I Learn What I Need, and I Need What I Learn
I never learned how to be sick.
There weren’t any models, demonstrations, examples of—
You get sick.
You are sick.
Then, you get better.
Things were much more complicated in my family
My dad, Sidney, beloved snuggle-bug of a dude, had his first heart attack when I was in fourth grade. It was a monumental day already, since I was expecting to get my Zorro sword. I already had my mask and my cape. The sword was essential for my ongoing commitment to protect all damsels in distress. Oh, how I longed for it.
I never got the sword. Other things were happening.
And my dad never did die.
Well, of course he died.
But first, he lived for 44 years after his initial heart attack. He lived in silent terror of his dying. We all did.
He was often sick or injured. Like a magnet, he drew situations to himself that had physical impact. Perhaps minor for others, for my dad always, always complications emerged. No matter how minor, with my dad, they became intense. And they all were held in silence.
All these events, these silent death threats lived as an unspoken dread in my body, shadowing my heart with anticipatory grief.
Here’s an example. I remember so well being at my beloved Beach Haven on Long Beach Island. I wasn’t in high school yet; trampolines were the new rage. Yahoo, Beach Haven had a new trampoline park! I begged and begged to go. And we did. I vaguely, half-remember one or two of my own tentative bounces. But I remember in stark detail, my dad’s bounces. He chose to trampoline and he bounced and bounced. I held my breath. And sure enough……..sure enough:
That night, he had chest pains. Those were the words that indicated we were screwed.
Chest pains.
When he had chest pains or when I was worrying about him getting chest pains, the enthusiasm and fullness of my own experiences, in this case, trampolining, were overshadowed by my dad’s.
He didn’t die from the Beach Haven chest pains.
Which, by the way, were my fault.
Nevertheless, that night, he did die about a hundred times in my head.
Time passed.
A thousand, billion things happened.
And he got older.
He got sicker.
And he lived and lived,
And I, and we worried and worried.
I held my breath.
Cosmic joke?
My pop passed after many, many years of our silent terror about his potential dying.
Forty-four years after his first heart attack, he took his last breath, at the beginning of the new millennium, right after Y2K fizzled into nothingness, as he did.
And among the million swirls of feelings/thoughts that passed through me in those early days, one was—
WOW. He actually did it.
He actually died.
He died, and I lived, something I didn’t think was possible. And that was 26 years ago. I have lived 26 years of a full life. Without him.
~~~
What about me? I was a sick, sick baby, and I lived, I survived, and grew into a strong, resilient body. I outlived two childhood disabilities, carried forward by that resiliency.
I am not prone to sickness.
I joke about my hearty Russian peasant stock, having baby in field of kasha, keep going.
And truly, I have had very little illness in my life.
Until now. Just this past year, I received a diagnosis has changed my life but doesn’t threaten my life, a medical condition causing hearing loss. Not a bad deal, I eventually realized.
But this past f—ing year!
I coughed my way through the Fall.
I got Covid on Christmas Day, demanding a few weeks of my life.
I slowly came back to some sense of normalcy.
And—damn—last week—a cough—The cough?—revived herself.
I have been coughing
And
Coughing
And coughing.
I’m sure you probably heard my coughing. If not, listen more carefully.
I’m doing all the right allopathic things, taking all the appropriate naturopathic options.
So, I’m sick. That’s all.
I’m tired of it. I’m pissed and bored.
And I won’t die.
This being-sick-experience? I’m holding it as yes, another f___ing opportunity to heal, to learn, to integrate unhealed parts of myself.
I’m remembering:
Everybody gets sick.
Everybody dies eventually.
Permission granted.
To be human, to be a sick human.
My practice today:
- To allow myself to be sick.
- To douse myself in Netflix as needed.
- To deeply rest as best I can.
- To draw upon the dog walker’s support.
- To stay sick for as long as my body needs to be sick.
- To take all the appropriate steps in getting un-sick.
- To finish being sick.
- And to live on.
And truly I do learn what I need. I’m getting older—I will be getting sick, my body will weaken. My body is getting older, it is weakening. And I need, so very much, to know how allow myself to be sick, without the emotional baggage of yesterday’s reality.
Without the emotional baggage of yesterday’s reality.
I wanted you to know—
Despite the intensity of my family’s obsessive focus on my dad’s illnesses, my father lived as a gentle, good man who modeled kindness, who taught me how to play, and who saw me for all of what I might become. He fully and whole-heartedly believed in me. What a gift he was.
~~~
What’s your relationship with sickness?
What did you learn in your family of origin about being sick?
What kind of sick person do you become?
Please let me know.
~~~
For the past few days I’ve been moping around, being grumpily sick, looking for a song to offer me and you, and magically this popped into my inbox. It is the perfect song—from my heart to yours.
Here is Sending Your Light, by Melanie DeMore and Julie Wolf.
~~~
Friends,
Give us the willingness and the strength
To stop,
To rest
And
To heal.
Give us the courage to let go of
Old patterns
And
Old reactions.
Help us to rest,
To recover,
And
To renew,
So, we can be of service to that which is Greater than us all.
May all beings benefit from our time together.
Blessings,
Aruni