Lessons

The ‘dreaded day’ is here. My hair is coming out and I will join the leagues of other bald patients. No tears, only fascination, and saving the clumps to put outside for the birds to use in building their nests. The lovely silver strands are soft and will be a good place to rear this seasons fledglings. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, that “every ending is a new beginning”. I am somewhat prepared: I have hats, scarves, even a wig, but I suppose that this is not something that we women are ever really prepared for. So the ending of my head of hair will be the place where our little neighbor hummingbirds will lay their eggs and raise their young and have their beginnings. And we will have the pleasure of watching the tiny eggs until they hatch, and we will see the long skinny beaks stretch upward to be fed until the day that they leave the nest and we will not see them again. And my hair will come back. Perhaps not the same as it is now, but it will eventually come back. And I will have my own new beginning. And with each change that takes place in my body, and in my household, and in my psyche because of the change in my cellular structure, I learn new things. There is a whole world of things that I have only known from afar, like from magazine articles, that I am learning about from much closer up. In the arrogance of good health, we think our passing familiarity with the vocabulary and the appearances of illness is all there is to know, but we are so wrong. Soon the vocabulary becomes personal, and the appearance becomes our own, and the feelings and the fears and the triumphs also become personal. No matter that one’s family, if one is as lucky as I am, is pulling for us and encouraging us, and helping us over every hurdle, the battle to stay real, to stay the person we have always perceived ourselves to be is an uphill daily battle. I ask myself daily, who is that woman in the mirror with the sunken chest, who is this person with the thinning old lady hair; who, indeed is this person who watches so much television because I am too tired to read and know that if I give in to a nap, I will pay the price in the small hours of the morning with wakefulness when everyone else sleeps. So every day I have to reintroduce myself to me, because every day there is something new to be learned from this path down which I am traveling. Some days I can taste my food, and some days not. Some days I am so tired for no apparent reason, and I will nap in the morning, and some days I seem to have enough energy to accomplish almost as much as I did before, until the moment that I seem to be dropping from exhaustion. For the days that I fought each new feeling, each new development, I tired myself out without anything to show for it. Now I look at each new thing and think, ‘now that’s interesting, I haven’t noticed that before.’ I guess what I am trying to say here, that if I can take life at its most frightening, and see it as something new to be learned, something interesting to be noticed, it takes away some of the sting. And when I see the love and support that is all around me from kind friends, loving family, even strangers that we encounter along the way who tenderly and hesitantly ask, ‘would it be all right if I pray for you?’ I know that I have come to visit in a place of great compassion and sensitivity, and that there are so many lessons to be learned here, and that no matter how hard it may be, I will labor to carry them back with me to the land of good health, and then offer them to those in the midst of their struggle for health. Do not shy away from the difficult. There are many valuable lessons to be learned there.