Walking the Wall

I’ve thought a lot about the issues of pain and internal struggle lately watching someone deal with these issues in her life and on her blog. It has hit home on many levels–as a human being, as a person who has struggled and hurt and grown, on a physical level of going through my son’s chronic illness for nearly 16 years. This past week or so has had moments of quiet contemplation, wanting to write and say something, but feeling the sense of muteness that can come while trying to know what it is you really want to say. My thoughts connected with a television show I watched last night and with a book I’m reading, as often has a way of happening.

When I was first coming to terms with my son’s disease and his very real possible death (it seemed a sure thing for a long time) and understanding that even in life, the disease would be an ever present threat–I cycled through all kinds of emotions, fear, anger, frustration, deep pain…but before I got to those I started with a sense of false bravado, I struggle to find the real words for it. I used ideas like "All things work together for good" or "what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger" as a sort of shield, not really believing them, but grabbing onto them because otherwise I’d drown, if that makes any sense. Then I cycled through all the other things and then ironically (and after a great deal of time) came back to a version of the first emotions–albeit a truer, deeper sense that life is about experiences and some are horrible and some are incredible but that we learn from them all and become stronger, deeper, more connected human beings because of it. That very often (I hesitate to say the "always" that is really at the back of my tongue) in order to get to that place of understanding, we have to be brought very low first.

This is very different, in my mind, from someone’s flippant comment that "you’ve been given this in order to grow" or "when given lemons, make lemonade" often said by someone who has never really been there and is spouting drivel because they really don’t know what to say. I don’t believe we are given bad things, I think that people experience bad things as an unfortunate factor of living in a flawed world–the growth comes in how we react to those experiences. Anyway, I was watching Grey’s Anatomy last night and a woman had been given a death sentence due to a large, seemingly inoperable aneurism in her brain. Far from being devastated, she had, as she said, become intimate with the idea of death…that for 15 years she had been asleep and her sentence had awakened her soul and she was really living for the first time and she would rather really live for two weeks, then loose those really awake moments to the possibility of a longer life.

In Henderson The Rain King by Saul Bellow, Henderson comes to the understanding that "Truth comes with blows," and further that people can have an "hour that burst[s] the spirit’s sleep." He says, "It’s too bad, but suffering is about the only reliable burster of the spirit’s sleep." That phrase stuck out to me, the idea of really painful places, suffering, hurt….awakening the spirit’s sleep. Certainly terrible experiences also have the power to kill a spirit, even kill the person, despair driving some to take their own lives even–it is so powerful that something can stand on the edge of a knife, so to speak, either kill or awaken, a life or death crossroads. Three is a powerful number, and I am always brought back to the idea of the three roads Thomas the Rhymer was faced with: the broad road to hell, the difficult road to heaven, or the bonnie road to elfland:

‘O see ye not yon narrow road,
So thick beset wi’ thorns and briers?
That is the Path of Righteousness,
Though after it but few inquires.

‘And see ye not yon braid, braid road,
That lies across the lily leven?
That is the Path of Wickedness,
Though some call it the Road to Heaven.

‘And see ye not yon bonny road
That winds about the fernie brae?
That is the Road to fair Elfland,
Where thou and I this night maun gae.

Only in this instance, the choice is between spiritual death, physical death, or spiritually transcending the painful experience. Like the woman on Grey’s Anatomy, I had to become intimate with the thing I most feared, and while I would give everything I have (including my life) for my son to be healthy–I am still thankful for having my spirit’s sleep burst, being awake is a wonderful way to experience life.

I like to say that my son, with his quiet endurance and his baby smiles through all the tubes and wires taught me to value life every day, to live in the moment; my daughter, born healthy and full of passion since she screamed at the world for an hour after her birth taught me to enjoy life, to put my face to the sun and laugh…..because of….or despite…