A friend of mine called me up to ask me how I was doing, and I said fine, and then asked her how she was doing. Oh, she said, moving very eagerly past my open heart surgery, it was a horrible year. Her beloved dog died, her cat got kidney disease, her mother had to go to a nursing home, her uncle was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and then there was this awful news coming out of Washington and the rest of world. It was a terrible year, she said, she never got to work on her art, read the books she wanted to read, take the trips she wanted to take.
After listing this sad and long litany of woes, she said, “well, what do you think?” Well, I said, it sounds like you are alive, and are experiencing your life. This was, I think, not what she wanted to hear, she seemed unsatisfied by it, but it was what I was feeling. I confess I did not feel much sympathy for her. Dogs die, parents get old, I know I am one of them. Uncles get sick. What did she expect of life?
Life is a great teacher, and I am a scholar of life. Whenever I wrote about a tough day in recovery, I am flooded with messages of support, and also alarmed messages guiding me to support groups, new medications, books and pamphlets. “You need to find a “Mended Hearts,” group, one man messaged me urgently.
It’s interesting because when I write that I am having a good day – most of my recovery days have been very good days – nobody offers me any help or advice at all. We accept the one as good and natural but flee from the other as unacceptable and urgently treatable. I am glad there are support groups for heart patients, I am not in need of one, and if I am in need of one, I will find one and go there, of course. I don’t need Facebook messages to tell me that.
But what I was trying to say to my friend – you can’t really say it to people who don’t want to hear it – is that she was not experiencing a terrible year, or even an abnormal one one. She was experiencing life. She is where we all are or will soon be.
Life is a wonderful metaphor for recovery from open heart surgery because recovery is never the same thing two days in a row. Sometimes it feels good, sometimes it doesn’t, that is the very meaning of recovery. If it never felt bad, if I never got discouraged or depressed, if I rushed to join a group or take a pill every time something hurt or I felt tired, then it would not be recovery at all, it would be something entirely different. In our society, we believe pain and sadness and death can be denied and avoided, or treated, or medicated instantly, or soothed by the right support group. I don’t believe that, not for me, not right now.
My bad days are as important to my recovery as my good days, one defines the other and makes it possible. On my bad days I learn much about my body and my heart, on my good days I appreciate healing and recovery and the hard work it takes to do both. I appreciate getting my bad days out of the way, it makes room for the good ones.
This is what I know about life. Everybody has it worse than I do, or as bad, and as good. We all lose dogs and cats. We all have lost or will lose our parents. We will all die in our own time and way, so will our uncles and aunts and cats. Most of us will get sick at one time or another, the lucky ones will get well or find treatment. Life is not excuse for not living, no hiding place where I can give up my work or my life, there is no normal life, there is only life. I am not looking for advice or sympathy, I am eager to explore and engage in the great dialogue of life.
In recent years, I have learned so much about the nature of life, and that is to accept it and to understand that my open heart surgery is just as much a part of life as the death of somebody’s cat or the loss of their mom. One part of life is loving, taking photos, writing books, living my life, another part is loss and sorrow, pain and disappointment. That is the bargain for living, it is all of a piece.
Life happens to all of us, in our own time and way, and we can deny the reality of it as much as we can, it will have its own way with us, and in its own time. This, to me, is the key to awakening.
I will never call up a friend and tell them what a terrible summer I have had, it is not a terrible summer. It is the summer of life itself in all of it’s crisis and mystery. And I do not need to reminded that I am lucky to be alive, and almost was not.