Monday, March 28, 2011

Walk Over It


(Not my photo....)

Growing up in Kentucky I would often visit my grandmother, Momie in her small town. Sometimes we would walk the four blocks to Main street, the major shopping Mecca. Her husband was the Postmaster (Kids, do you know what a Postmaster is?) and they were big in the church, so we stopped often along the way to speak with her friends.

Imagine a young girl, aged 7 or 9 or 11 decked out in her fresh, dewy skin, hair thick and lustrous waiting for an age when it would be gold on the market.... eyes bright, foot quietly, politely, but incessantly tapping the ancient, broken sidewalks, sometimes made from tombstones tossed face down to create a walkway... waiting and waiting as the elders, the older women, the wise crones exchanged the latest health issues, if not death issues of all the friends they had in common. Which was just about everyone in town.

It was black and white. Oil and water, this mix of child and wizened warrior. No matter that she taught me how Cardinals sound in the spring, why Peony's are special, that cornbread made into pancakes is far better than cakes... that no matter how broken you are when you arrive, there's still room at the table....

No matter what she taught, we were 7 and 57 and I just didn't get all this illness and death talk. Truly, I still don't. Not in certain ways. But...

I have one friend going though an incredibly hard bout with cancer (I refuse to capitalize it. Illogical, I'm sure). Another is just out of the hospital, having battled pneumonia and drug side-effects. A third is lucky to be walking. I'm going to the doctor tomorrow and everyone knows just how much I don't handle that.

I don't want to embrace the illness, the ache, the pain as a daily ritual. Not mine or anyone else's. But I do realize that it's becoming (like a quickened sunrise) a part of my age's 'neighborhood'.

Sadly, I've been through this before. But it was different.

I remember the AIDS epidemic. At the height of it, you would walk down the street with all of your emotional nerves exposed, though trying to act like everything was fine. You knew that at some point someone would say, "Did you hear about ___", "____ went into Hospice", " I don't know what to do with ___'s things". "He has developed Kaposi's Sarcoma. He has dementia."

But in those instances, the breeze in the trees overhead weren't moving across the cycle of life, but were grating against what was wrong. There was no solace in knowing a 24 year old man was soon to die, hadn't begun to touch the life my grandmother was familiar with, that her friends had been familiar with. In truth,

what I've been familiar with.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm trying to embrace this part of life that we all go through. Carmon, who is so depleted by drugs and cancer is planning to sit by her new garden, soon. Can you imagine how wonderful it could be, if the 'bestest' thing you hoped for was sitting next to new plants? Sick or not, young or old, investing yourself in the burgeoning world around you has to be one of the most powerful things you can do.

It occurs to me that as my Grandmother and I walked down those broken sidewalks, and she spoke to me of birds and flowers, and told me through her stories that I was as valuable as anything in her life, she was investing in a brand new world, was shaping me and holding me, even unto this moment as I sit telling her story to a 'machine' she couldn't have imagined.

Maybe we are crayons, rubbing up against new life, shading it; defining the lines. Maybe we see the black frame that encompasses the picture and say, "Walk over it.".

2 comments:

  1. I don't know yet, Hannah. To tell you the truth I'm scared to death. The nurse left a voice message saying that I needed to call them TODAY, and when I reached her she said I have some kind of internal infection and they needed to do more tests. I went back into work and promptly fell apart.

    I went back for all the tests and I imagine that I'll hear something tomorrow.

    And on top of everything, I found out I don't have a roommate, as I thought. Does this hell ever end?

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