I am home in Livermore now for the weekend. Casey is caring for Anna. I get to be home with Doug and Roxy and my comforts for a couple of days. This house is new but my things are my things with the history of my life reflecting back to me. It is my space. Our garden is new too as there was zero landscaping when we bought this house last November. We and the landscapers are still finishing it all. There have been multiple problems but it is now coming along. I trimmed the sunflowers of their spent blooms and put in the tomato supports. It is a smaller garden that I can tend to much better. This kind of puttering is nurturing and healing. Sunflowers smile even when you cry.
It is good for me to be here with the garden, near the vineyards and the birds at the feeder because I am tired, so tired, bone tired. We all are. It is the physical exertion of going every minute that comes with caregiving, the worry about a very sick daughter, the worry about the well daughter, the worry about the husband, the missing of my home and of the sweet dog who loves me and the body that is no longer so young any more. Yesterday I was noticing this tired, this feeling. What is this feeling? How can I describe it? It is a different kind of tired that is also laced with an anxious energy.
The feeling sits within my core. It is located in the belly and goes up to the throat. There is a dullness that comes into my body when I breathe in and sigh out. It is a fatigue, I guess. There are aches and pains around my legs, my stride is slowed. Taking a nap helps but does not get rid of it. I think it is because of my age. I am not as resilient as before. And this is not over. We are in the thick of it. So, I think, of course you feel this way. It would be strange if you did not. Your daughter is fighting for her life. How could I feel any other way? I will be tired until we get this job done and then, vacation.
Waiting in the cardio cath lab for Anna's final procedure of the week on Friday I could feel this malaise, this bone tired. There we were after a week of tests and this and that all over Stanford Hospital and I looked at her. Most of the time I just see Anna and sometimes I get another type of glimpse and I can not believe what I see. My beautiful daughter with plastic O2 tubing in her nose, without the vim and vigor that defined her cute personality, now with the constant persona of sick girl. It is shocking when I see it, when I stop and it stares at me. It makes me sad, so sad. She is so vulnerable, she is so sick that she needs a transplant. That is so big. The concept overwhelms. Then I think, but this is what we have been talking about for years. This is the miracle that we have seen time and time again in many of our CF friends. But it is so poignant, so deep in flavor that the taste buds of my mind must reconstruct a new sensory apparatus to decipher the complexity. That in itself is exhausting and haunting.
I know that in order to do this work and to get to the other side I must accept it all. I must look at the tiredness, the sadness, the feelings in my body, the potential loss, the present loss, the work ahead, the declining health, my own aging, all of it. That part is not as fun as finding the fortune cookie fortunes and the signs of hope and love that surround us, but all of it is true. All of it is what we are experiencing. The release of joy can not be truly felt without knowing its opposite, the recognition of a miracle can not happen without facing the truth of what is. We live in this world of all things, life, death, health, sickness, happiness, sadness. Where we usually wish for the fun parts we can not know them truly and their gifts if we do not allow ourselves to befriend the un-fun parts.
There is a Buddhist teaching that says, it is all the same taste, the very same taste. It instructs us to open to it all and feel it all. When you do, you sense the deep joy, the deep miracles that are there and ever present despite the flavor of the moment that distracts you with its coming and going like my tiredness and my hopefulness and my happiness and my sadness.
There is an ever present love, an ever present calm, the flowers still bloom even though you are sad, the birds still sing and visit the feeder even though life is tough, the seasons appear and disappear as will this moment...........
It is all the same taste, the very same taste and sunflowers smile even when you cry.
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