Sunday, January 31, 2010

Imagine not being able to move.  Try.  See how long you can stand it before you scratch your nose or rub your eye, brush back your hair, twitch your fingers or cross your legs.  Imagine you've been like that for 9 months plus a random week.  Imagine that there is one person that does everything for you.  Collects your urine, flosses your teeth, changes your clothes and sheets, moves you from bed to commode to chair to other chair, drives you to the doctor or therapy, pushes your chair, offers liquid and food as your need or desire demands and adjusts the television to the show you may or may not want.  Imagine.  Now imagine you are that other person. 

Very much in love, very willing and wanting to serve and please the one who has made your life full and rich and exceptional.  Strong and able.  Doing for self and other self at the same time wears and takes away from one or the other.  Trapped in a box.  In the box with him.  We both want out, but want the other to be free of the box so desparately. 

How?  There is no way.  It is what it is.  The box is a room with a TV and a hospital bed and way too many wheelchairs and no curtains, because she tore them down in a desparate attempt to redecorate.  Making a Victorian music room into a hospital bedroom takes special skills. 

He wants so desparately to walk.  Everyone is excited about his new electric wheelchair except him because it is a physical statement that he just might need it his whole life.  What a shitty deal.  This man, who was the jungle fighter for his junior high math students, who got them excited to explore mathematics by telling them they were about the learn the "language of the Gods," this man who built homes for a living and porches to please his wife, this man now lay immobile awaiting the whim of the one who serves.  What a cruel joke. 

2 comments:

  1. Hey, retired school teach, current antique shop owner, and friend. I got your voice mail but couldn't hear it - heck, Jed will have to walk because sometimes that darn chair won't work!!! Miss you two - is he turning into a democrat yet?

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  2. I cannot immagine. Satan is laughing at his cruel joke. Don't let him win this battle to defeat you. "But when I am weak, then I am strong because it is then that true Strength takes over.

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