As the sun translates itself into golden leaves and the sky shifts to a watercolor mix of grey and blue, the sense of waiting for clarity, the prescience is heavy all around. The world is holding its breath.
There is no “thing” to cling to today for me. For over a year, I have been floating on a raft sometimes carried by the current and other times just caught in the protruding tangle of tree roots. At these times, I become an immobile witness to the flow of time and events in the outside world.
Never before in 78 years of life have I been so detached from what is considered the 3 D normal world so completely. Sometimes I feel as if I have been attacked, bound, and thrown in a white van to be taken to a rehab temple high up in the mountains.
When my hip first failed, I had some difficulty walking but as the year went by the grinding of bone on bone in my hip joint ramped up the attack of pain, and the impossibility of trying to live what was my “normal” life stopped me in my tracks. I had been forced into complete submission.
My work addiction has been stripped from my mind violently. There is no joy in pushing myself to achieve a task. It sends me into three or four days of recovery and reclining on my pillows like some aged Cleopatra carried on a barge unmanned by hope.
I visualize deep black space and I as an astronaut float tethered to a source of oxygen. I have no references left, no gravity, no routine, no date on the horizon for when my spiritual plastic surgery will end and the actual hip surgery will begin.
No one could tell me what would happen next. The phone calls I made went to an answering machine that had a series of polite words that translated into “FUCK OFF.”
“We will call you if we have information.”
And so the patterns of the last few decades came to a halt. I dare not risk social contact because someone somewhere might be rubbing the lamp of my deepest wishes and a surgery date would magically appear. I had to be COVID free, totally well.
Since 2020 I isolated from COVID. Then on September 20, 2021, I isolated more vigilantly. When my ship-hip came in, I would be allowed to board and be carried to a magic land without constant pain, loneliness and the companion of exhaustion from nothing at all.
I felt much better when I researched the effect on the brain of chronic pain. I laughed out loud when I read the medical definition of “chronic ” as being three months. I was not weak, crazy, or incompetent on purpose. I was not a lesser being. It was normal to feel as I was feeling.
This green beret, marine, navy seal training in spiritual submission has been extended for 409 days thus far. And so I can forgive myself for bouts of depression and weeping. I can forgive myself for asking the question, “Is it worth it, this life?’
The time that I have found myself the most triggered and emotional is when someone sends me a message, “You are strong.”
My mind resents the implication that somehow because I have endured childhood abuse, cancer, Rheumatoid Arthritus, raising two small children alone that I have somehow shallower emotional roots. Things don’t hurt you as much as they do other people… seems to be the message. But I know this is just my ego trying to get me into a mind lock.
To see someone dressing up in their victim clothes and dancing at a martyr party curdles my blood. My ancestors were staunch, unflinching, and capable of enduring beyond what was considered the normal limits. I know I can get through this long period of solitude and pain. But the thing that most fills me with grief is the question, “why?”
And so there were two periods of time when all I could do was weep. It was like a storm at sea carrying me wave after wave, out of control. There was no date on the horizon offering me optimism that it would end. There was no comfort in watching the health care system with the valiant nurses and doctors desperately trying to help people and not succeeding so many times.
The grief was like a bleeding. The pressure had built up and it just had to leave my body. I resigned myself to being human. I resigned myself to the feeling of being abandoned. I resigned myself to enduring pain with every movement.
It was what Joseph Campbell calls a heroes journey. It is a twisting dark path that suddenly appears. All who are alive on earth have traveled it at one time or another. “When will this end?” we ask. It is part of the human contract we sign when we choose to be born.
It is as if the very cessation of this one particular challenge will take me to the land of pixies and fairies. There will be unicorns being fed rainbow popsicles by flower sprites. At the end of this stage of my life, all the roses will have butterflies and dragonflies lighting on them. This is what I tell myself.
I have had to travel into the deepest tangled wood of submission and understand that my brain chemistry was changed. Pain and stark solitude have a cost. It changes us.
At the end of the journey, we can only hope it has taught us compassion. We now understand intimately that just to stay alive in a challenging situation is courage. Those walking past my picture window are in the process of learning a lesson. Each of them is meeting challenges, making brave choices. It is why we need to love one another, no matter what.
Every struggle is a chance to grow, to learn, to be kinder. The lessons are why we were born.
