Embodiment
“Why love what you will lose? There is nothing else to love.” Louise Glück, The Triumph of Achilles
I was standing on the ledge of our tub the day before Thanksgiving, balanced precariously on four inches of sloping porcelain, while I scrubbed the ceiling, and I thought to myself: “Wow, six months of physical therapy and 2,400 dollars in copays later, I finally have the core strength to perch on the tub and really clean our ceiling!”
I had run into a friend on Michigan Avenue the day before and I had reached out to hug her and she had immediately stopped me—she had just returned to Chicago with a slipped disk to see her Chiropractor. “I’ve got a misaligned pelvis,” I volunteered. “I’ve got one of those too,” she said.
A year or so ago, my histamines started surging. I tried taking shorter showers and then slathering myself with large amounts of lotion, and we ran the humidifier to compensate for the dry heat, but to no avail.
I could not stop scratching myself, and when I scratched myself, welts would raise up on my skin. My face would flush up in patches, and my skin felt both alien and suffocatingly plastered onto me.
I was put on two prescription antihistamines, one of which the Doctor will no longer prescribe because it thins the skin, and the other which I tried to stop taking out of frustration with the sheer number of prescriptions I was on, until the exact same symptoms returned a couple of week ago, and I was obliged to refill that particular prescription again.
Just previous to that, there were just about six months I couldn’t swallow almost anything without choking. Mentioning this in casual conversation at the time, I realized that two friends had had the same problem in the recent past. One of them taught me a breathing trick to ward off choking, by forcing the esophagal sphincter open with a burst of air. The other had had to have a “trachial dichotomy,” which I’ve so far avoided.
During that time I subsisted on french fries, soup and toasted naan pizzas with cheese—three good things, but you can get sick of anything. I barely ate any heirloom tomatoes this past Summer. I’d already met my quota for this decade.
Around that same time, I managed to fall both up and down the same two steps leading into the dining room of the formerly iconic Pump Room on two different occasions, blowing out the knee of my pants in both instances, and scraping a large shard of glass against the flesh of my knee on the second go round.
After three or so hours of waiting in the Northwestern Emergency Room to have my knee inspected for glass shards, I remembered I’d enjoyed a bowl of soup (the only menu option I thought I could swallow) just a few months before, in the restaurant seven floors above.
In the last few months I’ve tripped over a raised paver and fallen on the sidewalk, smashing a bottle of wine, forborne public incontinence, sat in gum, and lost both pairs of my reading glasses at the same time.
With the advent of winter hat season, I find myself trying to jam the temples of my cheaters under my hat on the bus with one hand, which will no doubt eventually lead to another broken temple, which will leave me with two pairs of broken reading glasses, if I can even locate them from day to day. I lose my back brace frequently and only manage to keep a bead on my orthotics by wearing the same pair of old man New Balance sneakers every day.
After I finished cleaning our bathroom ceiling the evening before Thanksgiving, and was waiting to pick up our Thanksgiving order from the dear folks I used to do in-home wine tastings and mixology events for in Evanston, I realized my feet were freezing, although it was only forty degrees. I had gotten my socks slightly wet while cleaning the tub, and it was freezing to my socks inside my shoes.
I remembered standing outside the same building on what had been an eighty degree day a couple of years previous, after an outdoor wine tasting in the full sun, where I had opened about eighty bottles. “I’m never here on a fair day,” I texted a friend.
I often think about when my Father’s Spring of health ordeals began.
In the ICU, you become a creature of the tubes, filled and emptied, and drawn in and drawn out. The body is still centered, but almost incidental, as medication and hydration passively enter, and waste passively exits.
As he progressed from the ICU, to a regular room, to rehab and then back home, a most basic fact of our embodiment clearly emerged, beyond all our artifices of status and raiment: when the tubes are removed, you’re stuck learning to walk and stand again, to alight upon and raise up from the toilet, and to wager the risks of the shower. These are our most basic and necessary skills in a body.
Just before he fell ill, I had almost fallen on the sidewalk a block from our house—my legs had just suddenly lost purchase. I had just started seeing a Chiropractor before that first trip home, and my Lyft dropped me at the wrong terminal for my return flight, and although it was a short walk to the correct terminal, my legs foundered on me. What should have been a quick walk was more akin to an uncertain, halting and painful jig without music.
Thus began six months of back rolling, electro-stim, therapeutic back cracking and physical therapy.
One session, I found myself doing my physical therapy to the soundtrack of Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit.” “So this is middle age,” I thought, as I performed my cat-cow extensions and back bridges to music I was prone to slamdancing to upon its release.
I was recently emailing with my College advisor after my high school’s Centennial. He’s always been known for his memorable sign offs on correspondence. In the nineties, he introduced us to “Cheers” as a closer to a note. This time, the sign off was more exhortative: “Press on.”
2.
A friend was put down a week or so ago. He was said to have only months to live about a year ago, so we did get about six more months of time together than originally forecast.
He was the first dog in my life to seek out and befriend me of his own volition, before his Mom and I even became friends— and after we became friends, other dogs and even other completely different kinds of animals seemed more disposed to me, as if they are prone to speak among themselves.
I just went for my third to last physical therapy appointment of 2023. Contemporary country was playing on the office speakers and while my back was being heaved up and dropped down by the rollers, Brad Paisley was singing this couplet from “Remind Me” to Carrie Underwood:
“I felt bad cause you missed your flight/ But that meant we had one more night.”
Sometimes we do, and sometimes we don’t.
Would that so many wouldn’t choose to waste the opportunity this perhaps singular embodiment presents by organizing their lives around acquisition and hierarchies, and the fearful and empty hegemonies of patriarchy, white supremacy and imperialism, but we cannot bring to life a better world without effort, and this is the place where we find ourselves.
A family member describes herself in her faith as a “Tikkun Olam” Jewish person, and I would, philosophically, describe myself as a “tikkun olam”agnostic gentile—I firmly believe we are all called, within our own shifting bodily and mental capacities, to endeavor towards the “repair of the world.”
This particular embodied experience, despite some rather obvious shortcomings, offers each of us an opportunity to serve, love, and care for each other and the one earth we currently inhabit, and given the brevity of our embodiment, why would we waste our time on much else?
As the quote from Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” series goes: “You get what anyone gets- you get a lifetime.”
Be our steps “uncertain, halting and painful,” there is little else to do but press on. All endeavor has its own end, and we will lose everyone we love eventually, and our physical selves as well. How do we use this time in a body well?