When I was six, my mother and father saw me once playing with an electric keyboard at a friend’s house. While the adults ate a long dinner and chatted over countless pots of hot tea, I spent the entire night fascinated with its synth-like tones and all the instrument options available: harpsichord, flute, trumpet, even full orchestra. The family hosting dinner had a daughter about my age that was taking lessons, and so did a few others that were there that night. Sometime later that year, my parents bought a small upright piano for about $300 at a yard sale. It was janky and tarnished, but had 88 working keys and held tune reasonably well. Private lessons would’ve been a big deal for us back then, but since my father was still a PhD student, the university’s school of performing arts granted us a discount. Soon after, my Sunday mornings became occupied by Emma, a sweet but pushy Russian woman who was easily exasperated by lazy wrists and limp fingertips.
The etudes, scales, sonatinas, tarantellas, preludes and Hungarian whatsits piled on, and I had no concept of how they were separated. They were all just songs, nevermind who wrote them or whether they were for practice or performance. Emma taught me for the next 4 years, holding my wrists up when they dangled and selecting pieces for me to showcase as seemingly endless recitals came and went. Before teaching each new piece, she played them for me almost effortlessly, hands sweeping and gliding over the keys in a way mine never did. She sat next to me and held me close before and after each recital, fervent and excited for each moment, and once, when I forgot the last stanza of a performance piece on stage and ran down, she wrapped her arms around my head with gentle shushes as I cried in embarrassment. Piano was both a daunting and safe space for me. It was hard, fierce, terrifying, but also lovely, warm, comforting.
When we moved from Syracuse, we sold the tarnished mini-upright and the lessons were put on hold for a few years, until, living in Seattle, I reached middle school and we decided to buy another piano—an upgrade, which I could pick out myself from a real piano store this time. I tested them all by playing big, fat 8-note chords with the sustain pedal depressed all the way. I settled on a full upright burgundy Kawai, the one that had the deepest and most haunting reverb I could find in the store. Then we settled on another Russian teacher, Tonya. Also peeved by languid wrists. Also played effortlessly and beautifully. And I learned again, this time less with boyish wonder and more with teenage apathy, but with no less of that opposing tension as before.
So the lessons and recitals continued, until we moved once again, and then they stopped once again, and beyond that, piano in my adult years became an infrequent indulgence for an audience of my mother and father, in the kitchen cooking on my arrivals back home for a visit. Then the audience expanded to include my girlfriend—now my wife—and now includes my daughter as well, who insists on running over to bang on the keys as I play, lest she be left out of any event not centered completely around her.
When I first moved to Rochester and started working at the hospital, among the first things I noticed was that there was a baby grand piano in the main lobby, sectioned off by queue dividers with thick blue felt ropes hanging between them. Another stood in the lobby of the cancer center. Both were electronically programmed to play mellow classics and were meant more for distraction than showcase. Both had signs positioned above them warning against playing or touching them.
Both pianos are polished black and pearl, usually never a smudge on them. The one in the lobby of the cancer center tower sits below large floor-to-ceiling glass panes and reflects the light of the day. In the winters, after fresh snow has fallen and crystallized on the ground, sunlight both reflects off the ground and pours from above, and the lobby is lit strikingly against the lonely piano that no one ever plays. At night I sometimes walk through the tower lobby and think that if there were a janitor or after-hours secretary getting on with the final moments of their day, I would break all rules and play for them.
More so than that, I think back to the patients and families I’ve met in the tower. As an intern, I would visit some of them after my shifts if I was worried they were scared. I sat with Lewis and his wife when I knew we were coming up on the end. Even when Lewis was walking the halls trying to get his second wind in the fight, working on getting strong enough for a round of palliative chemo, his eyes would still well up when I walked into his room at the end of the day. I smiled and made jokes, asked him to name his grandchildren for me so I’d know what to call them when they came. I visited Allison every day that she kept bleeding through the platelet transfusions. I held her hand when I told her we still didn’t have an answer for what she had, and sat down next to her mother to hear stories about Allison and her sister when they were growing up. They were spaces of both fear and warmth. I wished I could’ve played for them, just 6 floors below where we sat.
The cancer tower was atypical in that sense. You’re not usually granted time like that—only in situations where you stay on a service for a month at a time, and patients also don’t leave the hospital for a month at a time. Otherwise not all patients love you. Many don’t like you, some don’t even respect you. One of the misfortunes about the small slices of time you’re normally given to form relationships is that it’s rarely enough to explain yourself to people. There’s not much time for them to explain themselves to you either. They don’t have time to hear your revised personal statement about why you wanted to be a doctor, and you don’t have time to hear why their lives collapsed and that’s why they don’t bother to take care of themselves anymore. Most of it has to be developed out of scraps, from which we make between-the-line assumptions about each other. Trust sometimes comes down to the tone of your voice and how you place your hands over their heart while probing for sounds with your stethoscope. Other times trust is a lost cause regardless what you do.
I think we all carry around things we wish we had an audience for—things that could go lengths in explaining ourselves to others without us having to prove we are who we say we are. In college I spent weeks practicing and learning Clair de Lune after hearing a music student play it live in the courtyard. I learned a number of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. I learned to play Before the Throne of God Above for a worship service at church once, and kept playing it long after. At this point, these are probably the only playable songs I have left in my memory (and shoddily at best), but I would’ve played them for Lewis and Allison regardless. Given adequate time, I wish I could play for all my patients. Patients want to be seen and understood, but if we’re being honest with ourselves, so do we.
My patients want me to know what their lives are like, what their suffering is like. When it’s clear I won’t continue to see them for long, they tell me up front all the frustrations they’ve been through, all the doctors that didn’t care in the past. They want me to know, because then, presumably, I’ll be on their side. I want time to read to them, sit with them, tell them stories, play music for them, because then, presumably, they’ll understand I was already on their side. But sometimes hostilities flare and neither party wants to do anything except move on. Chronic patients and chronic doctors become nihilistic—why seek to be understood if you only have a few minutes to explain yourself? If today you talk, but tomorrow someone new takes over? If today you have a treatment plan, but tomorrow the problem hasn’t changed? So me taking care of you is more of a business partnership now, and well, good, because we both like it better that way, right?
It reminds me of the pianos we’re not allowed to touch—tidy, but not actualized. Pianos were meant to be played. People were meant to relate. Sometimes you get that, sometimes you don’t—it’s a truth that’s just part of the job. But this year, I’m making it a goal to learn a new piece, and hopefully play it for someone before the year’s out. Maybe I’ll have a chance to talk about Emma, and the burgundy Kawai at my parents’ house. And maybe I’ll hear some good stories in return.
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