No Feelings

There has been a very sad death on the ward today, the child in the room next door no less. Leukemia patient and recipient of a bone marrow transplant. And I don't feel anything.

We heard the news this afternoon via the unofficial grapevine, but the basic fact was confirmed later by the staff. In a sense I've had no time to process this event, I've been 'busy' doing various things. I was doing some work on my laptop, we've been out this evening, Kay had to clean her teeth a couple of times, etc. But a little while ago I arrived back at the McD house and sat down in the library, on my own, door shut. It occurred to me that I'd not spent five minutes thinking about the aforementioned event.

So I started to push my thoughts in that direction...   ...and met a kind of solid wall of resistance. There seems to be some kind of mechanism in my head that won't let me contemplate the implications of this tragedy. I just cannot imagine... whatever. I have no feelings or thoughts about it.

I'm amazed. I thought that the human mind had some kind of morbid magnet in it that polarized itself towards tragedy, examples being all the rubber-neckers in cars driving past an accident on the motorway or all the other kinds of disaster tourists that we have come to know and love. But in this case my mind is reversed polarized, my morbid magnet swinging definitively away from the contemplation of tragedy.

It's a strange feeling, there are lots of unformed misty thoughts flowing around in my head that would like to find their way through my fingers onto this page. But try as I might to grab one for examination & dissection and it slips out of reach, repelled by the very effort. What is this? A defence mechanism? A kind of subconscious fear of facing an evil? Or have I simply become inured to this kind of fear and suffering? Am I/are we going to end up suffering some kind of post-traumatic stress when we get out of here and try to reenter the real world and recalibrate our senses & values for daily life?

Oh, I'm so tired.