A Beautiful Time, A Brutal Time

A Beautiful Time, A Brutal Time

My husband Rich and I in Mojacar, Spain 2011

I have thought so much about whether to write this post, and if so, how to write it.  I have had so many loving, encouraging, and supportive emails and messages from readers and friends I’ve made here, all asking where I’ve been and if I’m okay. It seems best to just tell the story – and as far as stories go, this one’s a doozy.

As followers of the blog may know, my family and I have been traveling for the last several years – ten years, actually, working and exploring the world. I have written posts from Spain, France, Chile, Argentina and Panama. As I traveled and learned, Hemingway’s writing stayed relevant no matter where we were. His travels connected him to the strength and endurance of the human spirit. The way he traveled, especially as a young man, taught me how to listen and observe. These years have been the most interesting and challenging years of my life, and I am certain that this is why I identify with Hemingway and Hadley, so much.

In the small mountain village of Comares above Malaga, 2011

My husband and our two sons and I have learned and grown immensely by plunking ourselves into new situations, countries, and barrios, always trying to live as integrated with the culture as possible, renting houses for months and years at a time to really get to know our neighbors. In this way, we have shared meals, laughter, and truly ourselves – getting to know, and falling in love with, the friends we’ve made in Latin America and Europe.

We’ve been served homemade fish-head soup from our neighbor Dario in Chile, tasted morcilla (blood sausage) and sipped mate in Argentina, gone down to the docks in the middle of the night to meet our friends’ fishing boat just coming in along the Chilean Coast. I once babysat a Bolivian toddler that was perhaps the most somber child I’ve ever met. In Spain – well, I could go on and on here – I felt, like Hadley, that I was given the keys to the world.

Dario serving fishhead soup in Concon, Chile. 2012

These experiences tended to burn away any falseness from us, what we found we had in common with our foreign neighbors was our humanity, nothing else was necessary. In fact, anything else would have stood in the way of all that we learned from the people we met. We have so many reasons to be proud of our sons, but their ability to acknowledge, and genuinely connect with anyone, anywhere, of any age or station in life is, to me, the most admirable and practical trait anyone could develop.

We were always working, maybe too much, and we were always aware that we were visitors. In almost every country we lived in, we volunteered in schools, orphanages, and soup kitchens.  I was recently asked to write an article for a luxury travel magazine, and it was the first time in years that I had to use a thesaurus to write a travel piece!  What are “upscale amenities” anyway?

This past spring, we took a group of students to Panama, a new place for us, filled with the promise of adventure. Our students and the rest of my family went to Panama ahead of me, and reported back with tales of a wrinkled old man walking along the road, barefoot and balancing a dead iguana on a stick across his shoulders. The iguana was nearly as long as the man, and the iguana may very well have been his dinner that night. On the phone, my two sons told me excitedly about swerving to avoid hitting an adult jaguar on a back road one night.  We had chosen a more rural setting in Panama so as to garden, meet neighbors, and experience the jungle. The students loved the tropical flowers and fruits, the colorful lizards, the strange swampy humidity of the air, and the drenching rain showers every afternoon; the newness of it all.

About a month after I arrived, I was startled awake, filled with terror, shaking violently, unable to control my body. I was having a grand mal seizure out of the blue. I did not know what was happening but I was sure my life was at stake. This was confirmed by the far away voice of my husband trying to reassure me with panicked declarations of love. I could hear the fear in his voice. We were, of course, in a rural part of Panama, in a mountain town, half way between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. My husband called an ambulance, which took us to the nearest hospital. I have seen a few Latin American emergency rooms, and this one was much more third world. My seizure was so severe that it caused a stroke, cutting off the blood supply to my brain and paralyzing my right hand.

The hospital was very small, more like a clinic. The floors were cement and the building was filthy. I was carried by stretcher to a small curtained off room where I could hear children crying, infected coughing, and moaning throughout the drafty room. There were lines of sick people in the hallways. The hospital staff asked my husband to leave my side briefly to take care of financial arrangements, and while he was away, I was hit again with another seizure. Going in and out of consciousness, I was unable to talk. A crowd, including the doctor and all of the nurses, gathered around my bed to watch; they simply did not have the capacity to help me. Before everything went black from the second seizure, I felt sure that I was dying. When my husband Rich returned to the room, they told him that there was nothing they could do to help me. We were then transported by ambulance 50 miles downhill on a two-lane highway, to a larger hospital. At this hospital, they finally had the resources to stabilize me and run some tests. That’s how I found out I had brain cancer.

