The view from the bottom

THIS transformation, this collision and its aftermath, has brought so much change, so much letting go! I sometimes feel I have stood at the edge of a pier and watched many people in my life set sail in a direction away from me. And I have lain, the mind a blur, barely functioning, thought so pared down by the damage to the brain that if I had ten thoughts in fifteen minutes, it would have been an unusually hectic quarter of an hour. Everything stripped to the barest essentials: sleep, food and, when possible, bathing... As I stood in the bath quivering under the arrows of water being shot by the shower, I sometimes found it hard to recognise my own body, so swollen, so tender, in so much pain. It was almost as though I lay somewhere buried deep within this distended, fragile and disoriented frame. Such a complex thought might take an hour to formulate itself, stopped short every few seconds by the dead-end of fatigue. Sometimes these eyes were so light sensitive that sunlight felt like a slap in the face. Curtains would be drawn, dark glasses worn all day. When I was young, in India, it was only vain film stars and the blind that wore sunglasses. But in this period, I lived almost entirely shaded by the darkest of lenses sold by opticians.

As I lay day after day on my bed of pain, watching clouds float by my window and slowly change shape, sometimes pierced by a plane taking off from Oakland airport, I often wondered if there could possibly be anything else to life than what I was experiencing. On occasion, this sport of watching the clouds was interrupted by the arrival of a friend. It was hard, really, to look out from behind my eyes and know what to say or how to reach out and touch the edges of her existence, let alone have any idea how to invite my visitor into the world I inhabited. So close to the experience, virtually no distance at all, no capacity to reflect on it as it was happening, offering it thereby as a story that she might entertain or welcome into her heart.

* * *

Why do I wish to speak of all this? Not for empathy or pity, sometimes for validation, sometimes as a way of sending a postcard from the bottom of the ocean, now that my mind has healed enough to know where I have been. I turn towards as a way of composing something like a bridge, however partial, between where I have been and where I am today. The truth is, to most people a chronically or seriously ill person is either someone completely unrecognisable, or someone that they continue to interact with as though there had been no change at all...

* * *

For it is not, I have learnt, as I have always feared, that once we open to grief or rage or frustration we sign, as it were, a lifetime contract with it. Time and time again, when sheer fatigue, exhaustion and weakness brought me to my knees in tearful prayer, all I could do was say, "Show me Your face in the grief, my Lord, show me Your face in the pain." And over and over and over again I sensed the warm presence of mercy, the tender glow of compassion and the silent grace of the divine....

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