When It All Goes Wrong Again

The Course of Doom has stuck once more.

This morning, my entire class arrived at 8 AM, sharp, for a lecture on Child Abuse, as part of our ongoing lecture series about things you should look for as a physician who may see children, and who—therefore—has responsibility for being an intervening force when necessary.

Again, this is a lecture that I had a personal connection to. When I was in my earlier years in high school—largely the pre-Joey years—I had several good friends in band. I became especially close to one of these friends, as close as siblings. He was on the wrestling team, so sometimes when he had matches, he would pick me up from home, and I would go watch him. Often, he would pick me up early, and we would go to Lake Rabun Park and talk for hours, sometimes, before he had to be at pre-match weigh-in and warm up. We would sit on the swings, roll down the hills, talk at the docks; we took an immense amount of joy in simply sitting and talking, the perfect pseudo-familial bond.

One of these days, he started talking hating his dad. I knew he hated his dad; he had hated him as long as I had known him, and I am sure he continues to hate him to this day. He talked about hating his dad because his step-mother had abused him, had thrown him into a radiator when he was seven, had done all sorts of horrible things to him. How he would sit on the roof outside his room, pray for wings, and never got them. He didn’t believe in his father, and he didn’t believe in God. On both accounts, I think it would be hard to blame him, no matter who you are, no matter what you think.

He had learned to be resilient, had learned to bandage his hands when they got burned, had learned how to lie low and how to escape bad situations. He had gained the ability to intuit who around him was just like him, the others who had been beaten, abused, thrown into radiators and ignored by their fathers. When he held out his hands, they showed no scars. He liked it that way. When we talked about how small my hands were, we would reach out and touch smooth palm-to-smooth palm, and he would wrap the lanky ends of his fingertips over mine. We liked it that way.

So today, when we were sitting around, wondering where the absent lecturer was, wondering why things go wrong all the time, I couldn’t help but think of him. I couldn’t help thinking of me, sitting across from my brother on a park bench, reaching out to touch the non-existent scars on his hand and touching, instead, the very real ones on his heart.