Trust the Hours

On fevers and coughs, sickness and health, and trying hard to hear the music under it all

Dear Ones,

I wake today from the fog of half-sleep.  Days and days of half-sleep.  One-third sleep.  Barely-there sleep.  The thrushes and the warblers sing.  The May light streams in, seemingly unaware that my son has pneumonia.  Unchanging, relentless pneumonia. Diagnosed earlier in the week, he has had a high fever and near-constant cough for eight days.  Chest pain.  No appetite.  Growing despair.  Together we navigate the shapeless hours, marking time with the spike of his temperature.  Finding order with doses of antibiotics, ibuprofen, and acetaminophen.  How much water.  A sip of bone broth.  A bite of applesauce.  Episodes of Anne with an E (my choice) get pushed aside for School of Rock for the fifth time and Malibu Rescue (a kids parody of Baywatch) and Mall Cop (why not?) because sickness needs to be paired with ridiculousness.  

Just outside my patio door are two trays of plants for my garden.  Waiting.  In my sink dishes are stacked.  Waiting.  On my table an old coffee stain.  Stacks of mail.  An unpacked weekend bag.  Notes from a class I’ve been taking, spent months looking forward to taking.  All of it waiting for an attention I can’t give it.  And energy I don’t have.

What can I do?  My mom asks, arriving with frozen soup and a Tupperware of chicken fried rice.  She folds my laundry, listens with me to the rattling cough.  The whimpers between each jagged explosion. 

My dad arrives to mow my lawn, trim the weeds around the fence, blow the debris from my walkway.  He takes the car to be washed.  It’s a start, he says, and cringes as he hears the cough from the upstairs window, that lightening bolt cutting through the hot Spring air. Crackling in his lungs.   Splintering his ribs.

Oh, Honey, they say.  Because they know each cough lands in my body like a thunderstorm.  It shakes me. 

I slide through all the feelings. 

Fear.  My body is rigid with all the warnings.  Watch for his lips turning blue.  Listen for wheezing.  Make sure that his sudden rash is not hives.  Was the vomit from nausea or coughing?  Is he short of breath?  Struggling to breathe?  How much weight has he lost?

Grief.   That he missed his last week of school.  That he couldn’t go on his last field trip or be at his school awards ceremony or say goodbye to his friends or experience the joy of singing, School’s out for summer!  That he can’t ride his new bike in these gorgeous days.  That he has to hear the carefree shouts of our neighbor kids, playing on our swing, frolicking in a world of health that lives alongside this world of sickness, always out of reach.  That he is in pain, so much pain.   I don’t like this, he whispers in his worst moments, tears sliding down his face.  I don’t like this at all.

Anger.  That our lives have been interrupted and sidetracked.  Again and again.  So much sickness this year! Nearly 21 days out of school.  So many weeks sacrificed to Freddi’s illnesses as if they were hungry, petty gods, demanding the best of our attention. And my own old angers at being a single mom.  At Freddi’s dad and his inadequate responses.  At myself and my own all-encompassing inadequacy.  At being so unable to take care of all that needs to be taken care of, including, irrationally, the power to take this sickness away.   And I’m mad at Freddi for reminding me that I can’t.  For not eating what I offer him.  For grimacing at my smoothies, thinking they taste like “old raisins.”  For yelling at me to leave him alone.  For not wanting to shower after ten days of no shower.  It might feel good, I say.  The steam will help.  And him sobbing and yelling at me, Please don’t make me do this and me, like an old, dry rubber band, finally snapping, yelling back, When did I become the enemy in this situation?!

Shame, of course.  Shame for reacting.  For allowing the loneliness and fear and fatigue to impact how I speak to Freddi, disrupt my steadiness.  What’s wrong with you? the shame demands. You have so much love!  You have help if you need it. People get sick. Geez!  This too shall pass!  Don’t be dramatic!  And you think this is bad? Some people have several kids to tend to!  And worse things. Cancer! This is nothing!  What’s wrong with you?  What’s wrong with you?  Buck up!

Fear, grief, anger, shame, fear, grief, anger, shame.  The cycle turning and turning like the days slipping into nights and the nights into days and the illness gripping us both, a dog with a chew toy, shaking us, not letting us go.  Every night, every fever spike, every moment of great pain, Freddi and I pray for healing and for hope.  Just something to hold onto, I beg.  A sliver of improvement.  Something that says, we’ll make it through all of this.  And later, Freddi says, Why isn’t God hearing our prayer?

Wait, for now, writes Galway Kinnell
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?

When Freddi was a newborn, I kept track of each feeding, each dirty diaper, each nap. All those slips of paper with times and lists – exclamation points when the sleep went long – they  gave order to the slippery quality of those days.  It made me feel tethered to myself, an old identity that was, without my knowing it, being washed away, washed away, washed away in the laundry machine that is motherhood. 

Can I trust these illness hours to wash me into a new place?  Is God here in the seeming sameness of early morning and middle of the night, carrying me without me knowing it?  How much is my resistance to being carried keeping me in a state of suffering? 

I’m writing now, in the early morning on Saturday, because I don’t know what else to do. Because I want to make sense of these days and Freddi’s illness and my helplessness and I want to write myself into a place of hope, like I want to pray myself into understanding and trust. It is an illusion, of course, that I can do anything, force meaning.  But, maybe, maybe if I just frame it right, make it beautiful, send these words out into the world, all of this will be easier, more bearable.  But I suspect that like the lists of an exhausted new mother, holding fast to her old identity, these words, this newsletter, just clutters up the countertop of the internet, providing not meaning, exactly, but a record of an attempt to find it, a record of trying hard, a record of doing something - anything! - to make this life – this inscrutable, ever-changing life – knowable, controllable, less scary.

Wait, Kinnell urges, speaking to me in my desperation.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Beyond all the feelings – feelings that are not unique, nothing special, everyone is tired! - underneath the cycles of pain, there is music.  I do know this.  Red-winged blackbird.  Mourning dove. Freddi whispering, at 2 AM, you do so much for me. This music - weaving me into love -shows up in a car newly washed and a walkway swept free of weeds.  It shows up in a batch of bolognese.  It shows up in my friend sending Calvin and Hobbes.  The gift of a funny drawing, a gift certificate, a text, a phone call, the laughter of the child next door.  All of it reminding me that, for now, life is here, for now, in this moment, I can trust the hours, passing, and in them know that I am carried.  Sorrow and relief.  Annoying showers and the singular delight of a Jack Black facial expression.  A furious rash and a sudden, joyful craving for French fries.  The flute of my whole existence.  If only I can be still enough, quiet enough to hear it.  It’s all here, holding me, washing me – washing us both! - into whatever we are becoming. 

Loving you from this kingdom of illness, doing my best to surrender, to allow myself to be carried by these mundane, treacherous and sacred hours into whatever is coming, all that is possible, all that is beyond my wildest imagination, I am yours,

Sara

a note from a friend last winter, but somehow always fitting

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Practice and connect with me in person! This summer I will be teaching several classes at my old studio in the Catskill Mountains. June 29-July 20th. Please write for more details and to sign up for classes. I can’t wait to see you all!