Cutting Time plus Seven days

“We could have been anything that we wanted to be—
And it’s not too late to change.
I’d be delighted to give it some thought,
maybe you’ll agree we really ought to.

We could have been anything that we wanted to be—
Yes that decision is ours.
It’s been decided we’re weaker divided.
Let friendship double up our powers.

We could have been anything that we wanted to be—
And I’m not saying we should,
but if we tried it, we’d learn to abide it…

…Flowers of the earth,
who could even guess how much a real friend is worth?
Shake an open hand,
maybe we’ll be trusting if we try to understand?

No doubt about it, it must be worthwhile,
Good friends do tend to make you smile.

You give a little love and it all comes back to you.
You know you’re gonna be remembered
for the things that you say and do.”


-Paul Williams
Paraphrased lyrics ‘You give a little love’
Soundtrack from Bugsy Malone.


Cutting Time plus seven days. Tonight the Howler has awoken again.
Whenever she wakes, we all wake. Hobgoblin Pain is crouching on her chest, stealing her air and forcing the awful cries from her.
I am torn, as I suspect we all are, between a desire to cradle her tormented body and yell at her to please…please God…Just Shut UP.
Day and night the Howler is forcing all within the sound of her hoarse, broken voice to grapple with our own survival instincts and compassion, empathy—as if the two could ever really be separated.
But here, in this land, that is exactly what is foisted upon us, from our earliest lessons: Might makes Right, the Creed is Greed, Me first and You later.

Even if you somehow escape this dominant paradigm, there will, at some point, come a Howler into your life, forcing you to choose. How often do we, can we, choose between a total stranger and ourselves? Is there a survival benefit, an evolutionary advantage, for Empathy? I have an idea that there is, and it is far more important than most of us realize. My idea, more and more a Belief, is that empathy is linked with our future, solidly connected with what we will become. Yet for so many of us empathy is a choice discarded when something happens, especially when the meds are late.
The Howler makes hypocrites of us all.

Listening to her winding, drawn-out shrieking brings all of my own pain and fear to the surface, a short journey, and I try to drown out her cries. Yet still, beneath the music, I hear her.
She sings an aria to death. The nurses whisper that she is close, she’ll die on this ward, in the room next to mine, or maybe next week in a nursing home.
Slouching along the hallway, He is near, and someone has left my door open. I do not fear that He calls for me; no, I survived that dice toss.
Instead, I fear that she will not resist him. While at the same time I fear that she will.

An Emergency erupted somewhere near me a while ago, the floor is short-staffed for the holiday weekend and Meds are more than an hour late. All of us here on the Acute Care Ward are hurting. But few are as stunningly vocal as the Howler. It is almost enough to make me run [okay. okay, stagger and crawl] into traffic and do a little howling of my own. Because when you get right down to it, down to the screaming, there it is:
I want my medicine first. And I am wrestling with how I really feel about this.
As I said, the Howler makes hypocrites of us all.

Michael [father by blood and heart] made it to town, rip-rarin’ to help get me on my feet.
His presence completed the circle of family, the circle that will help me gain the strength to walk safely and clear the remaining cobwebs from my brain.

Today I walked again, although not without Vertigo or Ataxia…yet.
Today I saw with my own eyes what lies beyond my door. Tomorrow I will walk to the nurses’ station. After that who knows? Maybe I’ll get to just walk right out of here and leave the Howler behind.
Although if I resign her to memory then I will have learned nothing.

No matter where I go her screams will always stay with me.
And that is just as it should be; it is in the forgetting that we lose empathy.
It is in the dismissing that we carve a piece of ourselves away,
the piece that is a key to our future.
For we can be anything that we want to be.

-End Transmission-
Dawn McKenzie