World View on the Other Side
Black eternity space of night and day with a myriad of stars. Millions of stars. I am holding tight onto a swing attached to nothing but the space magic as far as I can see. Black as black with so many stars. I feel at home leaning back, swinging, looking out onto one galaxy after another- looking down into black and stars. One foot on the other side. I feel elated swinging in the black star magic, waking to womyn’s voices, womyn’s hands, soothing, suctioning, signing. I am loved. I have never known such love.
I breathe in these womyn and they keep me on this side. I am again elated. Womyn of our community filling my cup with joy and love. I can tell you this- the love and prayers and healing touch and humor and singing and laughter and tales of sexual antics and tender but strong encouragement of my strength are as important as the skill of the surgeons. One womyn squeezing arnica between my lips and respirator under my tongue, one womyn doing therapeutic touch, another doing polarity, another doing reiki, another singing outside my window from the sidewalk below, womyn reading to me, crooning, telling jokes, holding me in a silver web of protection.
Every day and night I have a womyn in my room so I am not alone. I am never alone to return to the lure of the black star night.
I slowly emerge from morphine dreams. There is always someone I know, someone familiar, someone saying you are not alone, we’re beside you, you’re not going to leave us now. And my sweet devoted Marcia wipes my head and body as I sweat. Although the room is kept at 60 degrees, I am on fire and my pulse races at 160. But she and the womyn bundle up and come in, smiling and shivering, with funny stories of how this reminds them of Michigan winters back in their childhood.
I am love. I am in love. I channel words that come from beyond. I often wonder who’s speaking these words and all I can do is glow. Everyone is perfect. Miracles occur minute by minute. My doctors anticipate amputation, sepsis, respiratory failure, death. I have sixty-four broken bones, hundreds of fractures, a major closed head injury. My right knee, they say, looked like a saltine cracker when most of the bones were found under the dashboard. I have lost my sense of taste and smell. My epiglottis is paralyzed and I cannot swallow. My vocal cords are paralyzed and I cannot speak. A cranial nerve in my right eye is paralyzed and I have double vision. They believe I will be in ICU for six weeks.
But love and healing prevail. They cheer me on. My doctors are in wonderment and are wonderful, encouraging my daily miracles along with the womyn. The energy in the room is electric. Not only my doctors but nurses, therapists, dieticians, housekeepers come in and say they want what’s here. They know it’s special. They bring their spouses. They come out by the score. They know this is a safe place and they will leave filled not drained. Doctors kiss me when they come in and respect Marcia and my friends as part of the care team. My friends and lesbian family are providing wound care, turning me, washing me and doing what the floor nurses are unable to do.
Everyone is amazed at my swift recovering and lack of bone pain. My legs essentially remain painless in the hospital. It is the prayers and love, which kept and are keeping away the pain… Well, yes, and the dilaudid and midrin but mostly for my headaches.
It’s now seven weeks and I am home. My taste and smell have returned. My epiglottis is no longer paralyzed and I am joyfully eating again. My physical therapist says it’s because I’m in a state of grace.
I will end this by saying that I did not understand what my croning was all about (my fiftieth birthday was two weeks after the accident). All the implications, learnings, lessons, have not yet been clarified. But I do know that without all of your help I would not be writing this article. Without all of your love and support and healing and prayers and belief in me I would not have made it. I am learning about patience and grace and faith and the incredible power of love. I am in awe.
I want to thank you and especially the womyn at Wild Iris Books for facilitating the shifts womyn stayed with me. Keep me in your prayers and healing circles, and please drop by and see me. I’m home and would love the company.
With love and gratitude,
Barbara
6/15/97
I tiptoe tentatively into my present (revised)
I tiptoe tentatively into my present. Things are not the same. Well yes…I know I was told at the time of impact, confidently and precisely, that “things would never be the same” and yet… how was I to know what was meant by “things” or for that matter “the same”.
So many strange ways these changes are:
like tones of a chime or heights that differ from wave to wave, Reminding me, like a mantra, that these changes are subtle and yet profound.
But how can I tell you of these subtleties I feel?
Like bone cells regenerating and replacing rods.
Like skin cells sloughing like a snake in molting.
Vocal cord nerve cells lying still and alone, as naked as truth, and then to feel that quiver which arouses the spoken word.
It is like in a fairy book when silence is kissed good-morning. “Awake muted murmurs! Awake and cry out!” Shhh… listen… I am telling you the subtleties of life reawakening.
I will tell you how I willed my eyes to see in unison when the surgeon told me “you must remind your brain what to do” as if this brain were a casual interloper. I must speak seductively to this brain wooing it to see, to move, to speak. I lure this brain, arouse it, subdue it into submission. I make deals, I bargain, I pray for it to listen. I focus with intention as my arm arouses from surgery…flopping from one side to another. I speak to it as a mother does to its child...slightly detached but connected…cajoling it to work with me cooperatively.
