Sunday, February 10, 2008
We've frequently used the "royal we" in the sentences that usually introduce this column, often sharing snippets of "our" life that relate to the writing below. In the singular, "we" are Ashley Halsey, and our duties include editing Random Acts. "We" had a bad bike accident recently, and today we graduate from the italic type to write about the aftermath.
At sunrise this morning I lay awake, wiggling the fingers of my unbroken hand with the glee of an infant testing the joy of movement for the first time.
I had watched those fingers wiggle as the operating room approached two weeks ago, wondering if they ever would wiggle again.
"You understand there are serious risks associated with this surgery?"
Yes, I did.
When you lie immobilized, first by a brace screwed into your skull and later by morphine, there is nothing much to do. Unless a face is peering down, as though you are trapped at the bottom of a fish tank, there is nothing to do but think.
Thought begins with the basics: It is good to be alive.
In the aftermath of the operating room, I awakened to another revelation that now reoccurs daily, one that has helped me better understand the joy you find here.
The Random Acts of Kindness column grew from a single, unsolicited submission from Barbara Reck more than a year ago. Her piece about a moment of human decency -- helping an elderly man understand the value of a Starbucks gift card -- drew two or three similar touching reports from readers. Then there were a dozen, and after that it snowballed.
Soon the evidence became overwhelming that it is impossible to lose a wallet or purse around here without some kind person returning it. If your tire goes flat, someone will surely be along to offer help, and that certainty grows with the depth of your need: if you are old or infirm or you are rushing to fetch a child fallen sick. If you fall, strangers will rush to your side.
There is a good chance you will marvel because your angel is of a different skin color, or speaks with a different accent, or is a homeless person who wants nothing in return except sincere eye contact.
I figured that after a while we would exhaust every variation on human kindness, then mothball the column. The wellspring of human decency has proved me wrong.
There were many more submissions that you have not read because, and I hope you will forgive me, they seemed too trivial. Know that readers have labored, without satisfaction of publication, to share their joy at the simplest courtesy: a stranger's rush to pick up something they dropped, the young man who mowed a lawn because it was the right thing to do for an elderly neighbor, a pleasant exchange of words where pleasantries were unexpected.
I've spent my life in a profession charged with chronicling the less loving side of the human experience, and with that grows a cynical view. Still, through my observation of behavior that doesn't make news, not much of this kindness took me by surprise.
Your thirst for it has.
I've never seen such a response to anything I've touched in a newsroom.
Scores of letters come in like one the other day from Thomasine Lyles:
"I am a longtime subscriber to The Washington Post, who from time to time has said, 'This is the day I will cancel my subscription!' Then I read Random Acts. What refreshing articles. Please don't ever stop printing them."
Early on, I heard from a colleague who deals with urban mayhem as a crime editor. His wife, a local TV anchor, comes into your living room every night with a professional obligation that includes an abundance of crime-scene footage. Cynics? No. "It's the first thing we read every morning now," he said.
Even if I was slow to fully comprehend, I recognize that for so many of you the column was an oasis, an affirmation that this is a decent, just world.
Call this schmaltz and I will tell you you've never felt truly vulnerable, that your body has not flown 20 feet through the air, then skidded another 20 down the highway.
We hunger for evidence that there is love in this world and that it will arrive dramatically in our hour of need.
From the first moment I lay on the pavement -- "Please lie very still, sir" -- to this moment as I type with the hand that still works, I have been buoyed by love and kindness.
Some were no more than voices through the morphine haze. They can set screws three millimeters into your skull without killing you. Who knew? It keeps the head from moving, but the people around you are reduced to their voices and their touch. The voices of intensive care didn't belong to people putting in another eight hours until quitting time. They sensed the pain; they shared the intensity. There are seven bumps in the hallway between intensive care and the X-ray department, and every trip, I was told about every one of them.
Can it be that only special people work in hospitals? Or does working there bring out in people the loving nature that you and I pray resides in all of us?
I awakened to familiar faces, friends hanging blimplike above me, and drifted off to sleep with their smiles. Friends who had never come closer than a handshake held my hand for an hour. Comrades from the triathlon club dropped by. One day, most of the bike racing team assembled outside my room.
Friends I have yet to meet filled three Internet bulletin boards with prayers and encouragement.
Much closer to home, two gutsy young kids hung tough at the sight of their dad pinned to a hospital bed.
And that stereotype of busy surgeons devoid of bedside manner? That they cared showed on their faces.
Four hours later, the fingers still wiggled.
Imagine your greatest possible expectation of close friends, then multiply it by 10. The force of their love has been a counterweight the worst pain cannot surmount.
Not allowed to go home alone, I was swept from the hospital and nursed over day and night. When finally they delivered me to my own house, it had been made fresh from top to bottom. The door stays open and friends troop through, spoon-feeding me at first, changing dressings and bathing me, filling the house with so much fabulous food that I try to feed each new wave of guests with some treat left by the last. They have taught me that everyone folds laundry differently, that the purest friendship flows from a bottomless well.
I have been thrust into that world you yearn to read about, awash in the kindness of strangers, overwhelmed by the love of friends.
If you've followed this column of late you know that "paying forward" a kindness seems to be catching on all over. The last two weeks leave me with a lifelong debt to repay, and I will find joy in doing that once the last surgery is out of the way.
-- Ashley Halsey, staff writer
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