Conspiracy: Breathing Together in the Shadow of the Stroke

The recovery from my stroke on February 13, which one doctor called a “minor miracle,” continues.  I see family, visit friends, shop, walk a great deal,  have begun work again, and I’ve even played a little tennis although I wasn’t quite certain what to do with that stick in my hand. I emerged from the “event” (a tepid medical term for a potentially fatal stroke), relatively unscathed and accompanied by an overwhelming sense of gratitude. After only a few weeks the slurred speech disappeared completely.

Except: at some point, a “shadow” crept in.  Uninvited, it just arrived.  “Shadow” – I have no better word for it.  It was a sense of unease, but unease integrally linked to a vibrant sense of gratitude.  Both seemed part of the whole – not gratitude here and shadow there.  Both.

Perhaps, given my age and the fact that anything can change in an instant, was it an overwhelming sense of gratitude inextricably linked to potential loss, loss of it all – family, friends, life, love, loves, career, daily joy?  Was it that I was un-horsed so suddenly – public speaking, meetings, and then flat on my back?  The change was not incremental.  I have not adjusted well.

Even now after more than three months, my body, according to my doctors, is still recovering from a powerful trauma.  Sometimes meetings go well, sometimes they do not go as I might wish. Sleep, although better, is often elusive.

I shared these thoughts and questions about “shadow” with those who visited me after my “event” when I arrived home from my rehabilitation in California.  One friend, an award-winning quilter whose breath-taking seascapes of Maine, gulls, snowy owls and northern lights reflected in the water said, “If my paintings are all light, they are flat.  Shadows give the light richness and depth.”  The shadow notion resonated with another friend who runs a class on Buddhism for her synagogue in Washington:  “I see my grandchildren twice a week.  They are so precious.  We have so much fun, and then I think, ‘This will not last.  I am getting older.  They are getting older.  They will soon fly from my arms.’  I get depressed after every visit when I drive home after visiting them. I had to do something about it, and so I started this class.”  The Buddhist sense of “impermanence” has helped her.  In her words: “I have accepted that all is impermanent.  All will change.  As it will and must change, I’m learning to focus on and to celebrate the now.” 

Is the will to embrace imminent change, even though it will bring a sense a loss, enough to sustain? It helps, but I’m not certain is fully sustains me.

What does resonate is seeing the old as new. I don’t think I’ve ever breathed so deeply, exulted in the prosaic rhythm of daily life – so special because I am there to witness it., and because I came so close to not witnessing it.

 I feel a deep and sustaining, no, propelling sense of inspiration, as if I had received new breath.  The Latin root ”spir” means breathe, which serves as the base for inspire, respire, aspire, expire and even “spirit”  – divine power or one’s essential life force. I felt I was given new breath.  In a few lines from “Twofold,” the poet Micheal O’Siadhail, who himself brushed death, exults in the experience of the “new” in the very mundane, the daily miracle of God’s creation:

 So debonair/

that morning you fetched me from Intensive Care…

Colours of your blouse

Snatches of street-talk, hues of pink-bricked house…

My endless paradise

But more than to seize the day, to hold it twice!

O’Siadhail brought me back to  “Summer at the Beach,” a poem I wrote for my then five-year-old granddaughter Lauren nine years ago:

I get up early to get my e-mails

Behind me,

Because soon Lauren will bounce downstairs

Before me.

And then

I will become the toast thief,

The monster who captures mermaids,

The seeker for the squealing hider,

The tornado maker who tosses rafts aloft,

The sandcastle assistant and seashell paver,

The storyteller watched intently by wide eyes

Poking just above the covers.

 Shut the office door behind me!

Because now,  

                        Here

                                    Only

                                                Once

Does one get to be the monster who catches mermaids.

Seize it!

Oh, yes, seize it,

Because all too soon,

Mermaids slip away.

Yes, then I had felt the potential of mermaids slipping away from me – never the more sobering, even scarier notion, that I could slip away from mermaids.

So what then does sustain in these shadows? Yes – friends, faith, family, daily thanksgiving and a sense of wonder and deep appreciation for life’s daily quotidian. And that I still have breath, that I breathe. But that alone doesn’t sustain:  it’s so much more than just breath, than “spir.”  It’s deeper, for the word  “spir” also means inspiration.

So I think one must ask, for what purpose, then, breath?  At its most elemental, yes, gratitude – to thank my Creator for the gift of life, for breath. But must there not be more?  For, in spite of shadow, I feel a will and desire to push on, to help others, those whose breath might be labored, some purpose beyond my breath alone.

I believe deeply that we must be conspirators (!) – literally those who “breathe together,” sharing this life’s journey; for we cannot/must not do it alone: our own survival is inextricably linked to those to whom we are committed, those whom we, in spite of shadows, must help to breathe.