No thing helps very much - only time. There is no blanket or cup of tea or food or touch or kiss or toy or book that can touch you when you're THERE in the valley of the shadow of death, to borrow a phrase from a favorite piece of poetry. I wish this was not the case. I so do. I don't want you to feel futile and I don't want to be futile when I try to help others, but here is a truth most won't tell you: when a human is in true misery, either from starvation or dehydration or nausea or depression or anxiety (the five horseman of hell to me) you on the outside have no power to help. You don't want to know this. It hurts to know. You do have one power, and that is patience.
I'm not dead but I learned what it actually felt like to be ready to die, in 1996, after heart surgery, and I feel it again a few days now each chemo cycle.
I feel scared because I now know a secret: when some is so sick that they don't pay very much attention to you or they seem a little detached THEY ARE DETACHED and are actually quite alone. You are not there. I hate to confess this to you cuz it'll hurt you but at that time you are not helping not needed not there. Doesn't matter who you are father husband child god best friend sister friend child kitten you are disconnected.
A white blizzard descends and everything and everyone is whited out. Your love becomes an idea of love once heard of far away in Nova Scotia.
When the molecules of the chosen one begin to realign and things move toward homeostasis a bit, even a little bit - then rush in, you're back on the radar. Yes you.
You'll be there someday and understand, unless you are chosen as the lucky few lightning bolt shot or gun shot or sleep shot instantaneously to death.
My eyes water incessantly.
My eyes are heavy, one closes.
My eyes saw two movies with my babies today.
My eyed are topped by the thinnest most stupidly and randomly chemically manicured /butchered English garden row eyebrows of sparcity, they are neat but nut tidy. And not desired. These are prickly stickly thin sporadic weeded hedges of Death Valley.
My eyes search for your words.
My eyes dare not go to their invited yearly eye exam. Silly. How do poisoned eyeballs and retinae and rods and cones do their upside down spoon movie screen things without all sorts of fuck ups?
My eyes have thin spidery lashes no one mentions.
My eyes water poisonous tasting treason water I instinctively spit out. All day.
My eyes nor body are normal at all - watch out I can do easily deceive you.
My eyes look for you.
Hello little one who is grand in scale of smart and cute and loving and all the things that come out of witty and clever and brilliant. You who must fear this week and what it will bring, but you have so uniquely told us how you braved it all and under the radar though it was, you made it! You came through and stood tall when you were able, and told the world that although it was most horrendous, sicky-icky, but again and again you made it through and above and beyond and into wellness again as you shall again and again and then-- no more!! Ever! DV. Even though you don't want it, I pray for you and for myself because I cannot bear what you are bearing -- I cannot help you. I cannot but I know I am so so fortunate to know you Amy-Girl! Thanks for that!
ReplyDeleteYou are not alone. You are not alone. You are not alone. I wish I could move my IV stand right next to that chair of yours on Thursday. I'll be in RR getting my second chemo. This is the anniversary of the day I called you and told you I had breast cancer too. Do you remember? I do - every word. You have gotten me through this with your wisdom and wit.And chemo hasn't taken that from what I see.And that, my friend, is what will get you through. And that heart of yours. Good thing you had it fixed up in 1996. They must have fixed it well because when I see you - I see heart. Love, Debbie (Sorry - the only way I have figured out to post here is to go Anonymous.)
DeleteSeraph - I did not say I didn't want prayer - I welcome all good thoughts and thank you
DeleteYou get to an essential truth here, Amy, one of those truths our American culture would rather not know. We are utterly invested in believing everything has a solution, a cure, a happy ending. we can't abide powerlessness. Yet as you tell us, one of our most important powers is in nonaction, in waiting, in abiding.But that leaves us alone with our thoughts, and even worse-- with our feelings.
ReplyDeleteI've known the disconnection you write about a couple of times during horrid bouts of depression. The disconnection/isolation was what told me: I am depressed. I wonder, after it recedes, thank God like the tide pulling back out to the depths, if the feeling of isolation creates the depression or the depression the isolation. So you have helped me understand it a bit. I now think the dis-ease creates the isolation, severing us from the mainland of health. Stranding us out on an island. (John Donne was wrong.) Connection is a signature of our healthy condition. The disconnection we know more and more from the natural world signals our dis-ease as a society. That disconnection I don't think we can abide.
Ha! I love that you challenge John Donne and even more that you GET me
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