I was lying in our attic bedroom reading a book, when my husband came to talk to me. I moved to make room for him and heard a faint sound like a wet branch breaking. As I stood up, a lightning bolt of pain struck my leg.
Time suspended. After an X-ray, I discovered that the disc between L5 and S1 in my lumbar spine had ruptured, the gelatinous core had herniated, the nerve root was compressed and pain had radiated through my right hip into my leg. My physiatrist kept insisting that if I used the elliptical on its hardest setting and used my clam shells, I would improve.
My life came to an end. Standing was less painful than sitting. The worst was getting up from the chair. I used to stand at my kitchen counter like a horse all day, trying to write in my journal or watch foreign movies on my computer. I drank glass after glass of rosé and took so much extra-strength Tylenol that the backs of my hands would sometimes turn black. My husband made me chicken sandwiches; He used to wash clothes and wash utensils. She helped me in and out of the shower, she tied my shoelaces and held me steady as I struggled up and down the stairs. Her body had changed too, not damaged like mine, but affected by the grim inevitability of our future.
I became a closed person; As unbalanced and careening as a listed ship. My friends had to come to me. They listened while I explained in detail what had happened. Fear was visible on their faces and I understood that my relationship with them should not be strained or spoiled; I could neither be honest nor complain about what I felt. The effort exhausted me at first and eventually made me angry.
I needed to be alone to contemplate the reality of my damaged body and decide whether or not I wanted to live if the pain persisted.
I decided to go to our shabby cottage in Long Eddy, New York, not far from the Delaware River. I hoped to heal by getting closer to nature. But my intentions, I can see now, were more complex; I needed to be alone to contemplate the reality of my damaged body and decide whether or not I wanted to live if the pain persisted.
In 1925, when Woolf wrote “On Being Ill”, she was recovering from fainting and periodic depression. The influenza pandemic had flared up again, infecting fewer people but still killing many of them. As Wolf recovered, she realized that her illness had “loosened the earth around the roots of her creativity.” The disease, he wrote, changed the world dramatically for its victims. “When the light of health is extinguished… what happens is ruin and desert of the soul.” His essay argues that this change is so remarkable that more books should focus on what the body does to the mind rather than what the mind does to the body. “The great battles which the body fights with the mind… in the solitude of the bedroom, against fever or impending doldrums, are neglected.”
What are the stages of this change? Woolf wrote that illness “pierces the unconsciousness of busyness and obligation; it awakens us to the world around us.” And at first, in Long Eddy, standing on my porch listening to audio books and looking at the furry creatures in my yard, I felt, while I wasn’t cured, a certain helpful aversion. My bird feeder was attacked by a bear a year ago and so whenever he turned at a particular angle, sunflower seeds would pop out like candy from a pinata. Cardinals, bluejays and a nut hatch descended to enjoy the feast. Brown and red squirrels gathered, as well as the shy rabbit that lived in the raspberry brambles. The chipmunks stuffed their mouths with seeds until their cheeks bulged and then dropped into their holes next to the lilac bush.
Sometimes nature paid attention to me.
Ultimately, my focus was, as Wolf says, “on seeing.” Like robins pulling worms out of the dirt like little sausages, I took on projects unimaginable in my pain-free life. I made a chart of the squirrels living in the yard and upon closer inspection found that there were five, not two as I had suspected. One had a stubbed tail, another had ears bigger than his co-workers, a third started all the fights, a fourth had his front paw hanging down when he sat on his hind legs as if showing someone an engagement ring, and the fifth was fat.
Sadly, my fellowship with God’s creatures did not end my suffering. At least once a week I would go to the emergency room crying and asking for an aspirin with codeine, the strongest painkiller available during the opioid crisis. At night, the pain broke my sleep into pieces. Without my husband to hold me, I had to crawl on my knees to the bathroom.
I couldn’t sleep and looked at a Skunk Family file from my foundation. I’d tried everything to get rid of them, setting traps, filling gaps between stones, though I’m ashamed to admit it, even poison. “Skunks have always been in your basement,” an elderly neighbor said to me philosophically, “and skunks will always be in your basement.” Small animals raced to my compost barrel, knocked it over and gnawed on corn cobs and watermelon rinds.
There was some nostalgia about the skunks, their ancestors, who lived under my house for generations. Watching them I felt that Woolf had a deep, profound explanation of why, even when indifferent, nature soothes the afflicted. He wrote, “Within the sublime connection with nature, there resides the most troubling fact of existence – the awareness of an insensitive universe, indifferent to our fate.” This indifference paled and calmed compared to the weight of my loved one’s anxiety.
