Shut My Mouth

You may think you always say the most inappropriate thing, but you’re wrong. I do.

 It’s one of my gifts. It stems from the fact that I have no filter, and also that I am generally inappropriate, which is a really bad combination. At least the people who know me well tend to overlook it, but perfect strangers don’t have any warning of what they are about to experience. Even when I am trying to keep things light and make chit chat, I still come up with some real doozies that escape my mouth before my brain can register that my thoughts should be kept inside. It’s not just that I say the most horrible things inadvertently,  it’s also that the person that I say them to must somehow muster a response that balances out whatever I have let fly, or just allow my words to plummet to the ground, lead balloon style. I don't mean to put people in that position; I just can't help myself.

Why, just yesterday, I unleashed my bizarro self on my hair dresser. She was painting my hair its one time natural color, and I engaged in small talk in order to keep myself awake. I asked her if she had any plans to travel in the summer, and she said not yet, as they were expecting a family member to pass away, and she did not want to be out of town in case the worst happened. She then proceeded to tell me this horrible story, which I will now relate to you. It was one of those stories that you always hear at the hairdressers, but rarely happens to anyone you know, for which we should all be grateful. The reason she can’t go out of town is that her family is expecting her sister-in-law to die any day.

 About a year ago, this young woman of twenty one was driving home from her job at a restaurant on a rainy Saturday night. It was late, after midnight, and she texted her boyfriend to tell him good night as she drove. The literary term for that is foreshadowing. She drove along, not really paying attention, when her car began to hydroplane. She slid off the road, and her car flipped over about three times before coming to rest upside down in a ravine near a small bridge.

Did I mention she was not wearing her seat belt?

 Her family and boyfriend assumed she had made it home safely, as it was late at night and no one was expecting her. Her car was not discovered until the next day. She had suffered multiple traumatic injuries, and the lack of immediate medical care worsened her condition to the point where her family was not sure she would make it. She was in intensive care for months, and with treatment, rallied to the point where she could return home, under her parents’ care.

She was not the same girl. She could no longer walk. She could no longer talk. Her ability to communicate, to care for herself, to comprehend, all were gone. Any time she made strides towards recovery or stabilization, she would get an infection or have a respiratory issue, and back in the hospital she would go. And each time, where she had to be resuscitated or just receive other inpatient treatment, she would return home again, a little weaker than before.

 She was on a feeding tube. Her parents had to hire round the clock caregivers to help keep her alive. Every few months,she would end up back in the hospital. The family would brace for her death, which would seem like an inevitability, and she would respond to care and get better and everyone would breathe a sigh of relief and go on with their lives until the next episode.

My hairdresser told me her sister-in-law was back in the hospital again, and with all the weight loss and breathing problems she was having, she seemed like she wasn’t going to pull through this time. She told me how hard this has been on her in-laws to watch their daughter slowly die before their eyes, to think that every few weeks her time had come, and yet, by some miracle of modern medicine, she would recover just enough to stay alive. She told me about how her mother in law was making decisions based on emotion and not realism. And she told me about how the doctors were constantly amazed when she would improve.

It was a horrible story. Just horrible. As a parent, I cannot imagine how painful this would be for her family to go through, to maintain their spirits and their faith and hope for the best when what they were faced with was the worst they could imagine, and then to have to keep experiencing that same pain over and over again for a whole year, knowing that no matter what happened, their child was still going to die.

Instead of expressing any of that to my hairdresser, I said this instead: “I bet your in-laws wished she had died in the accident.”

 And, because that wasn’t bad enough, I followed it up with this: “It would have been cheaper.”

 Lucky for me, my hairdresser works with the general public and knows not to get too riled up by anyone’s words. So she politely agreed with me and continued to cut my hair. I remained silent, the damage already done, and tried to let her concentrate on making me look good instead of my insensitive remarks or the eventual death of her sister in law.

 Someone needs to invent an external filter for people like me, if indeed there are other people like me. It could look like one of those electronic voice boxes used by smokers with cancer. I could hold it up to my throat whenever I was about to speak, and the box would somehow transform the atrocious thing I was about to say into something socially acceptable, preferably in that computerized voice.

Actually, that’s not a bad idea. It could start with cancer survivors, and then go on to people suffering from foot in mouth, but eventually could have applications for folks with trouble making small talk or even men uncomfortable with their emotions. One of you engineering types needs to start working on this right away, because my next hair appointment is coming up soon. As horrible as it was for me to say what I did, it would be just as bad to not ask a follow-up “how is your sister in law?” and who knows where that will lead.

Hopefully not to a new hairdresser.