Month: July 2023

Broken People

On By ednafroeseIn gifts, Gratitude, Love, PainLeave a comment

            My opening photo was taken about a year ago during a visit with a friend in Victoria, BC. It soon became my phone’s background, and I have repeatedly contemplated the interplay of lines, the range of textures, and the subtle dance of muted colors. From the froth of the grass fronds to the mysterious black bulk of the forest and down to the dry grass, lit by the last bright rays of sunlight, the scene delights me. The V-ripples of the few ducks are an unexpected gift; I had focused on colors and clouds, not ducks.

            A life-long prairie dweller, I was an awed visitor here, marvelling that late September could offer such a visual feast for the eyes. All that water, salt water at that. Would one ever tire of it?

            Now in another summer, and still held captive by persistent pain (an angry sciatic nerve, if you must have specifics – see previous post), I see this photo every time I pick up my phone. It comforts me as I try to accept my current status as a broken person. Not fully functional.

            In the last weeks, I have had more than enough time to think about that “not fully functional,” suboptimal condition. I have pondered the ways that humans enter that state:

  1. We are made sick through viruses, bacteria, or harmful substances. Fortunately, Western medicine has become quite adept at treating diseases, discovering causes, finding medicines, developing vaccines, improving hygiene, etc.
  2. We are injured through accident or others’ malevolent actions. Here, too, we have remedies; trained first responders, skilled surgeons and therapists, inventors of mechanical aids of all kinds, and rehab specialists. We can do something about injuries, at least the physical ones.
  3. We are broken—through age that wears out parts, through misuse that makes our organs miserable, through initial genetic misfirings, through . . . . ? We can detect brokenness, in most cases, but have trouble seeing causes, or can’t tell where physical breakage has led to emotional breakage, or the other way around. It’s taken us far too long to recognize consequences of trauma and/or abuse. We’re also not very good at distinguishing between brokenness and difference (should we be talking about a continuum?)

The unknown is frustrating in all three categories, never mind that the categories overlap and won’t stay sorted. Just find the problem and fix it, fast—that’s the mantra of our culture. It has not served me well this time around.

      Then, in my quiet, sometimes lonely, pain-ridden hours came the gift of a book recommendation, serendipitously from the friend whom I’d been visiting when I took the photo that opens this posting. With the quirkiness of grace, the book’s title was The Giver.

      Yet more—it wasn’t The Giver that I really needed to read (although I loved it), but the companion novel that Lois Lowry wrote: Gathering Blue. In that imaginary world, one small scamp of a lying, thieving boy who’s been cuffed and yelled at and beaten and starved, travels from his village—where survival is all that matters and everyone grabs what is available and fights for what is not, and anyone who is sick or injured is promptly dragged to the Field of Leavings to die—yes, this wild little boy named Matt goes off to the “far beyond” in search of a blue-dyeing plant for the only friend who’s ever shown him kindness, and finds a wholly different Village he calls “the place of Broken People.”

      Upon his return with the desired plants and a strange, blind man (resident of the Village of Broken People), Matt is at a loss to describe this place where he was immediately welcomed and cared for after his arduous journey through the Forest. “Them be all broken, them people,” he said, “But there be plenty of food. And it’s quiet-like and nice.”

      When his friend, Kira, a girl with a bad leg from birth (saved from immediate death only by a determined mother who refuses to let the village expose the infant as would be the usual practice), questions Matt further, he shrugs in bewilderment: “Like you. Some don’t walk good. Some be broken in other ways. Not all. But lots. Do you think it makes them quiet and nice, to be broken?” Kira does not know how to answer. Her mother had taught her, “pain makes you strong.” But this tale of people who rescued strangers like the blind man now before her and tended them until they healed baffled her. No one in her village would have ever done that, let alone even known how.

      Lowry, however, does not offer the easy answer that Matt seems to grasp at, that being broken makes people nice. There are other characters in the novel who have let pain and loss turn them cruel and even more ruthless in their fight to survive and gain power.

