Alive and Growing

This morning I tried and failed over and over again to lift branches in a stone vase onto a shelf. I cursed that I couldn't do it alone, and I couldn't bear to wait and ask someone for help. Finally I discovered that if I stand on a yoga block I can raise myself up just enough.

A year ago I was in delirium, oxygen saturation tumbling, CO2 overtaking like a bully and stealing my breath. I couldn't respond to texts, didn't know if I was asleep or awake. 

Here is what my brain produced in the days before I was hospitalized, as recorded in my diaries:  

Successive approximation
Multiplicity
What my mother knew but couldn’t say couldn’t express could die it
Did I reelly hurt myself or was it a dream. Ow. Oh.

uptown lady and her cat, found quietly dying,
elegantly rescued.

relentless recurrent dream of blue and fathers.

visions of red cabbage with romaine.

need to know what to do. go to hospital, risk dying there, worst place for last moments. 

There was more but I think I've conveyed enough to establish how close I came. Finally I needed to be rescued by my daughter who at the tender age of 24 had to hospitalize me against my will. Unlike many, I survived the intubation, remembered how to swallow and breathe, lived to experience another spring. We've cursed Covid and the isolation, the zoom gloom. But today I feel grateful for the year I've had, for the yoga blocks and my ingenuity, for the many people who help me--the neighbor who addressed envelopes because I can't write anymore, friends who complain with me and hug me, my former patients who survive and thrive without me but also remember me, for the buds and the colors (look at that fuchsia of the calla lilies!!), and most of all for my daughter who continues to love me even though...

I will not last. 

None of us will. Let's sip from that nectar and pollinate. 

April 2, 2021