I’ve been thinking lately about picking up where I left off, but I’m not exactly sure where I was when I left, and am I really the same person I was when I left?
About one year ago my older brother, John, with whom I was not particularly close, contracted a disease of the blood. He had been a life-long distance runner, rising early to log his seven miles before going off to work, first as a union carpenter and then as a golf course maintenance worker.
For years he followed a steady routine. Up at 3:00 am, some carbs and fruit for breakfast, slip into some running shoes and take off down the road in the predawn darkness. Spring. Summer. Fall. Winter. I used to tease him that the people in our western Connecticut town were likely setting their watches as he silently passed through the seasons.
As we age, and our various physical systems prove not to be quite as robust as they once were, simple balance becomes less dependable. I, for one, am not as fond of gravity as I once was.
John had tripped once before, without consequence, but this one morning in November, three years ago, he was not able to engineer a soft landing and he dislocated his shoulder. Being the early morning, with nobody up and about, he walked, in pain, to the hospital. There, after a few attempts, they managed to “pop” the head of his humerus bone back into the socket. There was nothing funny about it.
Two operations followed, the second one finally succeeding, which led to two years of recovery while his ulnar nerve regenerated at the rate of one millimeter per day. An excruciatingly slow transition to recovery.
My brother is right-handed and he had damaged his right shoulder so there were many things that he had to learn how to do with his non-dominant hand, but he was healing. He first returned to walking a mile a day and then to three, graduating to a slow jog to keep the pain to a minimum.
It was against this backdrop that, one year ago, he received the diagnosis that would make the shoulder episode seem to be child’s play by comparison. My own run through a transition zone began then. I flew back that December to offer him moral support.
John was eventually presented with two options. Chemo cocktails, of declining efficacy, until the cupboard ran empty, or a bone marrow transplant, with some hint of an experimental protocol, should he decide to fight. He chose to go to battle.
The problem was that he needed to show that there would be someone to care for him when he was discharged from the hospital. I volunteered to be that someone. Whatever distance that might have existed between us would have to be subsumed into the greater narrative of what, exactly, is the meaning of family in this 21st century.
I am in my youngish 70s, if there even is such a thing, but I still want my life to carry some meaning, to have purpose. Besides, maybe if I could learn a lesson, I could still be around to teach a lesson.
I could do a chapter or two here about the ups and the downs. The miracle workers in our great hospitals and in the Veterans Administration medical system, about the people who show up every day. The names of the people that sweep the floors, that remove the trash. The nurses and doctors, many from foreign lands, who must have been exceptional in their faraway schools, who found their way to these shores to cure my brother.
There were many dark days as spring became summer and fall became winter. There was no one moment when a switch flipped, but gradually there was improvement, then steady improvement, a time when “failure to thrive,” an actual medical term, became something else, and that all the pill counting, and the meal prep, and the keeping of doctor’s appointments could be taken over by people that did not need to be around 24-7. I had toggled many times between hope and despair. Hope had won.
In mid-December the VA came and ramps were installed into my brother’s house. A nurse was provided to sort the 20-something meds that are still necessary, and a home healthcare aide to help with household chores and transportation.
I had been replaced. I could go. My brother and I had never been huggers. The feeling of understanding that runs between siblings, because of all those shared early experiences, can mostly suffice, but something had changed. As I was leaving to go back to Arizona, we embraced each other. Our relationship had morphed. I had grown.
I pointed my car southwest. I was delighted to see SW continue to show up on the GPS. The drive was not without its adventures, but gradually the thousands of miles wore down to hundreds. I was elated at the sight of my first prickly pear in west central Texas.
Elgin is an ecotone, a transition zone between two different ecosystems. Eastward is the San Pedro Valley which is where the desert tips towards the Chihuahuan. West is Patagonia and the Santa Cruz Valley, decidedly Sonoran.
I live in between, in the Sonoita-Elgin grasslands, and it sure feels good to be home.