      In the end, Gathering Blue offers simply the metaphor of the rare blue dye made from woad, which can be found only in the “Village of Healing.” As the blind man explains, his pronouns crucially changing, “There is always someone to lean on . . . Or a pair of strong hands for those who have none. . . . They help each other . . . we help each other.” It is left to us readers to consider how, in our world, we might move from the awed “they help each other” to the voice of belonging: “we help each other. . . . we are like a family.” Both those who are broken and those who are not.

“The village of healing has existed a long time. . . . Wounded people still come. But now it is beginning to change, because children have been born there and are growing up. So we have strong healthy young people among us. And we have others who have found us and stayed because they wanted to share our way of life.”

Lois Lowry

The View from My Bed

On By ednafroeseIn books, Gratitude, hope, PainLeave a comment

            It’s a limited view, of course. The prone position, at least indoors, doesn’t offer much to look at. In the last many days (I’ve lost count), the pain of a nasty back episode has necessitated almost continual bed rest. I would have been pleased with a skylight—clouds and stars both draw the human spirit upward and outward. 

            So: the wise ones among us, who ponder the meaning of life, agree that pain is not only  an inevitable part of life but also a great teacher of wisdom. I am not a sage, just an unwilling, and uncomfortable observer of the dogwood branches, caught in the relentless prairie wind, sweeping back and forth across the window, making shadow patterns on the curtains. Every now and then, a blue jay, sometimes wet from our nearby bird bath, comes to the bird feeder to ponder the day’s offerings and then hammer open peanut shells with his/her beak. Then the jay is gone again, until the next visit. Wisdom remains elusive.

            Nevertheless, I have learned a few things in the past month:

            It is prudent to select your confidantes carefully when you choose to talk about back pain (or colds, or any common human ailment). Unwanted advice is immediately and freely given, especially by those who know little about you or the problem. While in my worst days, I would have tried any magical brew—so I said in my desperation— I do want to believe that common sense would have come to my rescue and prevented outright silliness. Better to turn complete hermit and take a vow of silence than be regaled with others’ tales of suffering and/or miraculous cures.

            I learned that the familiar number scale for measuring pain—on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your pain?—doesn’t convey enough information. I offered my physiotherapist (who knows me well enough to interpret my moods) a new scale: stiff upper lip toleration of discomfort; winces and grimaces; moans, groans, and muttered imprecations; uncontrolled sobbing; and at the top end, screams. It’s a sliding scale, of course, because what evoked a bare grimace early on might later provoke sobs of weary despair.

            I discovered that the most important task of a health care worker, at whatever level, is to be kind. It’s that simple. Kind enough to listen. Lack of kindness doubles pain and deepens the loneliness that already surrounds the sufferer, who dwells in a separate country, the land of Oz, as Nora Gallagher describes it in Moonlight Sonata in the Mayo Clinic.

            In another time, that was the book that gave me comfort, that spoke words that I could hear and understand.

This time it was Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, not a book about illness at all or anything remotely close to my situation. I did not grow up as an orphan; I have always known who my parents are. I have never been homeless or lived as an itinerant worker. I have not known the kind of depressed economy that makes work in a whorehouse a reasonable alternative to starvation.

            But something about Lila’s strange encounter with an old preacher in a small town held my attention. He saw her as a fellow human being with innate dignity and extended to her, not only incredible kindness, but also grace. He lived his theology, fully prepared to question all of his erudite Calvinist doctrine rather than cause Lila any distress. And the possibility of such all-embracing grace was what I needed to hear.

For chronic pain has a way of involving body, soul, and spirit. It pulls together into one overwhelming sensation all of the stress and all of the guilt over hurtful mistakes and complicated relationships and all of the existential worries and whatever else is stewing around in the mind. That entire mess needs to be accepted and offered grace.

            Reading Lila was a serendipitous choice, because the final bit of wisdom that being helpless in pain gave me was a new awareness of how difficult life must be for those who don’t have an address, who don’t have easy access to medical care, who couldn’t imagine paying for additional services like physiotherapy or even any necessary medication. I’ve had lots of time to ponder the privileges available to some and not to others.

Lila ended with some hope, I’m glad to say, while remaining realistic and thoughtful. My own involuntary journey into the land of Oz seems headed toward the exit (still too far away for my liking), for which I’m more grateful than I know how to say. I have also not walked alone. That is an incredible gift.