Green Hoodie

Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: In 2022, we featured Sean Thomas Dougherty in our Writers’ Day Jobs series, where he discussed his position at a residential facility for traumatic brain injuries. In that feature, he pointed out that “the art of caring means you as staff, your ‘feelings,’ really don’t matter, you are trained with professional detachment to resolve issues.” As this week’s miCRo, we featured a new essay by Dougherty about that exact experience.

Green Hoodie

He’s playing with pencils and pretending he doesn’t hear me. He woke up in one of those moods where he wants to be left alone, wants to arrange his pencils, doesn’t want to make his bed. But he did say good morning, and he looks like an artist, the way he is so concerned with his pencils, this morning arranging them from dark to light, light to dark. It is his perseveration.

Some mornings he likes to arrange them by length, other days by sharpness, or by thickness of graphite, by the number stamped on the wood.

Before his brain injury from a car accident, he was an art student. Then an art teacher at a local high school. I think of this as I watch him get ready for school. Sometimes he is the teacher, sometimes the student. We let him arrange his pencils, let him think he is living his old life.

He asks, “Who are you?”

Sometimes I say I am the resident-hall therapeutic assistant. Sometimes I tell him, “Your roommate, silly.” Sometimes I just say, “What is your favorite color,” and we go from there.

The man doesn’t want to change his clothes. He slept in tattered blue sweatpants and a long-sleeve Special Olympics T-shirt he likes to wear, then wash, then wear, then wash. When he woke in the morning, he put on his gray New Balance sneakers and wanted to go. He ran a comb through his unwashed black hair. He wanted breakfast. He wanted to know why his brother wasn’t up yet. He didn’t want to change, nor pick out new clothes, nor take a shower.

And really, how many of us have spent the entire weekend in one pair of sweatpants, lounging around the house, putting off chores, or nursing a recent breakup—like my friend Cheryl, who after one really bad relationship’s demise spent two weeks in the same robe, eating instant pudding and watching the Lifetime channel.

One morning I was surprised to find the man awake and already picking out his clothes. On the bed he placed a blue button-down shirt and a nice pair of beige khakis. I said, “B, you are going to Asbury Woods today to work on the trails. Maybe you should get jeans and a hoodie.”

He said, “What are you talking about. We’re going to Chicago.”

It was the first time in a while he actually surprised me—usually I’m ahead of him. But I ran with it.

“What are we going to Chicago for?”

B looked at me and said, “To do that thing my father sent us to do.”

Then he walked into the bathroom and shut the door to piss. When he opened the door, he was back to this time and space. He didn’t know anything about Chicago.

He said, “Chicago? You’re a dumbass.” He asked what we were going to do.

I said, “We’re going to the woods to work on the trails.”

“Oh, good. I need my green hoodie.”

Today my daughter finally emerged from her room. She’s fourteen. She hasn’t showered for a week. “Daughter,” I say, “you need to take a shower.”

“I took one last night,” she says, her greasy hair plastered to her head.

I say, “You know the difference between work and taking care of you lately is negligible.”

“Good. Taking care of me is practice to make us money.”

“Or taking care of brain-injured folks is insight into my teenager.”

“Hey now,” she says. “Those folks are smart, you tell me all the time.”

She stands there twirling a greasy strand in front of her face and waiting for me to say something. Though what I should say, I’m not sure.