Rhapsody on Blue + ICUs

Joan Didion is a storyteller with whom I feel a strong and visceral connection:

Her references to fire season in Malibu. Berkeley’s English department. An adopted daughter. New York’s magazine industry. The shit show of shooting in Mexico. A husband’s sudden heart attack.

Tonight, a line in her latest work, Blue Nights, gives me pause.

Didion is struck by how many of her memories involve visits to the ICU. The many hospitals. The multiple cities. All with the same blue-patterned curtains and disturbingly medical sounds. Nearly all of her ICU flashbacks are accompanied by the patient’s subsequent death. 

My own encounters with loss rarely involve ICUs.

To me, the ICU represents insider trading, borrowed time, luck.

Put another way: the ICU represents other people’s experiences of loss.

I am more familiar with the non-negotiable, after-the-factness version. The ICU almost seems to be—dare I say it?—a luxury. A civilized departure from the usual phone call or coroner’s visit. My experience is with the quick death, swift death, sudden death.

But because the ICU words belong to Didion, I’m taking pause.

Taking stock.

Acknowledging that I do have friends and relatives who are HIV positive. That I do have a pair of 90-year-old grandparents with heart conditions. That I do have a family history of cancer and kidney failure.

That it may be a matter of time before the word luxury in reference to ICUs is replaced by a familiarity with blue-patterned curtains.