Reflections on a difficult time

February 20, 2010

The week – and the week before it – has exposed new challenges, physical and in a related way, psychological. That passage brought me to an unexpected place; a faceoff with an old axiom. Actually, there are two of them, standing as parallel corollaries: If you have your health, you have everything, and without your health, you have nothing.

What crap… and how dangerous a notion they represent.

Tomorrow is Saturday. I will wake up, full of the presence of my Fran, and there is no pain in this universe as great as that joy. I will make my way to La Madeleine, where my good and brilliant friends Mike and Charles will be waiting to solve the world, as they always do, and I would rather crawl there on broken bones than stride upright into a palace without them. Later, I will chat with my miracles, the progeny that has so far surpassed any embarrassingly small dream of mine for them, and wonder at the world that they constantly bring back to me. I would rather have just one ear to hear, or just one eye to see their lives evolve than to have perfect senses without them.

Later I will go to the place where I’ve chosen to work. I will be surrounded by young men and women who will listen to my ramblings, and even let me teach them now and then. I will not keep up with them, but I would rather sit among them than run without them. They will include evolving and important friends like Kyle, a partner now until he can fly alone; new friends like Mallory, who is colour and light; steady friends like Jason, who cares and shows so deeply, and so many others… strong and fascinating and urgent, they will go where I cannot go right now, but they will take me with them just a little. Throughout, other voices of my older friends will call, from Billy, from Norm P and Norm H and others, bringing me love and the healing heat of a sun-drenched outfield, and I’ll bask with them a while.

And always, I will come home to Fran, who is my home, who is my life.

I wander through a life that I could never earn, blessed beyond reason. That the mechanics of this body that I’ve been given are compromised is a petty thing, and the pain a cheap barter. A dear friend once offered to gather a prayer vigil for my health, fearing that without intervention I would be lost. I thought about it, and declined… out of my own fear, that changing the reality of my existence would somehow diminish the awesome gifts given to me.

It is important to note a distinction here. I will do all that is within my power to live and to live forever. I will fail at that, but it will not be for a lack of trying. I will take the shots, the pills, the pain, the operations and the limitations and I will fight them back, but it will not be for the blessing of good health. It will be for the sheer avarice of a man who has entirely everything that he could possibly ask for, and much that he never would have dared to… and will not give it up. It will be for the greed of a man who needs to give to my precious Brian and Pamela the last drop of what he has learned, and loved, and failed at and won. And most of all, forever, it will be to breathe in the presence of my Fran, to keep watch over her as I can, and to protect her from the loneliness that my selfish leaving would inflict.

I stand today as proof positive, and the myth debunked. I have not my health, at least in a conventional sense. What I do have is everything.