My Summer Vacation
Introduction
When I left for the States May 12, I thought I was going home for a vacation. I had a few goals for the summer, but then I always have goals--and goals are a good thing, right? Looking back, I wonder. While I had some fun with friends and family, I don't think I can actually call my summer a vacation. What would I call it? Not sure yet. Maybe by the time we get to the conclusion of this essay, I'll know. (Yes, I know: the thesis statement is supposed to go here, but I never was very good at deductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning is more my style, so if we're lucky I'll find a thesis by the time I get to the Conclusion.)
One title I might give my summer is "Musical Beds." I slept in a bed in North Carolina the first ten days I was back in the States. My parents live in Durham, so that was my first stop. Croasdaile Village is a thriving retirement community that's home to an amazing variety of folks. My actual bed was in Martha Bower's apartment, just downstairs from my parents' apartment. It was sort of a half-way house for me because Martha, a Navy nurse in WWII, was stationed on Guam in the 1940s! I found my parents dealing gracefully with the challenges of old age. Because I was dealing with the challenges of jet lag, we took a lot of naps. In between naps, we ate some wonderful meals and had a few laughs. My next 3 beds were in Colorado.
From May 21-June 23, I stayed with my friends Donna and Dave. For the last several years (six, I think), the Killens' has been my 2nd home, so I have my own room there. (Yes, they use it for other guests when I'm not there...) My dog Wrangler was already in residence at Killens, so most nights she and I slept upstairs. A few nights, when my friend Jacque came from Tacoma to visit, Wrangler and I slept downstairs. During that month, I reconnected with lots of CO friends (listed in alphabetical order) over a variety of meals: Bette, Dolores & Donna, Gloria, Julie, Lori, Lyndee, Marilyn, Nancy, Pati, Tom & Charisa (& Allana, Connor, & Carter), Vic & Lynette. And then there was a coffee hour with the entire Evergreen Christian Church family. Lots of good food, lots of laughs, and lots of music! My last bed in CO was in Montrose at Rog & Marcia's house. They weren't actually home, but their guestroom bed was on the way to AZ...
My next 4 beds were in Arizona. Vaughn's guestroom is a lot like Killens': I claim it for my own because of the many nights I've slept in that bed over the last 20 years. (Should I be paying rent to Vaughn and the Killens? No doubt.) June 26-August 12 went like this: Vaughn's house, Jorie & Nick's house, Vaughn's house, Jim & Maureen's house, Marlene's house, Bill & Taka's house, Jorie & Nick's house, Vaughn's house, Jorie & Nick's house. At all of these homes, I connected with AZ friends: Denise, Erika, Jerry, Joanne, Krista, Marcia, Michael, Patty (& Mattie & Mikhela). I ate more great meals, heard more wonderful stories, and yes...we laughed a lot. I think I should have called this section Celebration with Friends, but this is that inductive reasoning dogging my heels again.
(Yes, I know. I've failed the 5-paragraph essay form. I wonder how all those kids manage? From here on out, forget paragraphs--think in terms of "Sections.")
About now, you're probably scratching your head and wondering why my summer didn't feel like a vacation. You're probably also wondering how many pounds I put on. I'm not going to answer that second question, but I will answer the first. This is where we go back to the goals I mentioned in the Introduction. I had three big goals for my summer vacation. Goal 1 was to sell my house in Colorado. Goal 2 was to understand more about MS and how to live with it. Goal 3 was to keep writing.
So far Goal 1 that hasn't been accomplished. Still, I made good progress toward that goal. I picked out new carpet, paint, kitchen counter and backsplash, paid for said choices, and paid to have it all installed. I inspected said choices. Expensive & time-consuming? Yes. Worth it? We'll see. As part of Goal 1, I radically de-accumulated my possessions to get from the largest storage unit in Kings' Valley Storage down to the smallest
. Was this a good idea? Theoretically, yes. Practically, probably not. It required 2 full weeks of hard work, not only mine but also the efforts of 2 very cheerful high school bo ys. I got it done, but I was flat-out exhausted by the end of it all. (I was also humiliated by the amount of "stuff" I discovered I owned, but that's probably another story.)Goal 2 entailed a trip to Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, AZ. This goal turned out to be more complex than I expected, but I made a lot of progress. I found out that Secondary Progressive MS is a bigger challenge than Relapsing-Remitting, which I've been living with for 15-20 years. The problem with Secondary Progressive is that it's...progressive. No more nice little relapses to convince me that there's really nothing wrong. A permanent limp, ongoing tingling in hands and feet , and constant double-vision to remind me that Yes, Suzanne, there is something wrong. My time with the MS experts at Mayo helped me come out of denial and tiptoe toward acceptance. They gave me lots of concrete suggestions help me start learning how to live with a fragile nervous system. Am I happy about what I learned? No. Am I determined to figure out a new lifestyle based on reality? Most days.
Goal 3 was elusive. If you've read this far, you can probably guess why. Hard as it was for me to believe, I didn't have much time to write! Nevertheless, I did make progress toward finishing Kokopelli's Song. With the help of an ad-hoc writing group--Vaughn, Marcia, & Jorie--I came back to Guam with a clearer understanding of my audience (teenagers) and my purpose (fun with folklore). Once I recover from my summer vacation, I'll have that time I d idn't have in the States.
