Dr. Jedidiah’s Diary
Dr. Jedidiah is a psychiatrist who loves
traveling, meeting new people, and exploring different cultures. As a single
father who lost his wife to drug overdose 10 years ago, he has not been his old
perky self for the last decade. During those hard years, he has met hundreds
of, thousands of people from various walks of life around all over the world.
Meeting new people and listening to their stories outside his office have given
him different feelings from the ones through the formal encounter groups or
being truly honest with himself. Here is Dr. Jedidiah’s monologue that has left
him with some food for thoughts in life…. or a fodder to justify his own
mistakes in the past.
Episode #74. Emma
She
was a head-turner at the biweekly
volunteer meet-ups (called Snack and Talk
Club) for the low-income families, to which I’d been deeply engaged for
more than 3 years. My fellow volunteers from my clinic would jokingly say “Hey,
Dr. J, why don’t you ask out that woman? She looks stunning! What a perfect
match with you!” I knew that my colleagues and nurses from my office were just
joking, but had found myself gradually enamored by her personable smile and passion to be right there for the purpose of
helping the less privileged. I wholeheartedly agreed whenever people spoke well of her, because it was next
to impossible for anyone who had spent some time with her to imagine that she’d
been ever involved with a grisly crime or odious incidents of any kind at some
point in her life. Although if there’d been any moment that might insinuate doubt into my mind about her
pure and simple personality, I always knew that it was not my place to judge or prognose someone outside my clinic. Just
like my fellow coworkers mentioned, I was charmed by the way she smiled,
talked, dressed, and treated people around her from day one. I had to believe
what I saw in her, and it was more like…I wanted to even though I started to
get some weird feelings about her crawling into my mind. I happened to catch a
glimpse of some “hard-to-describe” darkness on her face when she was alone. The
moment I saw that unfamiliar side from the look on her face, I lost the train of my thoughts and feelings about
the lady.
Her
name was Emma. Her name would never fade away from my head, because she was the
most unimaginably strange person that I’d met in my life. Not a single patient
of mine wasn’t that much two-faced or as severely bipolar as Emma. She was the most warmhearted volunteer at the club for people in need, but often caught looking terribly agitated and gloomy when she was leaving for home after the meet-ups. The day I
finally mustered up all my courage to ask her out for dinner,
she did not hesitate at all to say yes just as if she had been waiting for the
moment. I made my specialty pasta dish for her, which was sprinkled with my
favorite truffle oil, hoping that she’d be impressed. Emma was impressed, but
not in the way I had expected. She told me the truffle oil sprinkled on top of
her pasta brought back some old memories she had back in her days in London.
What she described about the smell of truffle oil sounded like the unbearable
stench of a gory accident. She used
to work at a city morgue back in London, where she had been extremely stressed
out. Her memories from those years were full of dark, odorous, painful pictures
of the dead. Emma said she’d always wished to get out of her gruesome work
place. Even after she quit working there, every place in London looked and
smelled unbearably rotten to her. That’s how she moved to the States.
When I asked her what she’d been doing for a living, Emma kept silent for a minute or two ‘till she gave me the unexpected answer. She was still working as a mortuary cosmetologist here in this country. She looked at me and went on to say that her life had been doomed to be somebody that would make the deceased look as presentable as can be. Since Emma wanted to stay peaceful in her new phase of life here in this new country, and started her volunteer work in the soup kitchen, salvation army, and this biweekly Snack and Talk Club with the those marginalized in our society. Emma’s words still remain in my heart like an indelible scar. “Dr. J, I thought what I do for the deceased at the mortuary is to make them look truly happy and alive, but it was no more than a lie that I put on their real painful face and body so they’d look alright on the outside. In the soup kitchen or here at this volunteer club for those in tough situations, I see the similar pain on their faces. I want you to ease their hurt inside and help them get a moment of happiness at least once every other week before they end up with the same painful faces in the morgue.” Sadly, the fading aroma of truffle oil on her pasta and the unexpected darkness I saw on Emma’s face now and then were a perfect match on our first date night.
Expressions
1.
a head-turner: somebody
that draws a lot of attention
2.
personable: having
a pleasant appearance or manners
3.
to speak
well of someone: to speak
highly of someone, you say
good things about them (**antonym: to speak ill of someone)
4.
grisly:
causing horror or disgust
5.
odious:
repulsive or extremely disturbing
6.
to
insinuate doubt into someone’s mind: to introduce doubt gradually
or in a subtle, indirect, or covert way
7.
not one’s
place to do something: not appropriate or not proper to do
something
8.
train of
(one’s) thoughts: the
way in which someone reaches a conclusion; a line of reasoning
9.
to
muster up one’s courage: you try hard to find that quality in yourself because you need it in order to do something
10.
gory:
violent/. aggressive/ ferocious
11.
mortuary
cosmetologist: a service professional who cares for the physical
appearance of an individual after they are deceased. Their goals is often to help the individual look as they
did when they were living
12.
to be
doomed (to something/to do something): something unpleasant is certain to
happen, and you can do nothing to prevent it.
Good story
ReplyDeleteBut horrible career.
Well, maybe they wrap up the lives of the deceased here by helping them look presentable for the last time in this world.
Delete