As Long as You Need by J. S. Park

Author:J. S. Park
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2024-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

WORTH CONTINGENCY

The next time I see Mayzie, he’s in handcuffs. In the Emergency Department. He’s in the trauma bay. Stab wound. Self-inflicted. But he has also swung the knife at someone else.

Mayzie enters as a Doe patient. Frenetic Doe.

His bed is angled up nearly ninety degrees. I overhear someone saying his trauma was downgraded from Level 1. It’s not as severe as it appeared. There’s white sand all over his body. He recognizes me right away. “Chap, hey chap,” he says. He raises his hand but forgets about the handcuff. The way it clinks, it jars my memory—my mother arrested, her silhouette against a fog of red and blue.

“Chap, let me talk to you. I wasn’t trying to hurt anybody. See this?” He points to his stomach. There’s a laceration, about two inches. “I did that to myself. But they’re cuffing me like this for my safety, they said.”

He looks away. Sees the officer walk past. Sees a few of the nurses.

“Chap, can you close this curtain? I don’t . . . I don’t like being out here like this.”

I close the curtain behind us. I ask Mayzie, “Was there a reason you did that to yourself?”

Mayzie tells me this is his annual death wish. About once a year, he tries to find a way to end everything. He tells me it gives him a goal, a finish line, enough to get a sudden strength to walk again, a “bad sort of strength,” but it’s almost pain relief. This time he has gone to a beach with a knife, to watch the water a final time. But somebody intervened, a crowd gathered, the police were called.

“The pain gets to be too much. It’s like my bones are trying to get out of my skin. It’s real bad. Real bad in here.” He lifts his hand again, clink, points up to his temple. “I just . . . I start picturing myself as this blob floating in the clouds. And nobody wants me down there on earth. I’m this worthless blob with a useless body. I’m finished. With everything. I wake up the next day and I ask myself, Why didn’t I die? Why didn’t I just die? I start thinking this is the only thing I can really do.” Mayzie pauses a moment, then just almost, a hint of a smile. “Times like this, though, I’m trying to remember what my sister said. She was always saying, ‘You did enough today if all you did was today.’”

Mayzie goes on to tell me his sister Raneeta is very involved in disability justice, which encompasses not only the physical, but also the social and political.3 The grief of disability is not only over body, but over a world that assumes equal ability. “The fragility and weakness of my body I can handle,” Alice Wong writes. “The fragility of the safety net is something I fear and worry about constantly.”4 Or Meghan O’Rourke on chronic illness: “It took years before I realized that the illness was not just my own; the silence around suffering was our society’s pathology.

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