The Background Body

Attention is one way we tell another human being: I see you.

At the end of my week-long dance intensive, I found myself talking with one of the women in the class, a nurse at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

I asked whether the hospital would still have records from my years there, whether they’d have been digitized, and who would know how to find them.

She was incredibly helpful, so I asked something else, something I’ve never asked anyone who would know.

“Do children still get left alone in the hospital? Or was that just something that happened to Gen X kids?”

She didn’t hesitate in her response.

“Unfortunately, it happens all the time,” she said. “It’s a long road and families get exhausted, with their jobs, other children, hopelessness…”

I thought about the little girl I used to be, who grew up believing she was unlovable.

Believing isn’t quite the right word, though.

I knew it.

I knew I was unloveable. That’s why my father never visited. That’s why my mother didn’t stay.

I was 10, 11, 12, 13 years old, a girl growing up alone in a hospital bed, incapable of asking for what I wanted, unable to bother anyone with anger or sadness or need.

Abbreviated excerpt from Forager:

I don’t have pajamas, but the nurse hands me a tray. On it are light-blue pants, with little flowers and a drawstring, and a dark-blue top. Both are soft and worn, and smell a little like bleach, and I put them on, even though the pastel blue makes me think of the clothes I was wearing when Duchess died.

I look out my tenth-story window at the city, the endless gray asphalt, the tiny cars moving in all directions, like toys in the hands of boys. Everything looks so small, although I am not very big myself, which confuses me. I’ve never looked at anything from so high up in the sky.

Mother says it’s time to get back to the family.

“Why are there so many cars?” I ask her. “Do they look like toys to you?”

“You’ll be okay here,” she says. “The nurses will take care of you.”

“When you leave in one of those little cars, will I be able to see you from here?”

Mother doesn’t seem to hear me. She uses the hospital room bathroom, and I wait for her at the window, still staring at the street until it becomes too blurry to see. I hear the toilet flush, and I realize then that I am wet with my own tears and I must clean them up quickly, with the hospital shirt. But it is thin and already obviously wet, and I am beginning to panic, because she will step out soon and see this mess I am making. Which of course she does.

“Stop it,” she says. “You’re embarrassing me.”

I choke back the voice that keeps wanting to come out of my mouth. I gag with the words I don’t want to say. I fall on the floor, on my knees, and say, “Please let me come home with you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You have to stay here. You’re sick.”

“Please don’t go.”

“You’re not a baby. Get in bed.”

I don’t stand up. I can’t. I kneel next to my IV pole, hugging it like I’m a monkey in a zoo. I don’t hear Mother leave, but I hear the sound of the door as it closes behind her. I climb into the hospital bed. An overhead light is on, but I don’t know how to turn it off. So I nestle my head under the covers until I am burrowed in so deep it’s dark enough that I can pretend to be anywhere, like in a sleeping bag under the night sky.

Night after night, I wait for Mother to return.

I get moved out of isolation into a room with a bald girl named Sandra. Sandra is eleven, which sounds much more grown-up than ten, but her father calls her a little girl and tussles his fingers on her head, as if there is still hair there he can play with. My father has never called me a little girl or touched my head.

Mostly, Sandra is quiet and talks only to her parents, who are there nearly all the time. I watch them come and go. Sandra is thin and physically fragile in a way I think I, too, will be someday. Maybe soon. In the evenings, when her father is there, I am grateful I am farthest from the door, because when her father visits, he weeps. I have never heard a man cry, so all I can think of is Jesus, and how Jesus wept.

I try not to look at Sandra’s father when he weeps, but I can hear him, even when I push my face down into the pillow.

I want to pull my curtain shut whenever he comes in, so that he won’t feel bad, being watched. But if I get up to do that, he will see me. I wonder if he even knows there is a girl in a bed behind a half-drawn curtain, who can hear him cry and watches each of his moves, because he is the only thing moving in this room at night.

