Sunshine, come and help me sing
My heart is darker than these oceans,
My heart is frozen underneath...
I’m a crooked soul trying to stay up straight,
Dry eyes in the pouring rain
The shadow proves the sunshine,
The shadow proves the sunshine...”
- Switchfoot, “The Shadow Proves the Sunshine”
Healing.
Healing isn’t glamorous.
Healing isn’t a star-studded gala, rife with “smiles everyone, smiles!”, adrenaline-rushed, deliverance junkies.
Healing isn’t a breathtakingly panoramic trek with immediate before and after views and vistas.
Healing isn’t celebrity-reality-God-TV rostered with greedy, shaman-grifters who if they were all legit would
immediately cut the lights, camera, action and take up anonymous residency’s at inner-city hospitals and traffic in bona-fide righteous remedies.
Healing.
“It’s been said that time heals all wounds; the truth is that time doesn’t heal anything, it merely passes...it’s what we do during the passing of time that helps or hinders the healing process...”
I read that the other day.
I read it and I’ve re-read it while time passed.
I read it until I understood it.
I read it and I believe it’s true.
Time has passed - 8 months - since this coronavirus scrambled the frequency of my life.
Time has passed - 8 months - and I’ve done things, things that I hope have helped my healing process.
Time has passed - 8 months - and I don’t know if I’ve done anything to hinder my healing process, but I really don’t know because I’ve never had to heal like this before.
I have no healing baseline experience for ravaged lungs, half a face still numb and tingly, disheveled vocal chords, a tribe of scars (crows gather in a murder, rhinos travel in a crash, my scars are arrayed in a “tribe” - and why not? - a tribe is a “distinctive, close-knit group, inhabiting a place”), severely diminished strength, and a tentative, dominant right arm and hand.
Oh.
And a little bit of “brain funk-esque” weirdness: forgetfulness, reading comprehension slowdown, physical coordination ineptness, and some in general loss of a step or two.
Could be the creeping up of age.
The inevitable passing of time.
Nah.
I’ll stick with covid19-related for now.
Healing.
“Let’s check your blood pressure...”
Lauren lovingly calls it “gym class”.
As in, “Have fun at gym class” she texts as I walk into one of my 3 days a week, cardiac rehab sessions.
Me and half a dozen or so other old-timers with varying degrees of far away looks in our eyes, dutifully walking on treadmills, pedaling ergo bikes, and lifting weights, the little 4 or 5 pound dumbbells that might otherwise pass for paperweights.
I wire up my heart monitor, slip on my head phones, tune in some old Stones or Miles Davis, take a sip of water, and begin the dance.
Healing.
“How are you feeling?
Let’s see how your oxygen level is...”
In cardiac rehab world, normal gym-rat, cross-training, motivational, bumper-sticker jargon doesn’t apply.
“No pain no gain” is anathema.
If you’re in pain, you’ve done something or you’re doing something very wrong.
“Nobody should be hurting in here” they say.
A little sweat’s okay, a little more-tired-than-usual-tomorrow-is-fine-but-we’re-not-shooting-for-ripped-abs-and-calves-in-here, so take it down a notch or two, Arnold.
Healing.
“Did you take your meds this morning?
Did you move around over the weekend?
Have you been drinking enough water?”
Bruce graduated from gym class (I mean cardiac rehab) today.
We stopped tread-milling, ergo-biking, and paperweight dumbbell lifting long enough to join in giving him a round of applause while one of the nurses turned on a scratchy version of the graduation march song for all of about one minute.
It was a moment of surreal nostalgia mixed in with sad-but-oddly-kind-of-cool overtones.
Bruce and I talked on our way out to our cars in the parking lot.
“What are you in for?” he asked.
I smiled.
What.
Are.
You.
In.
For.
“It’s a long story” I said, and gave him the increasingly truncated version of my In The Year of Our ‘Rona, 2020 saga as we walked.
He stopped and stared at me.
“Well, wow” he said.
“Wow, that’s a lot, that’s an awful lot...”
Bruce is 74, did the double bypass around 20 years ago, this current gym class go round was kind of a tuneup for him, he encouraged me not to miss any classes, to keep it up and to keep at it, and especially to take care of myself.
Three times.
“You take care of yourself now, okay?”
“Take care of yourself, alright?”
“You uh, you take care, okay?”
The third and last time he said it he gave me a longer, deliberate, squinty-eyed look and nodded as if he wanted to say something more, something profound and wise, something religious, but he decided that telling me to take care of myself three times was the best, let-me-take-you-under-my-wings advice he could possibly give me.
I read this the other day while time passed.
I read this not long after I talked with Bruce.
I read it and realized the essence of it happens to me all the time now in my current life.
“Sometimes you don’t actually know how traumatic something you went through is until you talk about it like it’s some random anecdote, and then you realize the table’s gone silent, and your friends are all staring at you like, what the actual fuck...”
Healing.
Healing isn’t glamorous.
Healing is doing and not doing, questioning, doing and not doing again and again, and questioning some more.
Healing is demanding, sighing, waiting, sighing, waiting, demanding and damning, waiting patiently and impatiently, waiting mostly in the dark about what all the waiting is for.
Healing is treadmill-paced monotony, graced by rare invitations into holy, parking lot spirit-liftings from 74 year old, in recovery, heart-diseased angels unaware.
Healing is painstakingly slow, grinding, arduous, deeply-souled labor while simultaneously being divinely swift, delicate, effortless, deeply-souled artistry.
“and here you are living, despite it all”, writes the poet Rupi Kaur.
I take comfort in those words, words I would slightly alter:
“and here you are healing, despite it all...”
