Jeneva Stone

>But what if you have experience and no language?

Posted on October 15, 2010. Filed under: Jeneva Stone, language, personal essay, The Collagist |

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Ugo Untoro

Jeneva Stone explores the limits of words @ The Collagist.

(1999) One image that rises to the surface now is a brightly lit hospital room on the pediatric floor at Georgetown Hospital. In most of my memories, the rooms there are shadowy—perhaps because we turned off the overhead lights during the day—or the room is dark and lit by the glow of the box-shaped light over the bed and the green and red lights, the blue glow of the monitoring devices.

But in this memory, the room is very white-bright.

I think that Robert, my son, now two years old, had stopped taking food and liquid by mouth—he ate and drank, very feebly, for a year after what was an undiagnosed breakdown. We spent two hours or more on each meal. One little bit of feta cheese to the lips, push it in, see if he could masticate it without spitting it out by accident, and so on. Followed by an eight-ounce bottle of PediaSure, which took him nearly forty-five minutes to drain.

Robert did not gain any weight that year, and he barely grew in height and head circumference. One day, at the end of a long week of spending most days trying to get much food in him at all, he just refused to open his mouth at all, all day.

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