Maybe It Is Enough

I asked a simple question on Facebook.

Does a little bit of care make a difference when the pain is so big?

Within a few minutes there was a string of responses, many with exclamation points, assuring me that it does. Some people told stories from their own lives and how care carried them. I wrote it out of the overwhelm all around me.... disease, joblessness, death, divorce. I was surprised at the strength of the answers. 

 

I can recall small overtures in my own life that still warm me. One was in 1989. I lay in the hospital in Flagstaff, feeling incredibly adrift after an emergency appendectomy. My bishop called me. How on earth did he find the number? I myself did not know the number, or the name of the hospital for that matter, unless it was something obvious like Flagstaff General Hospital. He did not say anything particularly eloquent, just that he was thinking of me and hoped I recovered soon. Click. Let me hasten to mention that this man had fourteen children himself, and no doubt had other things to snag his attention. But he managed to figure out the number and the extension, and dialed it with a rotating dial, which those of you who are over twenty understand took more effort than speaking into Google Search. 

 

How is it possible that two minutes of a person's life can nourish you for twenty two years without being depleted? 

 

Then there was the card I got from the family I lived with when they had their fourth baby.

 

"To the Pied Piper of Bullfrog Lane." I can still see the hurried script of the young father of four children under eight. I had taken the job after a messy withdrawal from college, which was the fall out of my mother's forced entrance into a mental hospital. It was scary visiting her, walking through the perpetually locked doors, suddenly being outnumbered by people who had done enough damage to themselves or others to be sentenced to this. My mother was here. What did that mean about her, or about us? Playing with children was healing for me. Being appreciated for it was added balm. 

 

Another was the nurse when Benjamin was a patient at Cedar Sinai. She watched my mounting anxiety for a week of tests, and noticed that I had forgotten how to shower. I felt strapped to Benjamin's tiny side, and it never crossed my mind to leave it long enough to get wet. She shepherded me to the bathroom, offering a white towel, and said she would stay with my baby. I do not recall her name, but her gesture of compassion will never lose its power. 

 

You are present for some of the most poignant and vulnerable moments in the lives of people you love. You cannot retract the diagnosis, or rebuild the economy. But you can make an indelible difference. 

 

As one man said to his wife, "Thanks for sticking with me through thin."

 

Half Real

There is an amazing book, A Stroke of Insight, by a woman who descibed her experience of having a stroke. Parts of Jill's brain were starved for blood because of a clot the size of a golf ball.

Unfortunately Jill had booked a lecture about neuroanatomy before she lost her abilities, and she wanted to go ahead with the presentation. In the months leading up to the conference, she gradually relearned how to walk, feed herself and speak. She found a way to cover the third of her head that had been shaved, and began to feel brave enough to go out in public. But as for the content of her talk.... it was gone.

 

Fortunately Jill had a video recording of the same speech, given in another state back when she actually knew stuff. She began a training regime of watching herself: her mannerisms, the fluctuation in her voice, and the words themselves which she did not understand. After hundreds of hours, she could recreate the entire performance, and the audience was unaware of the fact that Jill had suffered a stroke and this was an act. She was speaking from her past, hoping that it would again become her future. 

 

Occasionally we forget the feelings that we used to know by heart. I read about a couple that went to counseling. The husband insisted that he never loved his wife. Ever. She dug up the boxes of love letters he had written her decades before, which dripped with affection. She showed these to him in the presence of the counselor, but he flatly refused to believe what they said, even though they were penned in his own handwriting.

 

Sometimes we cannot remember a feeling, or a body of information, and are duped by the illusion that it will never return. Most of us have photographs of ourselves at our own wedding, and other times of abundant love. We can watch those images, as a kind of script. We used to feel that way, and perhaps hold a flickering hope that the feelings can return, or be relearned. We can watch old movies of ourselves, and see how easily we laughed and smiled at each other. Perhaps those scripts can be a bridge from our own history, through the gorge of now, to tomorrow. 

 

A friend of mine says we need to "fake it til you make it". Swedenborg coined the term simulations, to describe the pretense that can keep a marriage afloat until real affection wakes up. 

 

Some days my actions are the genuine article. I make dinner from a love of my family. Other days it is only a shadow of the real thing. The food is still edible, but my heart is not in it. I am operating on auto pilot, remembering the repetition of hundreds of days when I wanted to stir the pasta.

 

Perhaps I am experiencing a kind of love clot. The feelings I used to have in abundance are not flowing easily, and parts of me begin to atrophy. But a story like Jill's tells me that not only can those parts of me return, my gratitude for them expands to fill the vacuum.

Two Arms

I fell on a slippery slope at a church camp and whacked my poor old bod. The bruise on my thigh was as black as coffee, and in the words of Benjamin looked "scary." But the more pressing concern was the damage to my left forearm. I do not score highly in the intelligence Gardner describes as bodily-kinesthetic but I was certain I should not move it. The improvised sling helped insure that, and I spent the next few days learning to live with one arm. 

What struck me first was the people around me who so casually maneuvered two hands. They lifted, grabbed, hugged, clapped, ate, played guitar and carried things easily. The cooperation of two limbs had never seemed so miraculous to me as it did now. The once simple task of holding a plate and filling it with food now took serious planning. Sweeping at chore time was sloppy. Playing for worship was impossible. I tugged out a foot of floss and soon realized I didn't have the strength to keep it taut.