At the alcazaba in Malaga, Spain 2011

I stayed in the hospital in Panama for almost a week, until I was stable enough to fly home. I was given a sponge bath every day with cold water. There was no hot. The nurses wore old-fashioned starched white uniforms, which framed their brown faces beautifully; their long, jet-black hair was tucked inside their old fashioned nurses’ caps. They came together beside my bed, holding my hand and stroking my head. Then they began to come to my bedside one-by-one to pray for me. This moved me beyond imagination. It was all they could do to help me and I will never forget my moments alone with them. They were mothers too, and it wasn’t often that they took care of a gringa in the hospital, especially one whose husband and grown children were constantly by her side, trying to grasp what was happening.

I was too wrung out and sedated to understand these events, but there were a couple of things I was sure about: I did not want to die in Panama, and I did not want to die of a seizure or a stroke in front of my family. I wonder if it was by sheer force of will that I lived through that day. I wanted very much to live, period. But I wasn’t sure what my life would become.

The prayer rag given to me in Panama by Anel and Xio

Another moment I cannot forget was when Anel and his wife, Xio, our Panamanian neighbors, visited me in that hospital. Anel pressed a well used, hand knit potholder to me with tears in his eyes. I wasn’t sure I understood what was happening, but his wife was crying too. I know some Spanish but could not completely understand what he was saying. My sons explained that the potholder had been passed around their entire church and every member had prayed over it – news traveled fast in that small town about the woman and her family at the hospital. The thought of all of the people praying for an American woman they will never meet still blows my mind, and I keep this precious piece of fabric near my bed to remind me of the kindness and generosity of the people we’ve met everywhere. The neurologist was a kind and gentle man but he couldn’t find a way to say anything encouraging. He told my husband to take me home and get our affairs in order. He said I had very little time – a couple of weeks, a month or two at best.

Before all of this happened, we were set to return to Spain in just a few weeks. I couldn’t wait to get back and see friends and unpack our books and household things in storage there. We planned to set up in Andalucía again and then make the breathtaking road trip across the country to Pamplona for the Running of the Bulls.

After what felt like an eternity, but was really just a week, we got ready to fly home. It was shocking how quickly my body had atrophied in such a short time. Although I was oblivious to it, my husband told me that he was struck by the looks of compassion and pity from the people around us as he pushed me in a wheelchair through the airport. He saw policemen watching us closely and tried to steer away from them. Two officers approached us. They said that I didn’t look well enough to fly. One of them escorted us downstairs to the airport infirmary. I wouldn’t be able to get on the plane unless the doctors gave me a medical clearance. They were surprised when my results met the minimum requirements. We were so relieved that we were able to leave the country!

We finally made it back to the states, and my doctor confirmed that, yes, I had about two months to live. Would I like to speak with someone from Hospice? They asked me several times. “Oh, no,” I would answer groggily, acknowledging their invitation, “I can’t go to Hospice, I’m going to Spain.” When they described some of the very few treatment options available to me, I said, “Oh thank you so much, but we will be in Spain.”  I was heavily sedated and still had not come to grips with what was happening.

When I met with the “team” of doctors for the first time to make a plan, it was the very week that the Fiesta San Fermin started in Pamplona. With genuine anguish, I mentioned it to my doctor; how much I had looked forward to it, how sad I was to be missing it. She laughed kindly, rolling her eyes, “Oh yes, we’ve all heard you talk about Spain!” she said.

This painting of Icarus hangs in the front hall of Ric and Karen Polansky’s house in Mojacar, Spainn Moja

Our sons stayed in Panama an extra week to help our students pack up and return home. That was one of the longest weeks of our lives – not knowing what the future held, only hoping that the four of us would be able to see each other again. In the shellshock of those first weeks, we wondered if we had been living too risky of a life, if what we had done was worth the price we were now paying. Had I, like Icarus, flown to close to the sun? For weeks after that first day, this question plagued me. Everything about our life changed in one day and we all had to switch gears on a dime. How could I possibly come to peace with what was happening?

