Candlelight Burning

It’s strange to think that a little more than six years ago, my life turned into something unrecognizable, and now, looking back, it is transformed again. 

Six years ago I was sicker than this.  A lot sicker.  I had been in a debilitating car accident that brought both brain and bodily injuries.  The physical contusions and subsequent injuries are theorized by some health practictioners to have triggered a hyper-autoimmune response (which means my already defunct immune system went ape) and exacerbate the illness, which before that had been diagnosed as mild.  I had no idea how sick I would later become.  And I had no idea of the journey I would embark on to become this person.  I actually love who I am now.  I have “filled-in”.  I have exemplified my name: Season.  I have been seasoned.

Ah, but still, there is some voice in my head who reads that and thinks, “How arrogant! How self-indulgent!”  But there is a greater voice still who knows the truth.  That it takes so much courage to stand in the full light of ourselves, and that we must revel in it.  So I will choke down the love and let it sit in the spot which rots with the darkness, waiting to know it’s own worth. 

Six years ago I couldn’t have said that.  I couldn’t have been that honest.  I couldn’t have known, let alone allowed it.  And it was for that, I am quite sure, that I nearly died.  I remember the day… just two short years after the accident, after the initial wave of sick hit, when my life hung like the last hum of a candle on the wick.  I had a deep knowing that it was up to me right then.  All I had to do was let go, and the light would go out. 

I was unable to eat or drink, being fed through a small tube (called a PICC line) which was threaded through a deep vein in my arm, up into a large vein in my chest.  It was full of liquid that streamed into it from a pack I carried around on my back in my waking hours.  I could hardly walk without help, and when I did, it was slow.  I had just built quadriceps with which to stand on my own, having just been a couple of months prior down to 104 pounds and on my death bed on the other side of the state from anyone close to me.  I had gained enough weight through the intravenous nutrition to make it on the plane ride to my family.  I had to gain 7 pounds to be considered safe to travel.  When I arrived, my health stabilized briefly, and then within two weeks, began deteriorating full-throttle.  I was on 11 different pharmaceuticals, one of which was a chemo-similar drug.  I had gained some more weight from medical steroids, which gave my family the comfortable illusion that I was doing better than I was.  In truth, I was doing something close-knit medical-folk warmly refer to as “circling the drain.” 

The day was very bright.  I was up in the loft I was staying in at my grandparents house.  It was up a few stairs from the main house that I am fairly sure are the reason for the aforementioned acquisition of quadriceps.  My grandmother told me later that she used to send my grandfather up every morning to make sure I was still alive, because she didn’t want to be the one to find me dead.  And alive I was, every day, and not for lack of thinking of the alternatives.  Every long, aching, painful, drudging, seemily endless day I was there, not breaking any hearts.  Days that felt like weeks.  It was one such day when I was sitting on the floor, completely ignorant to the sun that I only know was there in retrospect because I recall the brightness of the backdrop.  It was there on the floor, with that grey burber carpet echoing the shadows on the white walls, when a voice came from the deepest place within me that I had ever known until that time.  It asked me if I wanted to go now.  I knew if I wanted to, right then, I could leave this world.

But something inside me grabbed hold.  It wasn’t a strong hold, it was just a … for lack of better words… a lock.  There was a stillness and something ermerged from inside of me said, “No, you aren’t finished yet.  You still have something important to do.”  Now, we all hear of these stories, and you know, sometimes I wonder if that’s not just the amazing survival mechanism of the human mind and body going to town when it knows all hell is breaking loose.  But for now and the sake of the story, let’s just go with “that was some seriously mystical stuff for me”.  And it was.  It wasn’t even as strong as my longing for life as I knew it to be over, but it was strong enough for me to not be able to ignore it.  And I knew I absolutely had to make a choice.  I don’t really know how I did it.  I don’t know where it came from (but to run with the magic for a moment), from the depths beyond depths of me, some other place I had not yet drawn from.  And I chose life.  And holy roses did I not imagine at that time what was going to unfold.  I could never have imagined what would actually transpire to get me from that place at that moment, to this moment right now.

To be continued…