I'm bothered by persistent memories of the scared kid in the mass casualty biohazard drill in which I participated on Saturday. Who thought it would be a good idea to provide a child with ample nightmare fodder by exposing them to such a gruesome simulation? Whether or not the kid could grasp that the whole event was pretend, it must still have left some enduring images are of an incapacitated dad and a bubbleheaded apparition in a silver biosuit trying to talk reassuringly through a gas mask. I don't particularly think we need to screen kids from a developing awareness of the oft-arbitrary nature of life, but why hand them the script for the story of their enduring fears?

In the part of me that's just human, I wanted to pick him up and take him out of the whole thing. I would have liked to erase the moment for him -- to return him, if possible, to whatever state of partial grace existed before the drill started.

Here is part of the story that takes place off-camera: I am about four and walking with my mom in a slippery stream bed. She falls and breaks her tailbone. Unable to walk, she crawls back to the house and calls my dad to come take her to the hospital. The only fragment that makes it into my actual memory is when I stand outside the door of her bedroom listening to her crying and not knowing if it would be okay if I went in. Feeling and hating my smallness. Not just the smallness that keeps me from physically protecting or helping her, but my mental and emotional stuntedness that keeps me so childish and scared and needy when something more is clearly needed.

Then the guys attack my dad in the parking lot as we're leaving Barnaby's restaurant where we used to go for pizza in town. They mean to stab him but fuck up and only slug him with the handle, so we're running for the car and then he's slumped over in the passenger seat and my mom is yelling at us to lock our doors as the guys beat on the car. She backs out violently, almost hitting one of them, and we're careening out of the parking lot and out to the emergency room. I'm still so small that I can't do anything about any of this stuff that's hurting my parents. In the emergency room while we wait there's a woman who had boiling water poured over her and she's just sitting there shaking. I want to heal her. I hate my inability to do anything but sit and wait and be afraid.

I get stung by a nest of yellowjackets and have an allergic reaction. Someone pulls out in front of my sister's car and in the crash she shatters the bones around her eyes on the steering wheel. I break my arm playing football and wait for a doctor next to a man who's holding his severed thumb in a plastic bag. Every time I'm back in the emergency room, I'm still somehow too small. I always feel like a child compared to this suffering.

Then I become an Emergency Medical Technician and for the first time I see someone actually die. I put my hands on someone's chest and push the blood through their body, feeling their ribs bow under me. Sirens bay over my head as I struggle to stay over this dying person in the swaying ambulance. Still my hands are too small to wrap around the life inside them and keep it from fleeing.

I am not entirely helpless this time. I can walk away and eat lunch after seeing a death. I am mature enough to know that I can't prevent every death, adult enough to have discovered that you can't always care.

I wonder what it would be like to simply heal them. To be bigger, finally, than anything that could come for them or come out of them promising pain. I would like to lay on hands and not let go until they awoke from the nightmare intact.