I spent the first day of my internship memorizing rules: "Staff should never make unnecessary physical contact with patients. Patients should never be allowed access to sharp objects. Staff should never let patients see them cry...."
By the end of the day, the message was clear: This was a residential treatment center for adolescents, not a recreational center or the setting of a TV drama. I didn't understand all the rules, especially the one about crying, but I was determined not to be intimidated. I was determined to comply.
But then I met Matt. He was 14, but was short and had a cute baby face. Matt looked like he was 10. He had been sexually abused and beaten by his stepfather since he was five.
In general, Matt had a great sense of humor and was fun to be around. Sometimes, though, he would get angry. His face would get flushed, his vision blurred and he would lose the ability to speak. Eventually, he would end up in a tiny room with only white walls, screaming for hours, banging his fists against the floor and tearing phone books to shreds. They called it an explosive disorder. And I had to work hard to stop the moisture from welling up around my eyelids.
But then there was also Michael. He was 15 and had scars all over his pale skin. He sucked his thumb and had a teddy bear who was a constant companion. The staff told me that when Michael first came to the treatment center, he had refused to speak for two months, and that he still said little to anyone. I quickly discovered that he loved to write, so we began to communicate through paper and pen.
I remember one correspondence in particular. Michael had been worrying all week about visiting his father, a supposedly reformed alcoholic who had beaten him repeatedly. The day before the visit, we were sitting together in the cafeteria, carrying on a written conversation. At one point, I wrote to him, "Michael, it's okay to be scared sometimes." He read my words and then stared at me intensely for a while, his frantic blue eyes disturbing me with their intensity. Finally, he scribbled something almost illegible on a piece of paper: "But it doesn't seem fair that I have to be scared every day of my life." I looked up from the paper to see his eyes still devouring my face, searching for some sort of answer. But all I could do was avert my gaze and bite hard on my bottom lip. The only thing I could offer Michael was a stoic insistence on adhering to the rules.
About a month into my internship, the entire staff crammed into a small conference room for an unscheduled meeting. We discovered quickly that the meeting was about Kristy, about why she had been so sick lately and spending so much time at the hospital. It was because she was dying. She had AIDS.
I looked around the room. No one said anything. No one expressed any emotion. I was baffled. We loved Kristy. I loved Kristy. Even though she was bipolar and often moody and depressed, she still managed to laugh at my jokes and respond to my feeble attempts to help her with her problems. Didn't anyone care about what we'd just heard?
Suddenly, my resolve broke, and I became disgusted with rules that didn't allow people to cry for children who had been ignored and tormented all their lives, who needed desperately for someone, anyone, to show visibly that they cared. And so I released myself, and waited for my pain to wash over me and spill out my eyes. Finally, I had decided to let the tears flow... but they wouldn't come. A 16-year-old girl was dying before my eyes, yet I couldn't remember how to cry for her.
And for some reason I thought about reading the newspaper over breakfast that morning, and how I had received the news that the Bulls won another basketball game with the same emotion that I had read about people slaughtering each other in Croatia, which is about the same level of emotion that I felt toward wearing cow flesh on my feet, the sweat of abused factory workers on my chest and a watch on my wrist that cost more than many Americans make in a week. Reluctantly, I then thought once more of Kristy, and realized my emotions for her suffering, an individual with whom I had a personal relationship, were not any different either. And slowly, softly, almost unconsciously, I started to sing to myself the words to a song from a musical I'd seen as a child: "I dug right down to the bottom of my soul to see what I could find. And I cried. For I felt nothing. I felt nothing inside." And then I began to cry.
Joshua Weber is a Trinity senior.
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