November 2019: Days by Philip Larkin
On the first day of class this semester, my co-teacher shared the poem Days by Philip Larkin with our students. It’s very short, and it goes like this:
I memorized this poem in the hospital during the limbo of this fall. On September 24th, something happened, and for three weeks, my family and I were suspended in trauma and grief, pinballing from hope to despair and back again. We spent most of our time on the third floor of the hospital, which was shaped like a U once you left the intensive care unit. There was a waiting room on one side, then a long, narrow hallway, then another waiting room by the bank of elevators. I preferred the long narrow hallway. It was usually empty, and there was a line of small windows along the wall, with just a view of sky. I would pace the hallway, sometimes on the phone, sometimes crying, sometimes numb. Other times I would lean against the wall and squint at the clouds in the blue sky and negotiate with god. I memorized Days in this way, standing in the hallway, line by line, trying to answer the question.
Days were not meant to be lived like this, somewhere between heaven and earth, at the mercy of doctors and diagnostics, numbers, charts, machines, probabilities. Yesterday I heard the mechanical whir-snap of a hand sanitizing station and I flinched—it was a noise from the hospital, the kind of noise that became more familiar to me than any other. The two tone beeps of the machine. The gurgle of a drain, like a sick fish tank. The neutral voice on intercom that could be heard hospital wide in the hallways - code blue. Code red. Stand by. Sometimes I took the emotional landscape of my family sitting vigil, and I multiplied it by all the other beds and patients and doctors and families, and the weight was too much to bear. On Day 18, I called Emily from an empty waiting room, face down on a couch. “I feel like I’m calling you from another planet,” I whispered. On Day 9, I had left the hospital looking for a place where I could cry, in private, away from the hallway and the beeping and the people. I had to walk all the way around to a parking lot in the back, where I crouched by a shrub in the sunshine and lost it. On Day 14, I looked out of the window from the room where we sat vigil and realized that we had a view of that same parking lot, and that same shrub, and that anyone could’ve looked outside to see me sobbing, in the place I thought was private but was not.
Sometimes the long hallway had empty beds in it, lying in wait. Sometimes there was a person lost, looking for the intensive care unit. I could tell by their bewilderment that they were new. For me and my family, it was Day 20. I showed the bewildered person where to go, what phone code to dial, where the waiting room was, where the nurses could be found. I later heard her on the phone in the waiting room, in an earlier stage of a nightmare we had already been through. She was saying the same words we had said, words too clinical and now too private to even write here, but my heart broke for her, for whoever she was on the phone with, for whoever was in the bed in the ICU where she sat vigil, too.
Some days my brother was there. I showed him this poem. That’s good, he said, voice quiet. Earlier he had sat across from me, crying, and I couldn’t go to him, because we had to give each other space to cry. He took a walk around the hospital to sob. I didn’t tell him about the shrub where I had crouched the week before. All of this is madness. What are days for? They come. They wake us. They wake us!
If you rewind to that first class of the semester—the Tuesday after Labor Day, the classroom air conditioned, all of us still in summer clothes, the students with the poem in front of them, and I had just seen my step father, I had just hugged him goodbye—no one could know that a clock was ticking, that the days were running out. We discussed the line breaks. The symbolism. The rhythm of the lines. The imagery. My co-teacher gave everyone a writing prompt: write about the day that brought you here.
Where can we live but days?
When my stepfather died, we were on a different floor, with a different hallway. Shorter, with bigger windows. I went there to call Emily and tell her. I put my head down on the windowpane and sobbed. I made more phone calls, looking out at the blue sky, the one that had afforded me no miracles. I live here now, we all do, in a world without the man we love. Day 1 had been just a text message from my mother while I got a coffee on my lunch break. Just FYI, the text began. Oh mom, I wrote. My brother replied: if he’s already at the hospital, it’ll be ok. The day turned on its axis, through the looking glass. Time and time over.
xo,
c