About Suffering

"…how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along"

– W. H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts"

My job is to watch them.

Watch them comb their hair and make their beds and get dressed in the morning. Watch those on suicide-watch shower and use the restroom. Watch them eat. We all look forward to meals: They to hamburgers or spaghetti or scrambled eggs or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, me to the ten or fifteen minutes of calm when they are too focused on their food to act out. There is a special "finger-foods" menu for patients who aren't allowed to use silverware; spoons and forks are the privilege of the meek. Rumor has it that the kitchen used to serve pork chops until a patient tried to stab a staff member with the rib bone.

Stand back, my grandmother shouts when frying chicken. From across the kitchen we watch as she uses tongs to lay floured drumsticks and breasts into a froth of boiling oil. If baking she welcomes us close, offers us a spoon or beater to lick. Our matriarch, she presides over every aspect of important meals—Sunday lunches, holiday dinners, milestone celebrations—from preparation to prayer to Tupperware. A few days before my birthday every year, she asks what kind of cake I want.

Emerald green, also known as copper acetoarsenite, is concocted by two chemists in a Bavarian lab in 1814. A mix of copper sulfate, acetic acid, and sodium arsenite, the compound evokes the startling blue-green waters of the Mediterranean. Use of the vivid pigment spreads among bakers, who use it to color candies and cake decorations.

Watch them go to "school," which is just another locked room in the treatment center, but special, with its alphabet chart and motivational posters. Watch them learn. Watch them get frustrated or bored and run out of the classroom. Watch them watch cartoons (privilege) on Saturday morning. Patients who are noncompliant or aggressive must sit alone at a desk facing the cinderblock wall and write papers about why they are sitting alone at a desk.

A good homemade meal lures me back every few weeks. When it is time to leave and return to college, my mom begins crying. She hugs and kisses me several times. Her goodbyes create the impression that this is the last time we will see each other, that I am going to die.

A cake covered in candy flowers with leaves. Sugar dogs reclining in grass.

Watch them sit in time-out. Watch them pace back and forth in the quiet room. Watch them visit with family. Watch them play Uno and Monopoly and kickball (all privileges). Watch them pack their belongings and leave for home or another treatment center. Watch them smile. Laugh. Scream. Cry. Rage.

I am a teenager when there occurs one of those hometown tragedies that hijacks local attention. It dominates the front page of the newspaper. It leads news broadcasts, the story accompanied by B-roll footage of gray, choppy waters in our reservoir. It bows heads in our congregation as our pastor lifts prayers of comfort and healing for the woman. I try to recall seeing her family in the halls of our large Baptist church where they had been members. I did not know her three sons, who had been several years younger than me. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, I closely follow the story, compelled by the lurid eruption of catastrophe.

I cannot turn away. My job is not to turn away. My job is to supervise them. I am not their therapist. I am not their friend or their parent, cautions the training guide. I am there to provide direction and structure, to keep them safe and on-task while maintaining the therapeutic milieu. Not a babysitter, and not a guard, but something in between.

There are reports of children sickened or killed from green candy. A man dies after eating blancmange adorned with the most vibrant confectionary cucumber and leaves.

At times, it feels like watching a...