Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
22 degrees. A thin layer of snow on the solar panels, Black Mountain’s lodgepoles topped in a floury white and the sky that Colorado western blue. Bright sun. Why we love the mountains.
Still spinning out, not working much, floating in caregiver world, distracted. It’s ok. I’m waiting intentionally now, Progoff workshop starts Sunday and I’ll go deep into this current version of me, self-guided, self-analysis, Jungian style. The week after it finishes I have my pet scan, then the meeting with the oncologist. Into the unknown, first my psyche, then my body. All in two weeks.
The Progoff method is a pet scan for the psyche, letting me see the things within that have been hidden by busyness, anxiety, stress, competing demands, looking away. Once I’ve seen them, like the pet scan’s images of my cancer, I can diagnose my situation and make a plan. That’s diagnose in its etymological sense: from Greek diagnōsis, from diagignōskein to distinguish, from dia- + gignōskein to know. Merriam-Webster
My suspicion is that I’ve entered a different moment in my life, one that began with two dramatic changes, the first being the move to Colorado. It took about a year to process. All the financial squirming of two houses, moving and pitching stuff, lots of stuff, removing ourselves from Minnesota and moving onto Shadow Mountain. The second change. Prostate cancer. In which I went from a normally healthy aging man to a cancer patient. The sudden push back into the space of a cancer patient, after thinking I’d put it in the past, been cured, has jarred me in ways I’ve barely begun to realize.
Kate’s slowly, but now surely, rebounding from her long ordeal. She’s able to take on the dog’s second feeding, a modest, but real return to pre-bleed life. Our visit to Dr. Gidday, a post the most recent hospitalization appointment, gave her situation much more clarity. Dr. Gidday agreed that if her hemoglobin numbers don’t stay up, she has labs drawn weekly for the tpn feedings, then she’ll go to iron infusions. That will resolve, or at least attenuate, her anemia. Continued weight gain will happen through the j-tube placement. (remember the j-tube?).
The final piece of the puzzle, her lung disease, awaits either a lung biopsy, which she does not want, or a close reading of the high-resolution CT scan she had on April 2nd. With a diagnosis and the resulting treatment for the interstitial lung disease all the presenting problems of the past year plus should be addressed. A long, long time coming. Just how far back toward her old life she can expect to come is unknown, but if she can get back to sewing, driving, going to CBE and to Bailey Patchworkers and the Needleworkers group I’ll count her better.
Then, maybe I can get back to more abstruse obfuscations here rather than this medico-journalese I’ve had to adopt over the past several months. The tincture of time, as Kate would say.
Phone call today from buddy Tom Crane. In referring to the current kerfuffle within my body, those cancer cells, he said I was “wrestling with a dark angel.” That is so.
Recalled as I wrote this that I had a dream:
Back to mussar yesterday. First time in quite a while. It was a gift, as was the minyan for Debra Copes’ mother’s memorial the night before.
Being away for a while makes me more aware of these moments. Yet Debra wanted me at her mother’s minyan. She did a universal worship service which consists of lighting candles for Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and a general candle for other witnesses to the divine. Rabbi Jamie said, at a meeting a couple of weeks ago, “This ex-Presbyterian understands Reconstruction better than anybody else around this table.” Around the table were key leaders of the synagogue.
The Jewish approach to death, too. Sitting shiva with someone after a death. Having those in mourning stand and be acknowledged during the mourner’s kaddish at every worship service. Celebrating each year the yahrzeit, the year anniversary of a loved ones death. Calling together a minyan as Debra did for honoring her mother. Those who knew it, repeated the mourner’s kaddish from memory. A vital and key part of maintaining community, acknowledging that the dead live on, not gone, just absent.
So much here. The grit of my life over the past three and a half years. How has all this changed me? What direction does it suggest? How might I live into it with greater joy, greater passion, greater serenity? I also need a break from the every day. Not just because it’s been stressful as I said below, but because it’s been a long time between breaks. Tom and Mark’s visit was a nice respite, but too short.
Got my own thing going on, too. Second PSA showed a slight uptick from a month ago, from .12 to .13. As Kate said, probably in the lab’s margin of error. Still, it is cancer we’re talking about here. Any increase over .1 sends some sort of signal, just how serious a one I don’t know. Going in to see the urologist as soon as I can get an appointment.
What about Jesus? There again, I know the literary sources. The earliest gospel, Mark, probably did not include a resurrection narrative. The dying and rising god is a motif of certain Middle Eastern belief systems, the story of Osiris for example.
Go now, the illness has ended. Feeling 95%. Still something in my lungs, not much. So seven weeks after the molasses filled drive back from Denver, I feel able. Still got workouts and stamina to increase, but I enjoy that. Imagine me doing a little dance on the balcony of the loft, a dance of thanksgiving for a strong constitution and a return to the unremarkable state of health.
Remember the Producers? Zero Mostel? In it was the classic hit, “It’s Springtime for Hitler”. Well, it’s springtime in the Rockies and all of Colorado. Here’s another pirouette for great comedies and a plié with arm extended for the beauty of Black Mountain.
And, yes, in that state now, I feel resurrected, reborn, renewed. A little shaky perhaps but that fits such a state doesn’t it? What’s next? Not in the quotidian sense I mentioned above, but what’s next in the sense of “
Head. Mostly clear. Lungs. Mostly clear. I’m beginning to feel the illness bidding me goodbye. So long, it was good to know ya. Nah, it wasn’t. And don’t come back, please.
I really don’t want to confuse Kate’s journey right now, especially since we see the same doc, so I may wait a bit, be sure the flight of respiratory illness I sampled over the last two months has actually ended. In time I would like to know if anything in my lungs compromises my breathing. It’s certainly possible. I smoked for 13 years. Not proud of it, but I did. I also worked in a couple of high particulate matter jobs in my younger days, cutting rags at a paper mill and moving completed asbestos ceiling tiles to pallets. And, Dad had severe asthma, using an inhaler virtually his whole life.
What impedes breathing, impedes life itself. Impedes the spirit of all life that dwells within us. Like health breathing is unremarkable to most of us until its ease experiences an interruption. Water boarding, or extreme interrogation (not torture as our CIA likes to say), is horrific because it emulates drowning. Our body has reflexes built in, the diving reflex, for example, that protect us in the case of sudden immersion in water. This means that our DNA carries a history of dangers to our breathing.
A breathing issue is not, then, solely the province of pulmonology. It is also the province of theology broadly understood. Theology, for me, is the way you identify, organize, and deal with matters of ultimate importance. Life itself is, of course, a matter of ultimate importance to an individual; therefore, life and how it is for us at any particular point is a directly theological matter. Breath, the spirit of life that fills our lungs, provides our cells with oxygen so that they can carry out the physiological functions that are life in the body, is also of ultimate importance.
The woes of the body, our lamentations here on Shadow Mountain, are of the tactile world, the one bound up in life and death; but, they are not of the soul, the spirit, the ohr, the imago dei. No. In my soul (a word I’ve come to use more freely of late, meaning that part of me that bows to the god in you, namaste.) I can hear the sweet, though often very far-off hymn. It hails a new creation coming into existence even now, one shaped by the lamentations, but not determined by them.