Some Lines Written from My Hospital Bed
thoughts on roses, chronic illness, and time
1.
As many of you might already know, I am sick—again. I visited the ER twice this past week with prolonged complications from a viral infection. I was hospitalized last night due to my autoimmune issues. Please pray for me and my family.
I am fatigued in a way I haven’t felt since my recovery from sepsis, which means I won’t be long here with you. I have to type with my right hand, pecking away at the keys like a fourth grader, because my left side is decked out in hospital paraphernalia. My brain is foggy from a terrible headache, and my thoughts are quite melancholy at the moment, so I won’t be of much help to you today—other than to say, “Here, I am. I am hurting. I am scared. But I am showing up to write!”
As I dare to show up and create right from my sickbed, I feel a solidarity with other writers and artists who have done the same—like John Keats, Frieda Kahlo, Virginia Woolf, and Jean-Dominique Bauby. Trying to create something beautiful or frame a narrative around suffering that is all our own is not only a transcendent act; sometimes, as history shows, it’s even heroic.
There is no heroism here, but I can promise you I am a woman who is desperately trying to transcend the unending suffering she is facing.
“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work; you don’t give up.”
– Anne Lamott
2.
Over the past three weeks I have been slowly working on a poem about the complexities of chronic illness, which was inspired by the two dozen roses my mother brought me when I took to my sickbed. It is one of my most ambitious poems, and I don’t think it’s complete quite yet (Ever the perfectionist!). But I do want to share it here right now, as an act of transcendence.
Writing these lines gave me something to do. Something to think. Something to love. And, hopefully, something to give as an act of HOPE, when I found myself suffering alone for days on end, as everyone I loved was called away—and rightly so—to live their beautiful and glorious lives out in the world.
Perhaps it might hold just one of you.
That is my prayer, my hope.
3.
So, please, read “Things Only the Roses Know”—a poem in five parts—and be seen.
THINGS ONLY THE ROSES KNOW by Kimberly Phinney