Sometimes nature paid attention to me. Whenever I walked from my porch to my car across our large patio, the Turkey Buzzard, a vulture with large wings and a pink fleshy head, would begin circling overhead. At first I thought it was a coincidence, that they had smelled a dead squirrel in the woods behind my house. But after a few weeks, whenever I was in the courtyard, their shadows would move strangely across the grass, and I would wonder if they sensed my weakness, my limp, limping like a dying deer.
The mainstay of my week was physical therapy in the small ten-bed hospital in Calicut, the same place I had gone to pray for relief from pain. The PT area was in a room at the far end of the building that seemed to be suspended in air, with windows overlooking the helicopter landing pad and the Catskill Mountains beyond.
One of the physicians, a middle-aged woman with big hair covered in teddy bears, operated on a young man who had been in a car accident. He had recently recovered enough to move from Florida, where he was hit, to his parents’ home in upstate Florida. His pelvis, right hip and both knees were damaged. Bonnie massaged her feet and placed heating pads on her replacement joints. The man, who was clearly in pain, described how when the truck hit his motorcycle, all he had seen was sky, asphalt, sky, grass and sky as he spun. She shook her head: “I guess everything happens for a reason.”
His struggle to understand his condition reminded me of the specificity of pain; It involves spiritual and metaphysical questions as well as how to express the most raw expression of body sensation. Why did this happen? What does my pain mean? Does destiny exist? Is there any God? Who am I now? Pain is always associated with an interesting transcendence of its physical aspect. The microwave beeped and Bonnie took out large flannel bean bags and placed them at each of the young men’s feet. She did not believe in divine providence. “Instead I believe,” she said, “simple bad luck.”
After my friends left, I was lonelier than I had ever been in my life.
After spending a few weeks in the country, I invited my friends who live locally over for dinner. I drove to town, did the shopping, hauled my groceries across the yard and into the house, chopped, grilled, set mats and cutlery on the table, and opened the wine. I felt bitter that my friends would not even know what all this had cost me. How I needed the kitchen table to support me while I worked and how I felt a shiver of intense pain when I bent down to take a chicken out of the roasting pan.
However, as they drove into my yard from their cars, I felt a thrill: As tired as I was, I had managed to cook dinner! At first, I enjoyed the conversations, my friends were lively and smart. We talked about our crazy president and the latest Ryan Gosling movie, topics I was well versed in. But as the night went on, I felt increasingly isolated; My friends were able to move their bodies freely; They were hopeful about the future. I sat with such severe pain in my back that I was having trouble keeping my features coherent. As the conversation turned to tarot cards and how a prophecy could teach me about my destiny, I felt like I was turning against them.
Wolf understood that people who are in pain are susceptible to delusions. “This monster,” she writes, “the body, will soon bend us towards mysticism, or rise up with rapidly flapping wings in the ecstasy of transcendence.” It is believed by believers that religion comes from above, but if God exists, then he was created by the human body. The idea of the supernatural felt insulting to the harsh reality of a damaged body like mine.
After my friends left, I was lonelier than I had ever been in my life. I went out and sat on the verandah. The birds and small animals were gone, and it was still too early for the skunks to come out. A sphinx moth hit its narrow wings on a small lamp near the door with such force that the dander flew off. I turned off the switch and the moth went into the yard, flying over the blue-black grass and the tiny white flowers of the spirea bush. Then, somehow, someone saw life, a pure bead.
Wolf called illness “the great confessional”, a rare place where “the truth is spilled out.” But I found its truths existential and almost impossible to bear: “…how we walk into the pit of death and feel the waters of destruction close over our heads…”
Is it possible to hope for transcendence amid fear of the body? Woolf acknowledges that this requires a supernatural effort for “a reason rooted in the depths of the earth”, but she also recognizes a creative power in her suffering. “In its lava I still find most of the things I write about.” She encourages us to see the suffering body as meaningful, dynamic, mysterious. “…the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear…” She argues that while the singularity of pain can allow us access to unseen worlds, it can also generate a new language. “Taking pain in one hand,” Woolf writes, “and a piece of pure sound in the other… (we) crush them together, so that in the end comes out a completely new word…”
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this is a door by Darcy Steinke is available from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins.