The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 46: July 3

Today I went to a barbeque wearing a hospital bracelet. I’d gone to the ER a few days earlier to get antibiotics for a case of strep throat. Normally strep throat does not require a visit to the emergency room, but we are in Maine, and we don’t live here full-time, and the doctors here aren’t accepting new patients, and my doctor in New York refused to phone in antibiotics without examining me, and so I had to go to the ER.

I’d been to this ER eight years ago. All of my information dated back to that time — my old address, my old insurance, my old doctor in New York. My old doctor’s name was on the bracelet they taped around my wrist; on my discharge papers, it was suggested that I follow up with my old doctor once I returned home. Unfortunately, my old doctor was dead. He was killed riding his bike in Manhattan about six years ago. He was a beloved family physician of the sort that is not bred any longer, and thus his demise was newsworthy, inspiring many articles in the papers. In New York his tragedy had been well documented and long ago accepted. Not so here.

The secretary requested I update my information when I settled my bill. Because of my dead doctor, I nearly didn’t. In Maine, computers function as keepers of nostalgically outmoded ideas and things, kind of like historical societies. But I needed to input my new insurance company information, so I updated everything, including the name of my old doctor. Next time I visited the ER, there would be no trace of him.

I kept the ER bracelet on my wrist. Partially I wore it to make myself feel less terrible about erasing him. But I also wore it because of my failure ever to properly thank him for his doctoring while he was alive. He bent over backward to help me, not that I needed his help very much, but when I did, he gave it. I’d repeatedly said to my husband, “I need to write him a note to tell him how wonderful he is.” I never wrote a note. After he was killed, my husband made me feel better about the note I never wrote by saying, “I bet he received so many notes like that.” But what if other people assumed as I did, that all of his patients sent him notes, and thus they did not need to send him one? Maybe he’d never received a single note from anyone.

So at the barbecue many people asked me about the hospital bracelet, including a woman who, after I told her the story of my dead doctor and my subsequent guilt and how I couldn’t, because it was the final connection I had to this man, cut the bracelet off yet, she said, “Wow, that was not what I was expecting to hear.” She declared that, due to this bracelet story, she would need to totally rethink who she’d thought I was. I didn’t ask how I’d formerly been categorized, or how I’d be re-categorized based on this updated information.

Recently I read a piece by Julian Barnes about the painter Lucian Freud. Barnes writes,

In one version of the philosophy of the self, we all operate at some point on a line between the twin poles of episodicism and narrativism. The distinction is existential not moral. Episodicists see and feel little connection between the different parts of their life, have a more fragmentary sense of life, and tend not to believe in the concept of free will. Narrativists feel and see constant connectivity, an enduring self, and acknowledge free will as the instrument which forges their self and their connectedness. Narrativists feel responsibility for their actions and guilt over their failures; episodicists think that one thing happens, and then another thing happens…. Narrativists tend to find episodicists selfish and irresponsible; while episodicists tend to find narrativists boring and bourgeois.

These two approaches might typify our differences as people, this woman and I. She’s episodic, I’m narrative. I see connections everywhere. She’s a woman who has lived many fantastic yet disparate and self-canceling lives. She’s a rebooter, a category shape-shifter. I entered a track in my twenties and stayed on it and on it. She’s my occasional fantasy; I don’t know if I’m hers. But I suspect this is why our relationship is strained occasionally. We remind each other of who we aren’t. I am herself betrayed. She is myself betrayed. I don’t know for a fact, but I can bet she’s told herself, or told her husband, that she’s relieved she’s not me. I have told my husband that I’m relieved I’m not her. I only sometimes mean it.