The short answer is: Nada. Zilch. Zip.
Actually, let’s back up.
I’ve had a health problem for well over a month now, and quite honestly the main realization I’ve had is that I really don’t like suffering. At all. You should have heard me at the outset — “Take this away! Please, please, please take it away, take it away, take it away!” Like a two-year-old pitching a fit and demanding candy in a grocery store checkout line. I’m a wimp. I just want it to stop. Now.
The age-old saying “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” has, frankly, not been my experience. I felt quite the opposite, that I was becoming more frail and weaker by the minute.
In addition to feeling lousy, the emotional baggage proved even more daunting. I found myself bouncing around in stages, akin to the ones described by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in relation to grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
Denial: This can’t be happening. It doesn’t make sense. I’m a pretty good girl when it comes to my health. What gives, for cryin’ out loud?
Anger: This is so unfair! All that low-fat Greek yogurt and cottage cheese with live active cultures to boost my microbiome. For naught? C’mon! Where’s the gratitude for all that nurturing I’ve given you, Body? Where do you get off breaking down and betraying me like this? And if one more person says life is hard but at least God is with us, I may sock him or her in the mouth. Note: You can tell I spent a lot of time hanging out in this particular phase.
Bargaining: Ok. How about I give up sugar, most carbs, and a few choice cocktails? Will that do?
Depression (with a side order of Resentment): I’ve given up my possible dietary offenders, and I’m still not well yet. I’m going to go hide under the bed now until this whole thing blows over.
Comparison: I discovered this category, perhaps a subset of depression, early on. The upshot was that it only served to feed my depression and take it to new depths. Other people have it so much worse than you. Look around the world! How dare you complain! Buck up! Cue the donning of the shame hat.
Acceptance: Not there yet.
They say you have to feel it to heal it. Well, I’ve felt it, smelt it, and tried to figure out who/what dealt it, but it’s gotten me nowhere. My husband says I should have been a professional theorist, because I’m always turning situations over and over in my hands like a Rubik’s Cube, examining them from every possible angle, trying to come up with plausible reasons for why things happen. You can imagine how well this works.
Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for the medical intervention I’m receiving. But because the progress has been so incremental and painfully slow, it hasn’t done much to boost my emotional state or assuage my anxiety.
The whole process has been quite successful, however, in undermining my security, making me question why in the world I thought I could protect myself from the incertitude of being a vulnerable human being. Hubris, I guess. That, and wanting desperately to be in control. As if. I must say the lack of control, though terrifying, has served to drive me to my knees and contemplate with greater intensity and seriousness the crucial dependency of this creature on her Creator.
Perhaps to be disabused of my ability to maintain a fortress around myself is, in the long run, not only a good thing but also one of the best things to be distilled from suffering. My brother-in-law once remarked, “The psalmist says we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and he’s right. I bounce back and forth between fearful and wonderful all the time.”
Looking at the road behind me, I can kind of see myself (with a wince) up on my high horse, rocking away with my yogurt in one hand and cottage cheese in the other, thinking I was really on top of this whole health thing. But now, I’ve been reminded that life can change in the time it takes to snap your fingers. The effect has summoned all the aforementioned stages, sure, but maybe it has also produced a bit of humility? These bodies really do have a way of humbling us, as my brother-in-law pointed out, making us realize we truly are not in control, even when we fool ourselves into thinking that we are.
Coco Chanel once advised that when getting dressed, one should stand in front of a mirror and remove at least one item. I conducted an assessment of the emotional togs I was wearing and concluded that the shame hat simply had to go. Surprisingly, once it was removed, I was able to look around at my fellow man and find comfort and solace in the fact that we all do indeed encounter suffering in this life in one form or another. No one escapes the slings and arrows. The formation of all different kinds of support groups attests to our shared suffering, and these groups can help us navigate and steer away from one of the biggest pitfalls of suffering — self-pity and isolation. I suppose, taking into account my fellow sufferers was my Occam’s razor: the simplest solution, requiring the fewest assumptions, is usually correct.
A rather strange thought that emerged one day out of the blue involves the St. Louis Gateway Arch. I’ve never visited St. Louis and never before given the arch a second thought, but this image wouldn’t go away. It was a picture of grace and of God’s love over my life, even, and maybe especially, when I’m railing against the heavens, shaking my fist and asking, “Why did this happen and why won’t you just fix it?” I also began to think about the fact that below the arch in St. Louis is the city, teeming with both good things and awful things. A realistic picture of life, whether I like it or not. It just is. And for whatever strange reason, this image produced in me a profound sense of peace.
No surprise that the arch image put me in mind of the long-ago story of Noah, riding out the storm with the animals, via God’s provision of the ark. The storm could have been prevented and cancelled, but it wasn’t. Nevertheless, in the aftermath, God pinned a rainbow in the sky, to remind Noah and us that he is far from absent from the events of this world and our individual lives. It’s just that he has a story to tell that doesn’t always conform to our ideas about how this life should go.
I actually saw a rainbow not many days after I had been carrying the St. Louis arch image around in my head. I guess I’ve been given a glimpse of the Acceptance phase after all.