Conclusion: Reflections on Summer 2008
I know I promised you a thesis here, but hard as I look, I can't find one. This summer overflowed with
- the generosity friendship
- the work of finishing my Colorado chapter
- the challenge to find a new way of being Suzanne
MORE REFLECTIONS
LIVING UNDER GOD’S BLESSING
Some days are good days, others not so, and a few are flat-out bad. Sunday was
one of the bad ones. Discouraged when I woke up, by mid-afternoon I was depressed. Everywhere I turned, MS blocked my path. Getting out of bed was harder than usual because of a spasm in my right leg. The sunrise taunted me because I can no longer take my morning walks. Ironing the outfit I wanted to wear to church wore me out so completely I had to lie down for 15 minutes, time I hadn’t built into my schedule. It was a one foot at a time day so getting down the stairs from the parsonage to the sanctuary was even slower than usual. To top it all off the service seemed to be mainly standing. Halfway through, I decided it would be better to sit down than fall down. I sat. There I was a person sitting in a sea of people standing. It was lonely and dark down there, and I was there because of MS.
I complained my way through lunch and cried my way through a nap. I called a good friend. I pulled a dog-eared book off my shelf and started to read. Reread actually: For the last 20 years or so I’ve read Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved at least once a year. (One of my life goals is to memorize it.) The miracle of this gentle little book in my life is that every time I read it, it presents me with a new call to discipleship. The call I heard Sunday afternoo
n was “befriending our brokenness”…befriending Multiple Sclerosis?
“It is not hard to say to one another, ‘All that is good and beautiful leads us to the glory of the children of God’ writes Nouwen. “But it is very hard to say: ‘But didn’t you know that we all have to suffer and thus enter into our glory?’…The grea
t call of the Beloved Children of God is to pull their brokenness
away from the shadow of the curse and put it under the light of the blessing.” As I read those words on Sunday afternoon, I knew that for that day anyway I was living MS in the shadow of the curse. My depression was pulling me away from God. The call then was to put MS under the light of God’s blessing. But how? Nouwen suggests it’s by befrien
ding our brokenness.
I’m still puzzling through that phrase, but it’s got something to do with the way Jesus befriended a tax collector, a Samaritan woman who had multiple husbands, ten lepers, in fact all the broken people he met. By putting them under the light of God’s blessing, he healed them. It’s got something to do with the way we befriend the difficult people God puts in our lives. If we accept God’s call to befriend, first we must overcome the temptation to ignore the unattractive stranger. We must stop in our tracks, introduce ourselves, and ask polite questions of this person we’d really rather not get to know. That done, we must spend time with this ugly stranger, a lot of time. Eventually we start
to see good traits, the grace the stranger can bring to our lives. If we stay true to the call, the ugly stranger winds up becoming a friend.
That part I understand. But befriending a disease…a disease that won’t get better and will most likely get worse? At first I make any sense out of this call to pull MS out of the shadow of the curse into the light of God’s blessing, but the more I puzzled and prayed, prayed and puzzled, the clearer it became. It goes something like this.
Before I went to the Mayo Clinic last summer, I spent a lot of time ignoring MS. I told myself, “It doesn’t really matter that I have MS. After all, I’ve had it for years. I can keep on living just like I always have.” Of course, that wasn’t true because it was the worsening of the condition that led to its diagnosis. (It was that attitude that made my summer into an endurance test rather than a vacation…) The doctors at Mayo introduced me to this ugly stranger, and I have to admit, I didn’t like what I learned
very much. In fact, it was all downright depressing. To add to the difficulty, those doctors suggested I keep an MS diary to learn how my version of this idiosyncratic disease is affecting my days. This diary has become strangely like spending time getting to know the ugly stranger.
Looking for the good traits, the grace of MS? That’s going to take some time. Still, I’ve already noticed that MS is slowing me down, something I’ve tried and failed at for years. For another, MS is forcing me to focus on what’s really important because the disease has left me no have the energy for the unimportant. I can’t call MS a friend yet, and I can’t claim to always put it under the light of God’s blessing, but I’m working at it.
A POEM
THE OBLIQUE
Sometimes in shallow water in easy
reach of the shore, a riptide
develops. One unremarkable
minute you’re swimming toward
some harmless destination,
and the next…well the next,
you’re caught in the devil
of a current, so impersonal
you’ll most likely never
escape the water, not
alive anyway.
From what I hear,
there’s no telling where
you might encounter a riptide
or when. Certainly
there’s no explaining
why. Riptides
just happen. If you’re unlucky
enough to be sucked into
a riptide, you don’t
have many choices.
None good.
If you fight, you get pulled
under to drown. If you
surrender, you get swept
out to sea, probably to be
eaten by sharks.
They say the best
strategy is to swim
at an angle, aiming
for the place where
water and land finally
intersect.
Survival seems to depend
on finding the oblique, a narrow
ribbon of strength that can
take you to shore. Should you,
by hook and by crook or even
by guess and by golly, reach
land still breathing, you must,
like some ancient ceolacanth,
decide if you can find legs
to walk the unexpected stretch
of sharp coral beach.
2 comments:
You are truly an amazing person and a strength to everyone who crosses paths with you.
Suzanne, guess where I am! Skeeter was in CO for a week working with a professor in Fort Collins. I came up for the weekend and he arranged an airb&B - at Evergreen! Upper Bear Creek Road. We looked for you but couldn't find you! :)
Jacque
Post a Comment