2024.01.08 What I Learned in Sickness and In Health, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons

For two weeks I have been in intensive rehab care for a spinal compression fracture in my lower back. I’m home now and continuing to heal as I reflect on my experience. I have learned how enlivening it is to laugh and to remember that, in addition to efficient and capable staff, there is also a patient with a voice in the bed.

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VITALITY: How vital am I?  The number of times in a 24-hour cycle someone enters your room while you are in the hospital and feeling drained of energy maybe even of blood itself, can actually cause me to feel devitalized!  Oh, some are very polite and kind and ask you if they can “check your vitals” —place an oximeter on your finger and tighten a blood pressure cuff on your arm. Still, you know it will happen whether you consent or not, and even if you are sound asleep. You know you will be judged uncooperative and perhaps resistant to treatment if you refuse. Still, I have a voice, enough to persuade the night nurse to tell them to let me sleep through the whole night after lights out at 11 p.m. till dose #1 at 6 a.m.  “She needs to sleep to get well!” She is respected. I have a nurse-friend who can rise above the rigidity of  “validity” just for my sake this night.  Thank you!

PILLS: Countless in a wee paper cup. These pills come in and go out. Most of them I recognize, like old friends. Nurses are able to recite each one and its worth, also the identity and purpose of  any new one, such as a probiotic to guard against a small dose of antibiotics. I do wonder how all these pills can travel my one digestive tract, each discerning its correct healing mission for my lungs, and my back pain, and my aging bones.  Like an infant, I trust.

INFANCY: Language thereof.  The cries of the aging as each one recedes from full vitality and joins the process of dying, which is like the process of being born into the world and out of the safe warmth of the womb. First there is profound silence, then a touch and yowl of protest—a wail that says, Listen to me, my heart. I’m here. Quickly we hear Touch me. Then Warm me. Then, Swaddle me I’m cold.  Then, Take me home now. Cuddle me. And soon Feed me. Suckle me at my mother’s breast or with the fake but nourishing nipple of a bottle and security of a diaper. And at last, the silence of deep sleep, contentment. Let me sleep now.

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Dying and birthing are similar transitional processes. I believe that divine love is present at birth and at death—to welcome, listen, swaddle, warm, touch, feed, pray, and let be, which is not the same as let go.  

2024.01.07 Let There Be Light and Let There Be Darkness. Lyn G. Brakeman,Spiritual Lemons, blog post

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and called all of it good.

What is wrong in a country, in a world, in any society that prays for Peace all the time and has no idea what makes peace happen?

What is wrong with a country that calls itself a Democracy, a United states, establishes a Bill of Rights/Freedoms for all its citizens, and then silences some of these citizens from telling or writing the truth about themselves in an honest way? As a citizen I protest.

Is this moral? Is this ungodly?  Is this a violation of the freedom of every citizen to practice his/her/their own religious faith? Does this corruption, this lie promote holocaust, exile, soul-murder, evil, the censorship of truth itself?  That you can be stoned for being who you are, that you can be exiled for being who you are, that you can be lynched, jailed, buried alive, murdered, butchered, burned, bludgeoned, maimed, scalped, terrorized, banished, humiliated, deformed from foot-binding, censored, crucified, and shamed for being who you are and for writing, publishing, telling your own story about who you are.   

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Why am I so passionate about all this? Well, because I am a reader who has read about campaigns to ban books that MIGHT be offensive to young minds. And because I’m a writer who remembers Holden Caulfield!

American writer J.D. Salinger, born in New York City (1919) is one of the most famous living authors in America even though he hasn't published anything since 1965, and he lived reclusively until his death in 2010. He’s best known for his novel The Catcher in the Rye, about a boy named Holden Caulfield who gets expelled from his boarding school and spends the next few days wandering around New York City, trying to figure out why people have to grow older, why everyone is so phony, and where the ducks go when the pond in Central Park freezes over.

The Catcher in the Rye started out as a short story called "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," and it was the first story that Salinger managed to sell to The New Yorker. The New Yorker bought the story in November of 1941, and planned to run it in their Christmas issue. That December, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and Salinger's story was put on hold, considered too trivial in a time of war. Salinger writes from within the mental musings of a young teenager, gawky, curious, sexually awkward—unforgettable.  

Salinger expanded the story into the novel, The Catcher in the Rye, which came out in 1951 when I was 13.  The New York Times ran a review, titled "Aw, the World's a Crumby Place.” The children in it were unbelievably intelligent, and the style of the novel was too "showoffy." What adolescent is not?  Within two weeks Catcher made the best seller list. 

Who can forget Holden Caulfield, Jane Eyre, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Ebenezer Scrooge, Oz, Bambi, Christopher Robin, Pooh and Piglet, Mrs. Dalloway, Peter Rabbit, Cinderella, Grumpy, Moses, Cruella Deville—and more? 

Every tale and every character embodies good and evil, sorrow and joy, love and hate, light and darkness, heaven and hell, life and death—together. 

In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth and called all of it Good. 

O, light of the world, let your bright star stand over the place where the poor have to live; lead our sages to wisdom and our rulers to reverence. Hear this prayer for your love’s sake. Amen.  (from The New Zealand Prayer Book)