I have a very private spiritual life, but when I really need help, it is always art that nourishes me and gives me clarity when I cannot find it. I need the symbolism that illuminates my way towards the comprehension of the often chaotic events of human experience. To find my way again, I have to go down, alone, deep below rational thought, to the place William Butler Yeats writes of:

Now that my ladder’s gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start,

  In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Whether it is making an important decision, or processing grief, I have always found the answers I seek, and a tremendous amount of comfort, in literature, poetry, painting, music, and film. I am more human through art, and yet often connect to guidance that can only be described as divine. I am comforted that others before me have transmuted their own anguish into something beautiful and meaningful.

Dreaming is another way to drop deep into the place where the veil between the physical world and the mystical world disappears, however briefly. Rudolf Steiner wrote, in a 1923 lecture, “In dreaming the soul frees itself from the state of bondage to the body and lives according to its own nature. Thus the dream has become a field of inquiry for many searchers after the soul.”

Because I had gone from the hospital in Panama almost directly to a hospital in the states, my family packed and moved my suitcase, which had been with me in Spain, France, Chile, and Panama in the last year. The suitcase stood in the corner of my hospital room in the United States for 11 more days until finally I went home. When I opened it, I threw away every single bit of clothing I had with me in Panama, keeping only the books. Reaching into the side pocket of the suitcase, I found a few articles and essays that had been there the whole time, traveling with me over three continents.

One of them was an essay Allen Josephs sent me the previous summer after the Michigan Hemingway Conference. And there it was, the first part of being able to put some of the pieces of my life together. I remembered that I really liked the essay, and that it was partly about bullfights, whose symbolism, no matter how I viewed the Corrida, was never more relevant to me than at that moment.

The most impractical yet perfect get well gift from my mother. Knowing how much I love Hemingway and Spain, she tracked down a “montera” (a bullfighter’s hat) in an antique shop and gave it to me when I got home from the hospital.

I have read most of Allen’s work on bulls and the richness of Spanish culture for, you see, I had become an aficionada of these things too. “I wandered into Spain and was struck at once with the visceral and magnetic feeling that I had come home, come home to a place I had never been,” Allen writes of his first trip to Andalusia in 1962, the year I was born.

But his essay was only marginally about bulls; it was mostly about how deeply authentic the author’s life became when he finally followed his corazón. He was liberated in every way, especially from “an overly rational, culturally narrow education” by the writing of Joseph Campbell. Allen recounts specific passages from Campbell that were becoming true in his own life: “When you’re in a place, saturated, and its in the melody of your life, the language comes through.” For Allen, that was learning about Spain, the culture and the language. Although Allen was writing about his own life’s journey, it was a direct answer to my direct question about how I have lived my life: had we risked too much in these years of travel?

Allen’s essay advised me otherwise: “Participate in the play, in the play of life.” (Italics mine)Allen quotes from Campbell, who became a spiritual father for him. Allen expresses a similar sentiment in his most recent book about the lives of matadors and mortality. In this book, he proposes that the real tragedy for a bullfighter is not dying in the bullring, as we would suppose, but dying in an easy chair in front of the TV. I trusted these words. Allen’s journey (and bookshelf) seemed uncannily similar to mine.

I was comforted by Allen’s words, although I am sure they weren’t written for that purpose. My doubts evaporated, and I once again felt the gratitude that comes pretty naturally to me about my own life. I knew we could not have lived any other way.

After I had found some calm about this, the awful question why snuck its way into my thoughts. Why had this happened to me?

The steps leading to the balcony in the Notre Dame Cathedral

In late November of last year, I visited Paris with a friend. One of the highlights for me was visiting the Notre Dame cathedral for the first time. We waited in line in the misting rain for our turn to walk up to the top where the gargoyles are. There are 402 steps to the top (no, I didn’t count them!) These stairs are particularly beautiful, made of white stone worn and made soft by all of the human beings who climbed the stairs before us. I am so glad that I made the ascent.

I mention this because for at least two weeks after I left the hospital, I had the same dream every morning, just on the verge of waking.  In the dream I walk the last few steps of Notre Dame before the horizon of Paris fills my eye; all of Paris laid out in its grimy glory before me. In real life, I loved the gargoyles we had climbed to see, but in the dream, the gargoyles were grotesque and frightening and it was always disappointing to see them there each time I got to the top. It was terrifying to share the balcony with them. I couldn’t help thinking it was a dream about not being able to walk, or never being able to stand on that balcony again and look out over the rooftops of Paris.