I tiptoe tentatively into my present. I want to remember these sensual revelations. I want to remember the feeling of floor against the flat of my foot as I ease myself into vertical after lying four months high above the ground. And I am not lying when I tell you I can feel the blood through my arteries, rush through my veins as obvious as water through a hose. My body undulates under pressure of the pump.
I know the intimacy of deep red. I know the sweet taste of cells breaking in a cacophonous burst like caviar between my teeth. It is the taste of scarlet shattered glass turning into prisms of refracted self-reflection.
One Year Retrospectively Speaking…
The project this year, besides building and reconstructing my body, has been building and reconstructing my home…externalizing internal renovation.
Nerves and nails re-enervate my environment as studs and sinew are newly reinforced. Bones and bolts strengthen inside and outside structure. Caulk and plaster restore the cracks in the shifts in the ceiling as rods and plates restore the cracks in my long bones. Stained glass replaces shattered glass. The focus is on paint not pain.
The pieces of my life are replaced and repaired in new ways never before imagined. My internal and external house have been under construction all year.
My nesting snuggles deep in my pockets. I have pockets of projects. Pockets of hours spent fitfully figuring what size quarter-round goes with which kind of wainscot? Which kind of curtains go with what kind of window? What color trim goes with which kind of wall covering?
Hours of mulling. Lying awake at night meditating on healing and hemming. Hours on the phone finding great deals and great doctors.
I love to go to Lowe’s for lumber
Burdines for bedding
Peacock’s for paint
I can tell you where to get the best buy for 550 thread 100% cotton sheets and you would be as surprised as the orthopedist is when he glances at my X-rays and examines my mobility.
Sometimes I need to travel to Boston to find the best laryngologist. So, should it surprise you when I say I must go to North Carolina to find the finest flagstone?
Why worry about a lazy sixth cranial nerve that won’t regain my single vision or a non-union of two bones in the supracondylar area of my right patella, when I can torment myself instead with the fact that I can’t find the exactly perfect wallpaper for the dining room and if I can’t...well I just won’t be able to eat there anymore.
I could ponder about my orthoplastic surgery the next day, but instead I worry whether the pattern in the textured ceiling paper will clash with the carpet.
Remodeling and refurbishing are my passion and my anathema. Pleasure and pain intertwine like weavings. Angst over affordable patio additions reroutes anticipation of upcoming eye surgery.
Let me assure you, this has nothing to do with Martha Stuart or any such thing.
It is rather like a scientist on the brink of a breakthrough. The moment before yet a new-found miracle; when crises lead to custom draperies and color coordination…which leads me to the final sigh when I can say:
“Yes this house, this body, really feels like home!”
May 15, 1998
Three Years Post-Op or End of a Trilogy
Time moves softer and swifter this year. Each hour no longer has a personality all its own. I don’t recognize the four o’clock shadow against my south wall or the two o’clock or even the nine. It’s just another day. And that’s fine. I can water the plants on the top shelf. I can make my own dish for pot-lucks. I even have conversations now when people don’t remind me what a miracle I am. And that’s fine too because I have moved back into the world. Moving back in the world. But not exactly the world I knew before.
There are differences that I have learned that are as dramatic as taking a first breath again like a newborn does rising from its mother’s fluid, or as subtle as an angel’s wink from the corner of an eye. I understand differences in a way that are not always an Aha and may not even be visible to the person next to me but they have transformed me. These are the differences in knowing that I have the ability to change not only broken cells into bone, not only surgeries into surprises for the physician, but on a much deeper level there is a certain fear and anxiety that no longer grab me. There is no longer anything too frightening that I can’t stand eye to eye with and say, “you cannot touch me because I have seen your depth and can both embrace you and hold you separate from me”. There is not an anxiety too great that I cannot say, “you are not too big for me to place in a safe pocket and carry on”. This is an amazing freedom.
Over the past three years there have been changing challenges. There were times when I was unable to move my legs or lift my head or wipe my ass. There have been tenuous moments in hallways of hospitals not knowing if…if...if... There have been trying, tedious moments of having to wait for enthusiastic laughter of others to be silenced so I could be heard. And yet…those crises pass and leave me with this:
There is a privileged knowing that we who have straddled both sides share. It is the ineffable joy of knowing that every moment matters and, at the same time, there is not a moment that won’t eventually turn into another and then another with a resolution and solution.
The burden of grieving and fear and worry are done by those on the sidelines. But the very act and activity of seeing Death and not choosing it for now has freed me from the small talk of life. It has freed me from the throat clenching what-ifs. It’s made me less patient with idle complaining, blaming and gaming. I have come to look life in its face and say, “dance with me, sway with me, play with me, spin me, win me, bring me to my knees. Take me NOW, sweet Life. I am yours”.
June 2, 2000