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Friday, 18 May 2007

Keep on Singing

By Holly Stevens of The Storyteller and the Listener Online

Some 20 years ago, I read Maya Angelou’s captivating autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, but I couldn’t quite decipher her own answer to the riddle. Then, five years ago, I found myself perched in my own cage, not of my choice.

I was going through a protracted and difficult divorce in Washington state, a continent away from my heart’s home in North Carolina, when I learned that my breast cancer of 10 years earlier had sprouted new tumors in my hips, ribs, spine, jaw and skull. In the year that followed, I synched my calendar with the rhythm of the cancer treatment center as my body was burned, slashed, poisoned, prodded, palpitated, injected and fed into high-tech imaging tubes.

For months I bore the excruciating pain of a spine fractured at the site of an irradiated tumor before a 10-hour surgery encased my spine in a titanium rod. I chuckled then, proclaiming I was a bionic woman, but three months later, the former tumor had the final laugh, as paralysis set in, leaving me paraplegic from the waist down. Mark that as one year in the cage.

But through the bars, a little sun must shine.

In the wake of my failed marriage, I had reconnected with a man I had loved 19 years before, and though I gave him my blessing to move on without me, Bill chose to share my journey. Closing down his retreat ministry in Oak Ridge, he flew to Washington to be with me, to share what he called “our grand adventure.”

Together we learned something of value that dreary November as paralysis set in: paraplegia is a poverty of function, and fourth-stage cancer a poverty of time. But poverty, chosen or not, yields unexpected bounties.

Because I cannot jump in the car to go shopping on a whim, Bill and I have learned better how to be still.

Because my bones are too brittle for me to work safely outside the home, the world comes to me through my writing and my DSL connection.

Because I cannot travel to exotic spots where wheelchairs don’t fit, my soul has come to feel the imprint of home on the spirit.

Because I do not know when my cancer will break the barrier of my bones and move into my vital organs, I’m recording my life’s stories and eliciting the stories from my loved ones.

Because I probably will never grow old in years, I’m a crone now by choice, revealing as never before the dreams, passions and prophecies that form my center core.

Unless one dies from a sudden catastrophic event, aging and succumbing to disease processes inevitably means loss – of function, of time, of friends. We dread these losses for ourselves and our loved ones. But there are gains to be found there, too: an insight into a loved one’s psyche here, a revived memory of a shared moment there. Most of all, losses yield permission to be extravagant in our expressions of what matters most to us.

My body may be confined to bed and chair and my future to an early end, but as long as my mind remains clear, my fingers nimble, and my DSL connection unbroken, I vow to keep on singing - from this cage.

Posted by Ronni Bennett at 02:30 AM | Permalink | Email this post

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