 

Then I gradually started to figure out ways to still help in the kitchen, and dress. It took attention but I didn't want to simply give up. My right arm did double duty, and I learned how to hold gently with my left hand without actually putting pressure on the arm. 

 

The cooperation of two limbs reminds me of marriage. Working in unison while getting dinner on the table, or paying the bills makes it all much easier. But I know that in our relationship things are often unevenly distributed. John's paycheck is three times what mine is. I spent more time holding babies. I can feel resentful of that inequity, or I can learn to work with it. There have been times when I was incapacitated with asthma, and John took up the slack. Other years he traveled overseas for weeks at a time and I carried the brunt of childcare. What I have finally remembered to remember is that if I begin to feel self righteous about my competence, I can expect to be leaning on him in about ten minutes. 

 

The two eyes make one sight, the two ears one hearing, the two nostrils one smell, the two lips one speech, the two hands one labor, the two feet one walking, the two hemispheres of the brain one dwelling place of the mind, the two chambers of the heart one life of the body by means of the blood, the two lobes of the lungs one breath. But the masculine and feminine when united in love truly conjugial make one life completely human.

  Emanuel Swedenborg, Conjugial Love 316 

Long for the Sea

Once there was a man who wanted to find worthy sailors for an expedition. He recruited strong people and began to teach them skills like knot tying, and navigation. They learned the tasks adequately. Yet he wanted workers who were dedicated. He tightened the regime of training, using threats and increased promises of pay. They could all perform the motions, yet something was missing. He could not articulate it, much less remedy the problem.

 

Still the captain had to set sail, so he boarded the crew and they embarked on the frothy seas. In calm weather, things went well enough. The men on deck took their turns, arriving at the beginning of their watch, and leaving when it was over. But when the first storm came, they became disoriented. Some appeared late for their shifts, or begged to be released to the lower deck. Fear and anxiety made them forget their routines, and he found himself dragging them to their posts, only to have them prove near useless against the gyrating water.

 

It was a fierce night, raging on for hours. When the ocean finally calmed, the captain took stock. Half a dozen of the crew had been washed over board, several more begged him to turn around. He felt enraged, and hopeless. 

 

When they landed again, he begrudgingly paid the crew, and vowed to find another way to fill his ship. As he walked along the shore, he noticed a young man, scarcely twenty, who sat gazing at the horizon. He sat down next to him.

 

"What are you looking at?" he asked.

 

"The sea. I have longed to sail across it since I was a little boy," said the young man.

 

"Know much about sailing?" the captain inquired.

 

"Oh yes! I have read Moby Dick, and The Old Man and the Sea until I know passages by heart."

 

The man had meant actual knowledge, but he began to wonder. Perhaps he had been looking in the wrong place all along. This young man ached to be out on the waves, feeling the salt in his face. He could learn to sail.

 

For the next few months the captain found men and women whose hearts already belonged on the ocean. In place of experience they dreamed of what it would be like. Each person eagerly learned the skills, making mistakes to be sure, but ever willing to try again. 

 

When the crew set sail, everything felt different. Sailors arrived early for their shifts, staying long after they were over. They watched the captain closely, trying to mimic his deftness with ropes and sails. Instead of aching to be back on land, they savored the beauty of the open water, the birds and fish that danced around them.

 

The night of the first storm, everyone was perched to work. Men who had only read about the sea and sky trading places threw themselves into staying afloat. They rose to higher competence than the captain had ever witnessed in such novices. The water raged all night, and not a man aboard slept a wink.

 

But in the morning, the forgiving sun peeked over the shimmering blue sea to warm them. The crew was drenched and exhausted, yet strangely revived. They had weathered their first tempest. They were sailors. 

 

Marriage skills can be learned. You can practice communication tools until they are as routine as jumping jacks. You can parrot back the differences between men and women like you do the multiplication tables. 

 

But no one can teach you to love marriage. That comes from deep within, from years of longing for something God given, and imagining what waits across the threshold. 

 

 

 

Touch Me

I was very moved by a TED talk about human touch. The context was the doctor-patient relationship, and the potential for building trust through the laying of hands on another person's body.

 

The speaker, who received a standing ovation, described the ritual of examination and how it is being replaced by a vast array of technological wizardry. Doctors are more likely to order a CAT scan than to place their fingers on a patient's body. He came to this disturbing realization when he spoke with a patient who had changed doctors not based on the hospital atrium, or the cutting edge equipment, but because she wanted touch.

 

As chance would have it, I watched this minutes after I missed an opportunity to touch my husband. I was leaving our office just as he was returning, and by a turn of the corner, I came face to face with him when I had almost passed him unseen. We spoke about mundane things, who drives which kid where, and then I left. As I drove off I felt a lack on my lips. I could have kissed him. I should have kissed him. 

 

Especially in the wake of my neighbor's abrupt death, I wish I had done something far more important than clarify the Odhner Shuttle Schedule. I wish I had hugged him. 

 

I hear of couples for whom touch has fallen off the radar. This grieves me. And yet, I could throw my arms around my own husband a little more often. He would not mind.

 

I believe that babies need skin to skin contact in order to grow. Why would it be any different for marriage?

 

 

Ted Talk