Not All There in Breathing Lessons

He's not "all there" anymore, and he is so very young. He's the same age my significant other was when he died back in the late 1990's. My Kevin died of an aneurysm; this man has had two, plus a stroke, and he's been lucky enough depending how you look at it, to still be alive.

He talks well, more or less, though sometimes his thoughts come out skewered and make him sound a bit weird, though not dangerously so. His speech is fluent, though some words present him with trouble. They are always the same word. "Coffee" is one of them. When the meal planner comes along to help him oder his meal, he always wants coffee, and invariably uses the same gestures, saying very clearly, "Some words are hard to say.

His bed is by the window, and the curtain between us is partly open. I can tell he is watching me with curiosity, and I feel strange writing about this man who is only feet away from me. He's not asking questions, which is fine. I'm doing my best to look very busy, and he is kind enough not to want to bother me while I am otherwise occupied.

"I used to be a nice man," he said to me on his way to the bathroom yesterday, "but I'm not anymore. Too much. Too much. Things exploded and it was too much. Boom. Boom. Yeah..." His words wander, and his thoughts follow. With some it might be the other way around, but he is not just any ordinary someone. He is a blessed child of confused light, and we're all of us not there if we miss the boat he's sailing and can't follow. I know that I, for one, have been missing something, until now.

I think he's a nice man still. His voice betrays his goodness, the goodness that he seems no longer willing to acknowledge, maybe because his mind can't do that anymore. It's hard to tell.

He gives the nurses a hard time about his medications, not because he means to be difficult, but because the pills they give him here don't look exactly like the ones he gets from the drugstore and has when he's home, and his confusion leaves him paranoid. It's hard to reason with him, though he is not unreasonable, it's just that his train of thought derails itself from time to time, and logic logic becomes a thing of the past for him.

And here I sit, complaining to myself about my lousy lunch, when just feet away from me is a man who lives in a world that confuses him because he simply isn't "all there" anymore.

Shame on me.

He tries so hard to "fix" himself and his situation in life. He means to overcome whatever obstacle he is presented with as it emerges from seemingly nothing to obscure the path he's walking. Damn, I hope he makes it. I'm in his corner all the way,and to hell with lunch being inedible; there are other more pressing concerns in the world.

Ah, the lessons the random people who come into our lives can teach us....one of them being; sometimes we are none of us, "All there." We look for a way to make the pieces of our puzzles fit, and the truth is, they're not meant to fit. Maybe he knows that, and if he does, in some ways he's way ahead of us, and that's what makes his "Not all there" so special and brilliant, and our "not all there" merely a sign that we haven't got a damn clue.