So much for plans. Our wedding anniversary will be spent at home. I think I am not good at being laid up, I suspect I am a difficult patient. I keep wanting to get up, move around, do things. Being sick requires acceptance, a letting go, a submission to rest. No writing, no photos.  Maria called the hotel to  change the reservations from tomorrow to another night and  they said it was their policy to charge the full price unless reservations were cancelled within seven days. Maria was upset, $200 means a lot to her. She looked at me – I was drooling and out of it – and I said, well if you’re upset you can call them back.

Before I finished the sentence, she had dialed the number and was on the phone with the manager. It was our anniversary, said Maria, her husband was sick and we were just trying to move it to another night. This was a terrible policy, she said. The manager asked her if she could send a doctor’s note, and then suggested it was probably just a 24 hour thing and we could come Wednesday if we really wanted to. Politely but firmly, Maria pressed on in the face of this surprisingly obnoxious behavior and the manager relented and moved the reservation to next week. I was listening in a feverish haze to this, and it is fitting on the eve of my anniversary to note the strength and clarity in Maria, to see how much she has changed, how strong she is.

When we met, I doubt that she would have made that phone call, shown that strength, stood her ground. It wasn’t that she was weak, she is never weak, rather that she had lost her voice, lost her spirit. Lying in bed and listening to her, I felt a strong wave of emotion seeing how clearly that had changed. What a strong and loving person, she is, I thought. How caring. It is hard for me to believe someone like that could love me, nothing like that had ever happened to me before. But I can see it is true, she is taking such good care of me, she is doing this in such a loving and caring way.  When we met, Maria was not sure she could take care of herself. She never need worry about that again, she can take care of herself. And thinking this through, I also realized that she could take care of me, and I needed to let her take care of me. I let go of this idea of myself, of my idea of being sick.

I stayed in bed, as she suggested, drank lots of liquids and tea, and let go of the idea that I could behave normally. She brought me some chicken soup, fixed the pillow, mopped by brow with a cool cloth.  I brought the camera upstairs, I wanted to take a photo of Red and Lenore, but I put the camera down and went to sleep. I thought that the real meaning of an anniversary, of a marriage has little to do with a hotel or a trip, it might just be that the most meaningful anniversary will be right here at home.

And I felt like writing again, so I must be getting better.