Warm Blankets
I’ve begun this post several times since September, and each of those beginnings was written either in an emergency room, a hospital room, or a sick bed. I had an appendectomy; my husband and I had covid; I had complications from surgery/infection; my husband had a wicked case of food poisoning. Not the sort of health emergencies that severely compromise or end a life, just ones that hurt and cost a lot. Neither of us had spent time as patients in hospitals as adults, and as children we’d only had one routine surgery each: tonsillectomy, herniorrhaphy. Our big discovery of the past few months, or my big discovery anyways, was the Warm Blanket.
If you’re also lucky enough to have not spent a lot of time in hospitals, allow me to explain. Warm Blankets are thin, more like a huge dishtowel than a blanket. The best of them have been washed to a fabulous softness, like a t-shirt you’ve had for decades. They’re kept in a warming cabinet, and when a nurse or tech smooths one over your body, you barely feel the weight of it, but the warmth is enveloping.
As a teenager I had juvenile arthritis, and on particularly rough nights my father would rub my knees and elbows with a blend of Aspercreme and Bengay. If you’ve not tried this combo I do recommend it, but it’s only going to help if someone who loves you applies it. Just as salt brings food to life, tenderness infuses OTC topical rubs and dishtowel thin blankets with a healing capacity they do not possess in and of themselves.
My appendectomy turned out to be a bit of unplanned medical tourism, and as I was leaving Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a tech folded a last Warm Blanket across my shoulders. “You can keep it,” she said, “for the ride back to your hotel. It’s cold outside.” I swallowed tears. I was dreading the Uber across town, the walk across the hotel lobby, and the flight back to Atlanta in less than forty-eight hours; I felt as if this tech understood all of that. She couldn’t erase those challenges, but in her openness and kindness she gave me fortitude and strength.
It's not easy to hold one another in this way. Among the beginnings I wrote but did not follow for this newsletter: “I mostly feel furious these days in the face of genocide, war, climate change. It's absurd, the situation in which we find ourselves as humans. Nothing remains. Not our health, our loved ones, our communities, our planet as we’ve known her. I read so many excellent pieces addressing the issues facing us a people. What else is there to say? We’re saying it, and saying it, and still we’re barreling toward oblivion.”
A couple of years ago, I took an online course titled A Year to Live though Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California. The course is based on the book, A Year to Live by Stephen Levine, and it was taught by the blazingly kind-hearted Vinnie Ferraro. There were hundreds of people in the course, hundreds of us imagining as best we could, for a year of our lives, that we’d received a terminal diagnosis. And among the hundreds of us imagining, there were some for whom this was true.
One of the meditations involved sifting through one’s life for the kindnesses. I found more than I could ever list, and I discovered that what I’d been told by so many teachers is true: none of us would be here today had we not been shown kindness. Someone gave us food, shelter, warmth. Even for those of us who didn’t receive enough of these things, there was still enough to perpetuate life. There’s no guarantee of receiving enough of anything to survive our wholly dependent infancies and our largely dependent childhoods. We are the species responsible for war, genocide, and climate change. That we’ve survived the worst of ourselves long enough to meet together in the space of this post is a miracle worth noticing.
I think it’s helpful as well to examine how we ended up so lucky as to be here, reading this. That exploration leads me to the many societal and cultural inequities that benefit me as a white, cisgendered, middle-class American woman, and it also leads me to the best capacities of the human heart. Both/and. I can address the inequities only to the extent that I can apply the strengths of my heart. And sometimes, this work takes longer than a calendar month, especially when those little four-week chunks are tough. I’m glad I didn’t force any of this essay’s earlier beginnings to their natural end. You deserve more; I deserve more. Nihilism is a stepping stone, not an endpoint. I’m reminded of this from the Dalai Lama: “’You should prepare in your mind that life is not easy. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.’”
I brought that hospital blanket back to Georgia with me. It remained a Warm Blanket even after it cooled because it was imbued with the tenderness I’d received. I had plans to embroider it. I had plans to write its story in longhand on beautiful paper, tuck it into an envelope, and pin this envelope to the blanket for the future to find.
But then Grant’s turn to visit the emergency room arrived. We were experienced by this point. We knew we’d have a long wait; we knew that wait would be cold and uncomfortable. We brought the Warm Blanket with us not only because of the qualities it had developed through good use, but also because, in all honesty, it wasn’t a precious item when stripped of its history. Thin as a dishtowel. Dingy white. Frayed along one edge. Grant snuggled under it in the waiting room, in the triage area, in the ER room, in the ambulatory holding room, in the room to which he was admitted. Other Warm Blankets joined the one we’d brought as the nurses and techs at Emory layered him up. We remained able to identify the Boston blanket though. It was grayer than the rest, and it smelled of our home detergent.
Grant had food poisoning, as you may recall from the opening paragraph, not any of the horrible cancers for which they scanned him. It only took a couple of days to confirm this, but those days felt long. I know that every person reading this has some familiarity with the particular bardo of Waiting on the Test Results. We spent the 19th and 20th of December in that space, wondering if we’d exit through the Merry Christmas door or the Collect Your Child from the Airport with Dire News door. We got the door we wanted, and we were reminded of the loved ones we’ve lost to this sort of death: one day they were well, and the next day they were not, and then, in what will never be enough time, they are gone.
When it was time for us to leave the hospital, I left the Warm Blanket from Boston on the bed, an emigrant from one community of kindness to another. Grant and I felt so held by that blanket during the final months of 2023. It was a dingy, common, overworked talisman, and that was what we needed. I couldn’t in good conscience pull it from service to become a sloppily embroidered family heirloom for some overwhelmed future ancestor of mine to haul to a thrift store. If you visit Emory at Emory, maybe you’ll encounter this blanket, or maybe it will, by then, have emigrated once again.
To the blanket givers, thank you.*
*including my son, should he read this. He works as a tech at an ER in downtown Denver. He sometimes reminds me that when he was younger and would complain, I’d ask, “What are you going to do about that?” I meant the question to be empowering, but what I communicated was “That is yours to fix. Good luck.” And so, both because of and in spite of my parenting, he did; he does.
