible. In any case, his body mass index is so low it disqualifies him from making such a donation in the state of Nebraska. I have decided he will be cremated. Alone with my dead father’s body in the middle of the night, I scan his bookshelves and find my own copy of Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker, which has mysteriously found its way into his library. “Thus here am I alone on the earth, having no brother, fellow, friend, or society than [End Page 158] myself,” Rousseau writes in an opening that strikes me as an apt description of how my father saw himself, a cast-out and isolate wandering in search of company that always proved elusive. His greatest fear was dying alone, as his own father died alone. If I had wanted to reach him in time, I should have been on a plane the day I spent walking around the Adelaide Hills trying to decide whether to go. At least the nurses and chaplain were present. Circling his body now, I play Laurie Anderson’s Songs from the Bardo on my phone. We are no more Buddhist than Catholic, but in the early hours of a morning in October, I walk through and around and past belief. Belief is a forest that withholds meaning, that refuses belonging, whose pathways are always solitary. 2. The Queen of Pentacles On past visits, I have stayed at a Hampton Inn, the closest accommodation to my father’s facility. This time, however, I decide to stay downtown, near the Old Market, where the dining options are better. The poet friend who read my cards before I left said to me, “Maybe this is the time for a little indulgence. The Queen of Pentacles is the earth mother. She would want you to look after yourself, to splurge.” I spend twice as much on a room downtown as I would...