Spring New Shoulder Moon
No Kate in the bed last night. Kep was there, though. Medical procedures upend regular life in so many ways. Kate had to stop most of her meds, use special cleansing soaps, sleep on clean sheets (yes, that was a requirement), stop eating. Then we have to leave our home, drive in to the hospital early, always early. Once there the ritual of checking in and paying, followed by pre-op disrobement, placing of iv’s, lots of conversation about medical history, warm blankets, lying in hospital bed on your back connected to various machines with many different numbers: O2, blood pressure, heart rate among others.
This is a gradual relinquishing of control that culminates in anesthesia and allowing someone, paying someone, to violate one of the most persistent taboos in our culture, the literal integrity of your body should not be disturbed by another. The surgeon cuts into the skin, goes inside where we never see, into the most private and intimate of spaces. And, in this case, takes out bone and cartilage, sets aside nerves, and installs titanium in a location known before only to flesh and blood.
The process begins to reverse in the recovery room as questions about nausea and pain depend on your answers for treatment. Modest control returning. Once in your room you begin to eat again, determine your pain medications, walk, use the bathroom. Finally, if no complications arise, the wheel chair ride to transportation home. Even at home the post-op plan governs a lot of your life. How much and how long of course depends on the procedure. Not sure quite what this looks like in Kate’s case yet, we’ll learn that today.
We agree to all this because we trust, more or less, the institution of medical care and the people who make it work. Of, if we don’t exactly trust, then we realize our options are few if we want the painful right shoulder to stop hurting, become useful again.
As a physician and a former nurse anesthetist, Kate knows the parts of surgery usually invisible to a patient due to anesthesia. This is, as the Bible says, a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing in that there are fewer unknowns to give anxiety, but a curse in that surgery does not always go well and she knows that from personal experience.
I look forward to picking her up today, bringing her home and helping her through recovery. As Schneider’s interviewee said, then she can live on and give on.
As one of Dr. Agronin’s youngest informants said, even when physical decline and losses restrict one’s options, there remains the capacity to appreciate and approach each day with a sense of purpose. “It’s all about how you frame what you have,” she told him.
Hopefully, our children, the millennials among them, will look at us and come to that phase of their lives with a different image. My hope is that they will see that aging is the accumulation of years, not a time of diminished hope and diffuse fear, but life continuing. If that image can become dominant, it will look like the diverse approaches people have to their first and second phases. In other words the third phase will have as many distinct trajectories as there are people who enter it. It will not be dormancy, or a pause before dying, but life itself.
I like Robert Hill’s definition of positive aging: (It’s) “affected by disease and disability, but not contingent upon avoiding it.” Rather, it is “a state of mind that is positive, optimistic, courageous, and able to adapt and cope in flexible ways with life’s changes.” 
Not only in children, I think. Resilience can allow us to accept the changes of the aging body without losing hold of the power of our own lives. With a resilient personality even ALS will not cause us to stop growing. Just look at Stephen Hawking.
In a bit of nostalgia for me all the seats in the place were taken up by residents from a group home for the developmentally disabled. A young man with a plastic helmet to protect against seizures, another autistic young man davening and crying out, and four Down’s Syndrome young women. When I worked with the developmentally disabled, which I did from 1974 to 1980, taking clients out to places like the laundromat was a pleasant diversion, teaching independent living skills and being away from the residence.
My physical was, at least so far (before lab results), unremarkable. Dull is my favorite medical term. Boring. Nothing happening here. My ekg was like last years. My blood pressure is low enough that Dr. Gidday wondered if I was over medicated. No, I said, I want to keep it low. All those strokes in the family of origin. O2 saturation fine, as it always is when I descend 3,600 feet to her office. Knee? Fine. Other knee? Surprisingly fine. Prostate? Still gone. PSA’s good. No hernia. Lungs and heart sound good. Still upright and moving.
It is the tao of springtime reminding us that winter passes, too, as will all the difficulties; and, that even in the midst of a tough season, underneath is the movement of life itself, struggling to emerge, to take back the moment. All we need to do is follow its cues.
Sometimes. Well. So, the washer failed first, on Thursday. Then, a day or so later, the dishwasher. 1 Stop appliance, the folks who do Samsung repairs up here, only have two days in Conifer, Monday and Wednesday. Monday was full, so Wednesday. That’s the day before Kate’s surgery.
Made corned beef and cabbage for dinner last night. Erin go bragh! When I decided to write novels, now long ago, Kate suggested I find an area that I could relate to. I chose my Celtic heritage, both Welsh and Irish. It is a fertile realm, filled with gods and goddesses, fairies and banshees, this world and the other world. Not so deep into it right now with one exception, the Great Wheel.
Its sumi-e material material, though, was feeble compared to the hole in wall (by comparison), Red Herring. Meiningers’ selection of brushes were all cheap, beginner’s brushes. They did have a couple of Yasumoto inks that I bought, an Ultra Black and a Black Gold. I also picked up an Olfa knife to cut paper, from the kraft roll that came last week and from the rolls of rice paper I bought from Red Herring and Blue Heron, an online sumi-e store.
The new life moon, which hung in the sky during the Jewish month of Adar, gives way this evening to the new shoulder moon in the month of Nisan. On March 22nd, under a waxing new shoulder moon, Kate will meetup again with Dr. David Schneider, this time at Ortho Colorado, the same hospital where Dr. William Peace put in my new knee. If all goes well, her new shoulder will be in place that day and she will return home on Friday to begin six weeks or so of recuperation.
There is, as well, another factor. Beth Evergreen. Kate has a community that cares about her and will help us through her surgery and recovery if we need it. We probably won’t need help, but if we do, we know Beth Evergreen is there for us. For two folks living in a new place, with ties of forty years severed by leaving Minnesota, this is a huge comfort. Being part of a beloved community. A gift for which we are both grateful.
Had a strong sense yesterday of the tao. Often elusive for me, yesterday had a distinct flavor, a wind blowing through the events of the day and I rode with it.
It was jaggedy, edgy tao, putting up barriers, then releasing. Gabe had his own struggle with this tao. I was forty minutes late picking him up.
This anecdote has stuck with me, I think, because of the sale of our land in Andover. We did so much, worked hard at creating soils that would grow healthy, vibrant plants, but then we moved on.
Last week at mussar we had a fascinating conversation on the essential dourness of both Jewish and northern European cultures stimulated by the Norwegian concern that they had won too many medals in the winter Olympics. In both cases happiness, and by correlation, joy, are suspect. Why are you so happy? What makes you think that will last?
It was also time to slough off some of the Minnesota based, second phase lingering work. Especially the political. I am going to the caucus this Tuesday; however, I no longer see myself as a dedicated activist. But, and I consider this great news, Ruth told me she was walking out on April 9th, standing outside Mcauliffe, her middle school, for seventeen minutes, one minute for each of the Parkland victims. She’s doing it in spite of the fact that adults tell her no one will listen. Go, Ruth!
The melancholy also uncovered a tension I’d been feeling between leaning in to the domestic, cooking, for example, and Kate and mine’s presence in the Beth Evergreen community, and what I consider my work. Recalibrating second phase expectations about work, which I have not yet fully done, feels like a task for this time. In fact, I enjoy the domestic part of our lives and it feels good to devote more energy to it.