An emotional day

The day began with a phone call from Canada. A Facebook friend I have never met knows a transgender woman who is being discharged from a mental hospital near Portland and has nowhere to go till she can be admitted to a long-term facility on January 3rd. Can she stay with me? 

I want to say yes, but I have Bella coming on the 30th for a sleepover. I don’t know how stable this woman is. I call her in hospital; she tells me she is being discharged but the shelters are full and have waiting lists. She will have to sleep in the street unless she can find someone to stay with. I am furious that the hospital will put her out on the street. I call a nurse who confirms the situation. “Her medical condition,” the nurse tells me, “does not warrant...the insurance will not cover....” I want to give shelter, to share my warm, safe home with her, but this is a person I’ve never seen. My apartment is only two small rooms. I take time to think, trembling from a grief that is not mine. 

I decide she can come January 1st, as soon as Bella goes home. I can’t give her refuge, sight unseen, while Bella is here. I’m so sorry. I tell her I hope she can find somewhere else for the next three days. Tightly, she thanks me. I know I may not hear from her again, I know she is in danger...from the weather, from men, from strangers, from whatever put her in the hospital in the first place. I want to give her a harbor. But there is so much I don't know, not having seen her, not having met the woman who knows her. It's just a few degrees too uncertain. I feel ashamed. And yet I say, sincerely, "You are very welcome to come on January 1st."

My plan for the day had been to go to Powell’s Bookstore. I go on with my plan, my hands damp with tension and my heart heavy. I find a book of achingly beautiful poetry by a Hawaiian poet I’ve never heard of. She writes of a son with mental illness who commits suicide. I sit in the bookstore, tears sliding down my face. I buy the book. Waiting for the streetcar, my eyes still wet, I see a child clutching her book, lost in some inner world. I make a photograph.

The Permission, by Juliet S. Kono

My son is lying like a bridge
spanning himself from this life
into another.
We will take down the scaffolding
that breathes for him,
each breath a step closer
to where he will arrive.
Hands raised, the nurse snaps the latex gloves
over her hands and unplugs the ventilator.
His mouth falls open
and she takes the tubes and pulls
them out of his throat,
feeding tube from his nose,
IV from his arm.
She leaves the oxygen in for comfort,
the last suspension to his life.
His head rolls back on the pillow.
Slack from pain and tension, his eyes open
and tears roll down his face.
I hold his hand and wipe his forehead,
the things I couldn’t do to love him.
You’re almost there. 
He breathes on his own.
It’s pure reflex now.
His breathing will slow down
they tell me, then fade.
He goes on through the night,
into the next day.
It will be nice where you go.
I give him this permission of love--
to cross the bridge.
I tell him to enter Kaiwiki house.
He doesn’t have to take his shoes off
or shake out his pockets,
filled with the summer he played in.