Fifth, maybe of tequila

Facebook is unthinking and uncritical of what it throws in our path from the times before.  We can count on whatever we did a year or five before popping into our path again, in all its colors.

Today, this:

This evening as I went through my end of daylight routine I reflected upon how strange it is. One highlight is putting my hand in the trough of baby koi and having them swim into my hand and loll around in my palm before I turn out the light. 

Inside, I am treated to the sounds of guitar practice. There are more things for me to do, but they will wait for morning. Dinner is over. It was early. 

I hold something in my heart for my friends in the ICU in Honolulu. It is a well of hope. There are many more words for the sea of thoughts and feelings that come with waiting to know which way fate will twist, once it has struck a critical blow. There is no calling in favors from the universe of chance, no making deals. I do not know what moves among us that some experience as the divine. 

Are we each here for a reason? Do we have a unique purpose, something we are given to live out with grace? I do not know. 

There is a phrase in Philippians that I love when I rework it into my own language, the language of what I feel to be my authentic self. We have it within our selves to accept a peace that surpasses human conscious understanding. It is within the embrace of this peace that we can keep moving when the world we thought we knew changes course in wild ways.

This is not anything I would repost there. But, it recalls a flood of memories. 

The baby koi were divided between the pond and a friend. Now even the pond is in the past, under the care of others who bought our home. They tell us they were moved by the pond to claim the house. 

The sounds of guitar do fill the house of an evening, although tonight the plan is to head over to Kaktus for the flamenco show. There is snow on the ground, and the temperature out there just now is 44.  It will drop into the 30s during the evening. The show is out of doors. Maybe too cold for us. 

Our friends in ICU. It was a peculiar accident. They had been in Kona at a beachfront rental with friends from the mainland. There was a rock wall between the house and the water, a little sandy beach, and all day long everyone had been up and down. My friend was getting a tray of pupus ready for before dinner snacking, and looking around for her husband, didn't see him. He was lying on the ground at the bottom of the wall, his head smashed on the lava. Apparently he had slipped scaling the wall, on the steps, and tumbled backward. He could never say what happened. 

The doctors warned our friend her husband might never be anything like he had been before. He would suffer some amount of permanent brain damage, and how severe was an unknown. But likely he would need constant care and supervision. It was a daunting prognosis. There may have been something he wrote out explaining what he would want done in the event of a crisis like this. Oft times people say, do not bring me back. I would have said that. 

But if there was such a document, it was nowhere to be found, and everything went into saving him. It took hours upon hours, but he was airlifted to Queens trauma on Oahu, and placed in a medical induced coma, then allowed to come out of it on his own. 

It all took a long long time. Weeks and months, and slowly he returned. There were tedious gaps in his full recovery. He was not interested in eating, for example. He had a tube, and seemed content to continue to get his nourishment that way. Food held no interest. It was hard to imagine this man with whom we had had dinner in restaurants, at people's houses, at his house, the man with whom we had shared food above all else, separated entirely from the urge to eat. He had to be cajoled into taking mouthfuls of anything. It was almost more frightening than when he had been unconscious and it was unclear whether he would wake up. 

Eventually, he began to eat again. He took part in conversations. He did not seem to grope for words or ideas, and was present. His efforts at everything however were dampened. His enthusiasm was not as great, his joie de vivre lessened. And then over the months, life continued to improve, and brought more happiness. It is a long way back from a severe traumatic brain injury. 

What I take from this personally is a range of ideas. One is that I am still thinking about how to word what I want done if I have a brain injury. "Heroic measures" were taken for him. Had they not been, he would surely have died. Had the measures failed, he would have lived on but not conscious or not fully conscious, disengaged. Is he the same person who fell? His wife said yes, immediately. What matters in this life has everything to do with the people who love us, the people we love. I knew that already, but perhaps not in this depth, or with this level of conviction. 

On a more public level, the things that matter are sometimes nearly ruined for us. The state of our nation is for some just fine, and for others, we perceive a well of putrescence. The past of racism and sexism is laid out like a cadaver, but still squirming. Ageism, something you would think would be rampant, has all kinds of ugly tendrils but the government leadership seems firmly in control of old white men. Something is rotten. 

So taking all this together, as the world changes about us in wild ways, we keep our feet solidly on the ground, and make our lives and the lives of those around us just as solid and good. We let them do that, according to their abilities, and we offer our hands to help as needed. We accept help as needed. It is all so much more complex and wild than we ever imagined.

Addendum: As fate would have it, about an hour after I wrote this, I heard from a good friend that her sister lay in a coma, across the ocean. A simple infection, untreated, resulted in sepsis. No one was there to help and she passed out, and inhaled vomit. She lay on the floor 30 hours before being found. She had no document on file with instructions. She is now comatose on life support. What this means for her family is that those who want to gather before she is gone will be able to do so. They will be able to meet up, have conversations in the room with her, experience their goodbyes.

Life, death, and that realm that lies between life and death do go on. A 91 year old man, an actor, on his way to a performance, stepped between cars on a busy California street and was struck by two different cars and killed. It mattered to me how this happened, just as it mattered to me how my friend's sister came to be comatose, and how my friend came to be so severely injured. Today my husband remarked about what joy it brings him to maintain the beauty and integrity of our home. These sorts of details tell us the story of how and why, not the story of "that".

I am ready now to focus upon plans for our next venture into the wild. Maybe all this is to be careful to keep the road map going while there is no internet, to bring a tow rope and shovel, and plenty of water and blankets since it is still winter.