I noticed it as a kid before I had words for it. The way adults would speak
around older people instead of to them. The way a room would keep moving while
someone sat in it, waiting. I would watch this happen and feel something
uncomfortable in my chest that I didn't know what to do with. I still don't, really. But I've stopped looking away from it.
When I trained as a CNA I sat with a woman who had been admitted with a stage four pressure ulcer
and could no longer manage her continence on her own. She was in the
kind of pain that reorganizes a person, and she would try to tell you that. She had a
way of reaching for the words slowly, like she was building something, trying
to make someone understand what it felt like to be inside her body. Staff were
not unkind. But wounds need dressing, and there is a rhythm to clinical care
that moves whether or not you have finished your sentence.
Turn. Dress. Next room.
Turn. Vitals. Meds. Next room.
I stayed when I could, but it wasn't enough. I watched her try to be heard
and I couldn't slow the rhythm either, and I carried that with me. I still do,
some days. Not as a critique, nurses carry more than anyone should have to, but a question I haven't been able to put down: what does it cost someone to
speak and not be heard? To be tended to but not seen?
There was a man on the unit who hadn't spoken in weeks by the time I met
him. I sat with him one afternoon longer than I needed to. He looked out
the window. I looked with him. After a while he pointed at a bird on the
ledge and made a sound, soft and deliberate, and looked at me to see if
I had caught it.
I had. I told him so. He nodded, satisfied, and we watched the bird until
it left.
I don't know what to do with that except to say it happened, and that it
felt important, and that nobody else in the building knew about it.
We have decided, somewhere along the way, that attention is a resource best
spent efficiently. Efficiency has very little patience for the elderly, the
nonverbal, the ones who need a moment to find their words, the timid. So we learn to
move around them. We get good at it. We stop noticing we're doing it.
Curiosity gets talked about like a professional virtue, an ultimate move you
deploy in the right contexts when it benefits you. But staying interested in
someone whose life looks nothing like yours, following a story that doesn't
resolve into a lesson, that is something harder and quieter. Most of us stop
exactly there. At the edge of easy.
I think about that woman often. About what she was trying to say and whether
she ever found someone to say it to. About how much of a person can go
unwitnessed, quietly, in the middle of a room full of people doing their jobs.
That feels like too thin a thread for a life.
I noticed it as a kid and felt bad and kept moving, like everyone else.
I don't want to keep moving. I want to be the person who asks, who stays,
who catches the thing someone points at and says yes, I see it too.
Attention is a small thing. It costs almost nothing.
I think we've just forgotten that it's ours to give.