Nora
Gallagher (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013; paperback, Vintage, 2014)
Before
that day in the fall of 2009, when she was lighting a fire and her
vision blurred, Nora Gallagher's map was her Daytimer. She led a
stressful life, coping with the deadlines at her day job (editing
copy for Patagonia, the outdoor clothing company); keeping up with
family obligations; and jetting around the country giving talks about
her books. Driven by 'things not yet happened,' she had no time for
prayer or relaxation. "I traveled like this to talk about my
spiritual life, but the irony was lost on me."
But
she went to the doctor to see what this new blurring was; you really
don't want a doctor looking at your eye to say, "Darn." And
with that, Gallagher's crowded schedule was yesterday's news. "It
was like falling into Oz. I walked right over the border without
knowing I was crossing it. It had no border patrol. I did no
planning. I had no map." This book is the map she makes as she
goes along, as a coastal mariner might, of shoals and lighthouses.
The
first thing that was hard is that no one could say what was wrong
with her. She had an eye doctor for a case of uveitis that she'd had
for years, but the extreme fatigue and weight loss pointed to
something more complex. On general principles, the doctors started
her on steroids, and the tests started to multiply; she was treated
like "a thing to test, not a person to heal." The nurses
who didn't look at her, the residents who scoffed at her questions,
and the world famous specialists who didn't accept follow-up
appointments, appear in the book by only their initials.
The
other kind, the doctors who listened, are named. They obviously saw
her as a person, and cared about her, but no one knew what her
trouble was, so she won the golden ticket to the Mayo Clinic, in
Rochester, Minnesota, where the whole place might as well be Oz. The
Mayo Clinic has figured out some best practices: the local hotels
connect to the clinics by tunnels to avoid the winter weather, there
are strange and beautiful things to see everywhere you look, and the
staff always tells you what to expect. Eventually, they even figured
out what was wrong with her.
She
didn't do all this alone. Her husband, Vincent, was right alongside,
though on the other side of the glass wall that separates the healthy
from the sick. The priest at her Episcopal church, I'm pleased to
say, was another good companion, a veteran of waiting rooms. His
advice to stop and consider 'what is real now' resonates: "If
you stayed in the present, if you paid attention thoroughly to the
now, what it had in it might come to you. And if you did not pay
attention to the present, you might miss essential information
that might be exactly what you needed."
This
kind of openness to the present posed a challenge to her faith. The
triumphalism of the Nicene Creed, the Almighty Father, the Mighty
Fortress, came to seem ludicrously at odds with the Jesus who made
mud with his spit to heal a poor man's sight. "The man Jesus had
had quite a lot to say about losing. He was -- now I understand --
preoccupied with loss: lost sheep, lost coins, lost sons. His own
lost life." She can still identify with that Jesus, because now
she can hear, and tell, the everyday stories of loss, and of having
nothing left to lose. "It is a kind of desecration that we made
of this man, a crown, a king, a Lord. Jesus is about as far away from
a king as a person can be."
But
he's willing to go where people are lost, hurting, and scared. Jesus
is a voluntary citizen of Oz. When the losses mount up, as they
inevitably will, that's information I want to hold onto.
Email edition, March 1, 2016
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment