“Look at the light of this hour!”
“Look at the light of this hour!”—Poet Robert Creeley
“It’s this, don’t you see,” said Stephan Arkadyevitch [to Levin]. “You’re very much all of a piece. That’s your strong point and your failing. You have a character that’s all of a piece, and you want the whole of life to be of a piece, too—but that’s not how it is…You want a man’s work, too, to have a defined aim, and love and family life always to be undivided—and that’s not how it is.
All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”
—Leo Tolstoy from Anna Karenina
One day I’m over the moon, the next low as my bed. Is that really true? Now up and down happen almost in nanoseconds and aren’t nearly as extreme as earlier in my life. Most problems that I can’t solve, I shelve for a bit or at least simmer them in the slow cooker of my dreams overnight. Lovely moments I cherish, hard ones I acknowledge and try not to forget that both cycle in and out of my day like the sun casting light and shadow from new leaves outside my window.
If I am honest, each moment is a rose bud, a thorny stem, or something in between. What is new is not holding on to the thorns, not adding them up in my head just after they prick me, at the end of several hours, or at day’s end—reciting a litany of my frustrations.
What’s also new is not worrying as much about the future, “What if this happens? What if my husband doesn’t like the TV program and becomes more nervous?” He says he’s having a really hard time tonight. While I’m in the bedroom on Zoom with my writing group, he has left the TV and come in twice and then returned to the living room. Earlier Rosie was woofing in the hallway. Will she stop or continue when my writing group unmutes to read our pieces aloud? Now Rosie is curled up asleep on our bed. Will she remain asleep? Will my husband come in again needing me? I don’t know what will happen, but I have to trust that some way I will continue to write on Zoom tonight with my group. This is the dance I do throughout the day, keeping him calm and occupied and then doing what needs doing in the kitchen or doing what gives me pleasure—write a little bit here and there, read for 15 minutes, work on a crossword puzzle.
Covid-19 and social distancing will end at some point, and some kind of normal will return, but not for me or for my husband. We left normal behind four years ago when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and with Lewybody dementia. There is no drug to cure either of these conditions. No magic bullet exists that can bring back his body to moving normally, restore his balance, or recapture the brain cells or the memory he has lost. We are headed down a one-way street. My sorrow is as vast as the sky. Sometimes I cry. Mostly, I just keep moving forward or I stop still, inhale moments of pleasure to get through difficult minutes of the day. I am giving up in a good way, I think, accepting in the ground of my being that I cannot control the progression of his disease. I can try to reduce only the amount of his daily dis-ease by giving him palliative care. At other times, I am not sure of anything. What if there are medical protocols that exist that I haven’t discovered? What if I haven’t found the right doctor?
Moments of doubt are a human certainty. All kinds of “what-ifs” have assailed me over the last four years. What if I had married someone who never developed these diseases? Or, what if I had ended our fifty-year marriage years ago when we reached painful impasses with no through-line on the horizon, would my life be easier now? Yes? No? Would my life be less difficult in some ways, but harder in others? These what-ifs are impossible to answer. Is blaming myself for a partner who would become ill or for not leaving my marriage earlier a way of trying to find a way out—to control the uncontrollable?
What is the truth of my situation? Is there only one truth or many? What if I had left my marriage years ago when things were tough? Would I ever have reached this level of letting go? Would I have had the need to reach deep into my well of pleasure to survive and to want to pass on my experience to others? Earlier in my marriage the prospect that the hardest parts of taking care of my husban would always be there and probably would get worse would have overwhelmed me. I would have run from pillar to post like the ugly duckling trying to solve the problem once and for all, trying to find a way out of the pain. But now, I find the way out is to be way in without a map with the only guiding stars the ones in my gut saying, “You know the next step; this choreography lies deep within you and reveals itself one move at a time—the way the dance of life does.”
Taking pleasure into my body is as necessary as taking in food and water.
So far, one truth for me remains constant: if moment by moment during the day, I take in whatever delights me as sexual, tactile pleasure, this pleasure fuels my emotional stamina and resilience the way taking in food and water fuels my physiological stamina. Just as I draw upon the nutrients in food I’ve stored in the cells of my body, I can access the pleasurable feelings I’ve stored emotionally and physically to get me through hard moments. No one doubts that we need food and water to live; however, few acknowledge how much we need bodily pleasure to live well and to not feel that life is only hard.
Fully enjoying brief moments of pleasure in each day is the message from a keynote speaker I have muted most of my life. Delighting in moments of pleasure is the lime that turns the new grass greener, that calls a halt to meaner deeds done from anger, that seeds comfort. When life turns upside down despite my carefully laid plans, or when my husband asks me a question that makes absolutely no sense, pleasure pats me gently on the head and says, “There, there, wait awhile. Look at that sunlight bathing your kitchen in amber. Draw this yellow-red deep into your vulva. Fill up with its fire!”
