coughing

Dear hearts,

Val is coughing. Lately she coughs in fits and starts throughout the day, although mostly she sleeps well. Some days she coughs with every sentence she utters, her breath hitching on words as she tries to squelch the impulse. There is a faint, asthmatic wheeze behind her words. She has coughed up phlegm and spit and specks of blood and small gritty lumps. She coughs when she laughs. She was scheduled to do a reading tomorrow and had to cancel it, because she realized she can’t read aloud without inducing fits of throat-clearing coughing.

Maybe some of it is allergies. Maybe some is the dry winter air. I’m coughing more too. She is trying antihistamines and decongestants.

On rough days it makes my heart ache to watch this freewheeling wordsmith hobble her thoughts into simple sentences, carefully rationed out between the slamming of the glottal gates.

Tonight our dear Cynthia  had a second emergency surgery on a cat-bitten finger that is suddenly infected down to the bone. Now she has to have six weeks of IV antibiotics through a PICC line. At least we know what a PICC line is like. Sometimes it is helpful to have a medical trailblazer in the family.

I don’t like the suddenness of these things. The laughable fragility of the people I entrust with my heart. I would like to bake you all in a kiln to set you up good and tough to withstand life’s absurd plot twists. Just hold still. Be safe. Be alive. Be well.

This month it is two and a half years that my feet hurt with nearly every step I take. They do seem still to be improving. Quite a lot, really, if you look over the course of months. On a bad day I can’t move around the house without significant pain. On great days I can slowly walk three-quarters of a mile on the tiny trail on Reed Campus, down in the urban wetland where the ducks are. Beavers chew trees into orange stumps like blunt crayons there, and the winter pair of hooded mergansers is back, sailing regally among the floating leaf litter. My feet have taken me there to see them, to this postage stamp terrarium of the natural world I crave. I’ve managed it maybe ten times over the past two months. A tiny bit of autonomy, a tiny bit of motion. I try not to dwell in thoughts of all the unconcerned ways I danced through the world in my first forty years, breathing and walking and hiking as though it were my birthright. I try hard to keep alert for the beauty in where I am now, where we are now.

There is a lot of beauty here, people. There is a great hill of sorrow, too, for this altered life of unchosen transformations, and I won’t lie to you: often I am buried beneath sorrow’s landslide. But truly, amazingly, there is also abundant beauty here, in these dense, rich days. Stories exchanged on careful, slow breaths. Opportunities to meet vulnerability with kindness, and radiant, clumsy generosity with vulnerability. A Townsend’s warbler at the feeder. The sweetest irascible terrier in the world. An extraordinary loving community of brave and terrified souls. A thousand ways to break into pieces and mosaic our crazed selves back together again.

Val is scheduled for a CT scan on Monday. I hope we will hear its results when we meet with the oncologist Tuesday. I hope we can do something to ease her coughing.

Send love.

Sending mine out to all of you,

Deborah