Spirituality and Illness

Many Doorsteps

/ alicebarrett / 7 Comments

That Doorstep

That doorstep trips you up every time.

Look down, the key is under the bucket.

Look up, watch your head.

Watch, don’t let the cat out.

Look behind, or the screen door will hit you.

Put your bag down; it tips over.

Look down, the key is not under the bucket.

Look up, bang your head,

Hold the screen with your elbow,

Kick the door with your heel. No one answers.

The cat sits between your legs.

.

The Stoop

The concrete is hot. It must be summer.

The streetlight sputters on. It must be evening.

The Mallory’s slide open their window. There must be a breeze.

Cousin Jimmy has his guitar. There must be no work.

Mom and Mary Ryan sit down to stretch their legs. Dinner must be cooked.

I sit on the bottom step, feet planted on the sidewalk.

A cat between my legs.

.

The Wheelchair Doorstep

Someone must see it is raining.

Someone must be working the door.

It can’t be long now, can it?

Surely someone will come soon.

I back up, rev up my arms and rush the doorstep.

The tiny front wheels catch the lip and tip me forward.

Surely someone will come soon.

See me in the rain outside

A cat upon my lap.

.

That Last Doorstep

He’s lain there unmoving,

Waiting for God knows what.

The nurses lied on his chart –

He has not eaten in days.

His eyes have not opened,

His throat has not moaned.

He’s lain there unmoving,

Waiting for .…

.

He is waiting for the precise moment.

Relax, he’s been waiting a lifetime for this moment.

The exact right moment.

Some sound in his silence,

Listening for that precise breath

To choose to be his last.

Before stepping over.

.

I nestle under his chin.

Feel my purr echo in this chest.

Kitten Anti-Terrorism with Shingles

/ alicebarrett / 2 Comments

 

I’m miserable. Everyone who has ever had shingles, raise your hand; you know what I’m talking about. This is the fourth week of skin torture. I’m writing this after taking a pain med, but before it knocks me out for a blessed four hours. This is my “able to think about something other than shingles” hour.

Usually I scroll through Facebook while drinking morning coffee, a non-threatening way to start my day before facing Huffington Post or BBC News. Now I appreciate FB even more. I don’t have a lot of “friends” on FB, but the ones I have post great inspiring, thoughtful, hilarious things. Gets my mind off my rash. This morning I read about cute kitten anti-terrorism.

Authorities in Brussels asked the public to stop tweeting information that might reveal where police are working because ISIS could use the info. So Belgians began flooding #BelgianLockdown with cat pictures: cute ones, funny ones, cats in police uniforms, filing their nails, Darth Vader kittens, all to make it harder for terrorists to sort through while looking for information about police movements.

It’s hard to feel pain while looking at a Salvador Dali-like picture of a cat’s head poking through a Belgian waffle. It’s hard to whine while watching a country respond to a call for anti-terrorist cooperation with wit and humor.  It’s satisfying to think of hate-filled people being forced to scroll through cat pictures hours on end. Reportedly, a news photographer come up with the idea. It might be too much to nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize, but maybe not. [Remember, I’m on drugs.]

A number of people on FB (and in the real world) remind us that the opposite of terror and destruction is creativity and union. Poets vow to keep writing,  teachers recommit to teaching, care-givers continue to give care, parents hold up their children with pride and love. Jeannine is working right next to me now to bring the play “Breastless” to Ashfield, teach drama at Whole Children, prepare to direct “The Crucible”.

Anti-terrorism work surrounds us.

I’d decided not to write a column this month because of the difficulty of thinking straight with a wicked case of shingles. Then I read about the people of Brussels and changed my mind. I may not win a Nobel Prize for literature, but I showed up.

Using the Wound to See

/ alicebarrett

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

May 14 is the 2nd anniversary of my accident. On that date in 2012,  a car hit me as I was crossing the street. Against the odds, I did not die. A surgeon who was skilled in repairing “filleted” ribs was at BayState Hospital. Medical staff and an amazing array of tubes, blinking lights, beeping machines, and knock-out drugs kept me alive through septicemia. I’ve written before about the community of comfort, prayer and song that accompanied me. And needless to say, the gift of my vigilant, loving wife Jeannine.

What about now?

You’d think it was time to let go of the past and resume my Alice-ness. However my old Alice-ness is altered. And I’m still discovering the nature of my altered Alice-ness.

This winter I shoveled snow. Afterwards I was on the floor and couldn’t get up, the pain was so bad.  Yesterday I lifted a tray over a coffee table and the same thing happened. The pain is located just below where my body had six surgeries. So I’m writing this on ibuprofen and an ice pack. My body has changed, but what about the other essential parts?

When I meditate, scary memories arise. When I pray, the space is empty. But I meditate and pray anyway, in some form or another. Is that what people call “faith”?

Something still feels amiss. Sarah Pirtle helped me describe the feeling: part of Alice is still on Maple Street, getting hit by a car. Another part is struggling against wrist bindings. Another is having the horrifying hallucination that I was paralyzed for life. Other bits and pieces of Alice lay strewn between Holyoke, Linda Manor, and home. My body sometimes forgets it’s not in a wheelchair.

I am trying to coax all the pieces back, to get reunited with myself. Some people refer to the process as “Soul Retrieval.” The people in the Prayer Medicine group at church have helped so very much. Praying for Kate O’Shea in the group pulled me up and out, allowing me to send energy, with others, to her healing. Praying, sending energy to another person helps me become whole. Perhaps praying for someone sends out a call to all our parts, “Come home, parts, Kate needs you.”

Someone asked her minister, Kate Braestrup I think, to pray for her. Braestrup was dubious about the effectiveness of prayer. After praying, she realized that, no matter the effect on the person’s health, she herself was changed and blessed by the act of prayer. Having been on the receiving end, I know that prayers have an effect on the pray-er and the prayed-for.

Unexpectedly, Emily Dickinson has taught me many lessons. She confronted pain and grief head-on, no walls. She was not given to comforting thoughts, but to examination of these feelings under a scope. She changed my definition of “healing.” Is the work of healing actually keeping the psychic wound open? Not in masochistic pain, but to transform the wound into a opening. Or, as David Brooks said, “…turning it [suffering] into something sacred.” Perhaps a wound of any kind can become another sense with which to experience the world. Emily used that sense.

My Alice-parts are trudging home in fits and starts, what Emily calls “That precarious Gait.” I am trying to coax all the pieces back, to get reunited with myself.  As my physical gait and snow shoveling improves, I also cherish the parallel journey: continuing to walk with that precarious gait, recognizing how many of us walk with that gait, and using the wound to see.

-Braestrup: Here If You Need Me, Beginner’s Blessing

-Brooks, “What Suffering Does” New York Tmes Op-Ed April 7, 2014