Lucidity is Over-Rated

One day to go. In fact, in 24 hours, I will probably be in recovery, waking up into a hazy, strange world, looking through Vaseline-treated lenses, maybe even lying on my back. Looking up at the world from flat on my back will be a definite improvement.

Today I woke up exhausted. The last two days I've DONE TOO MUCH and today is when the physical body and its limitations come calling for accounts due. No putting off paying the price for movement and attempts at semi-normal living. How dare I even try to go out and eat a bagel or take a car ride for eight miles or do anything remotely connected to the Real World?

I am having a hard time today, fending off despair and hopelessness. The phone keeps ringing, with long-distance good wishes and rejection of home health care requests and hospital preoperative questionnaires and other people/institutions asking me to Take Care of Business. Those calls and the poetry of Rumi as presented by Coleman Barks are keeping me here and not letting me fall over some Edge that I perceive just around the next corner of time.

I am still lamenting my dependence on morphine to get me through this, and I must talk about it more than I realize. Today my own sister scoffed at the idea that I would ever be addicted to morphine or any other drug; perhaps her words were the tipping point--no one else in my life thinks that this will be a problem. Maybe I could relax and just take the damn pills already and be grateful for a return to my body that can only take place if I'm taken sufficiently out of my body to survive its proximity.

I'm angry and restless and grateful and hopeless and eager in turn. I can conceptualize some vague notion of a productive and somewhat effortless return to living and being and doing... most of my life has focused on the DOING and it has worked well enough to plant me right in the middle of a thorny garden of illusion that I have some control and autonomy in deciding what to do, and then just DOING it.

The past 57 days have done a pretty good job in destroying my ability to depend on my capability to DO anything. Yet I yearn for it... the ability to get out of bed, dress myself and two sleepy, squirmy boys, feed them and get them to school and daycare, and then return home to work--the money-earning kind, the money-saving kind, the obligatory tasks required to hold household entropy at bay, the blessings of maintaining social and familial connections, and the processes involved in basic personal hygiene... oh, how it goes so effortlessly to shower, shave, floss, style hair, apply cosmetics... when one is well, that is.

Now I wonder which tasks will REALLY happen at all. Just the hygiene part is impossible for me now. Which work will be most insistent, when I begin to get well? Which work will I wave away for now or forever? Will I ever be able to do good work to contribute to a Good Cause or to Earn A Dollar again? What will I have left after this that is of value to anyone else?