In the evenings, when it is darker outside than it is in our room, I stare at the window more than usual, drawn to the way it reflects me back to me, my body superimposed against the lights of the city, the motion of the streets. When I look outside, I also see myself, and I am reassured to see I am still there.

Mostly, I pretend to be asleep. My body hurts from being in bed all the time, but I am proud of how little I need to sustain myself.

Sometimes I have to get up because I need to use the bath room. I hope I’m not bothering Sandra’s father when I try to sneak into the bathroom, dragging my IV pole on wheels. But her father doesn’t seem to notice me.

I am used to being invisible, so this doesn’t surprise me. I can even hide in plain sight. Maybe this is my superpower. They say I may die in here. But I may not.

They give me bone marrow tests and blood transfusions, and sometimes I cry out. But then I remember how to hover above my body, like I learned to do when Grandpa’s boys touched me, so I do that now too, and the pain feels like it’s happening to someone who isn’t me.

The nurse says good night to Sandra’s father on the way out. Maybe he thinks I am asleep, or maybe he doesn’t think of me at all. She leaves the light on. They always leave the lights on in he hospital. Since it’s never fully dark, you can never see the stars.

When she leaves, Sandra’s father begins to pray out loud. He weeps. He begs. But Sandra dies anyway, and I get a new roommate in the hematology/oncology unit of Children’s Hospital. I will have another roommate soon, and another one after that, and another one after that.

Mother is embarrassed by me, and I am embarrassed by my weakness, and it’s taking so long for me to get better; sometimes in her frustration, she asks, “How could you do this to me?”

Mother spends her visits asking the doctor and nurses questions about the treatments and trying to figure out the paperwork for how to process all the payments through the Ronald McDonald House, which is covering the bills for us. Mother says the world sees us as poor, but we are children of God, not man, so while we must pay unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, we don’t have need of their coins. Dad has never come to the hospital, so he doesn’t have to worry about things out of his control. Mother handles all the particulars.

There is a lot Dad will never see and a lot Mother won’t notice. They don’t see the shiny floors or the colorful patterns on the nurses’ outfits. They don’t see how they clean up blood without anger, without reproach. They don’t see the needle marks in the creases of my inner elbows or the bruises on my inner wrists, or the thick tape on the back of my hand that holds a needle in place there all the time, so that the nurses don’t have to take it in and out. They’ll never know how all these needles prick and protect me, like the layers of pine needles I used to sled on down the San Andreas Fault.

I learned what it felt like to lie quietly in the background while everyone attended to something else. I became very good at disappearing, very good at needing very little, very good at not inconveniencing anyone with requests.

And still, all over the globe, there are children lying in hospital beds, waiting for someone to ask why they’re still awake. Waiting for someone to ask their opinion, listen to what they think, care about what they want.

Curiosity is one way we tell another human being: I see you.

I asked the nurse what it would take to volunteer at Children’s Hospital, and when I got home, I filled out the application.

The girl I was back then didn’t get what she needed, but I can honor her by showing up for lonely children now. And I can honor her by giving the woman she grew into what she needs.

And what I need now is relationships with people who notice when I’ve gone quiet, who wonder what I’m carrying, who are paying attention and are curious enough to ask.

Because attention changes us.

I can’t go back for the little girl I was.

But I can stop staying where I am a background body in a bed.

In your second week of The Secret Garden, what did paying attention to your practice reveal to you—about you, or about someone you love? How has your practice changed the way you see yourself? Or the way you see someone else?

Who Am I?

I’m a writer, teacher, and lifelong forager. Raised in an apocalyptic cult in the mountains of California, I learned to survive off the land and listen for what lives beneath the surface.

My memoir, Forager: Field Notes on Surviving a Family Cult (Golden Poppy finalist), tells the story of how I left everyone and everything I believed in, and why.

Today my work explores how attention, creative practice, embodiment, and the living world help us become more fully alive. Through this newsletter, retreats, workshops, and seasonal communities, I invite others into that practice.

And if this practice resonates with you, please share with a friend.

---

---