The view from the top of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris

The dream kept recurring, as if I wasn’t getting the message, so one night I tried to understand what it was showing me. I can’t quite articulate it well enough yet, but I understood that by accepting the gargoyles not only as part of the view, but as perhaps the reason why the view is so profoundly, fiercely beautiful. You know, like life –

Three months after returning to the states, I finished brain radiation and had another MRI. The radiation oncologist had repeatedly said we shouldn’t get our hopes up. For the cancer to have stopped growing would be a successful response to treatment and would buy me a little more time, he said. And a ten percent reduction in tumor size would be the best-case scenario. He was a soft-spoken man who, when he first met me, would not look me in the eye. He obviously did not have much confidence in my recovery, but I did. Apart from radiation, I followed a disciplined regimen of alternative  complementary therapies, with the support of my husband and family. When the results came back, they showed an almost seventy percent reduction of the brain tumors!

When my oncologist went over this news with us, she had just returned from a biking trip to Venice, Italy. I told her that there was a Hemingway conference there next summer and how much I had looked forward to going. “Well, I think that Venice is an appropriate goal to work towards,” she said. I was shocked. But what about Hospice? I asked, referencing that shadowy word that lurked in the margins of my thoughts. “Well, you were pretty sick when you came into the hospital.” She paused and added, “and I didn’t know who you were then.” Well, you can imagine how happy that made all of us!

I have always appreciated the feeling of community that has occurred as this blog has evolved, and I have missed it tremendously in these last months. My own story often spills over onto these pages as I’ve traveled and learned, and I can’t help but do that now. I am beginning to write again, but I couldn’t possibly write another word about Ernest or Hadley without writing about this first. I hope this post conveys the love, gratitude, and humor that continues to fill up each day of my life.

There have been a lot of silver linings, too. The time we are spending together now as a family is priceless. People we could never get to visit us are finding their way to the Pacific Northwest. We eventually got everything out of storage, and I am reunited with my own library again! We will be having an American Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, which I have really missed, especially the tree. I am getting stronger every day and I am healing. All of us have noticed that by coming through such trauma, it is so much easier to love and forgive, and especially, laugh – full body, deep from the belly laughter, more often than you would think. It could be that the world truly is absurd, as Camus suggests, or it could be that we’ve just been awakened to a whole new possibility of being.

* Thank you to Matt for the title

Please scroll down to see photos of our life in the last 10 years. You can click to enlarge them.

A street sweeper in Mendoza, Argentina 2004

Matt learning the art of the Argentine asado with our friend Julio in Mendoza, Argentina 2004

Matt with the guys from the fruit stand around the corner Mendoza, Argentina 2004

Rich and I dancing the Tango in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2004

Sisters at an orphanage in Mendoza, Argentina 2007. Photo by Scott Woodruff

Argentine boys at the Mendoza Orphanage 2008. Photo by Scott Woodruff

Our students and family renovating a dormitory in a homeless shelter in Mendoza, Argentina, 2008

Our son Andy on a hike in the mountains outside of Mendoza, Argentina 2007

Our son Matt fishing in Bariloche, Argentina 2010

Brisa, one fo the infants I grew close at a children’s hospital we volunteered at in Mendoza, Argentina, 2008

San Sebastian, Spain where Matt went to the university in 2009

Miguel has a cafe with Russ and Andy in Comares, Spain 2011

Rich and I in Ric Polansky’s Bull Room learning about Spain Mojacar, Spain 2011

A retreat in the mountains in Comares, Spain 2011

On the way to Pamplona, Cathedral bells in Extremadura, Spain 2011

One of our favorite stops in Extremadura, Spain. The plaza in Trujillo, 2011

Pamplona, 2011

In San Sebastian, Spain, after watching the Running of the Bulls, 2011

A funky street market in Valparaiso, Chile 2012

Our friend Alex invited us down to the docks around midnight to see nights catch. Concon, Chile 2012

This is Libertad, the owner of our local kiosko, and one of my friends during the year we lived in Chile. I wrote about her on this blog. Concon, Chile 2012

Our sons Matt (age 25) and Andy (age 28) and I at the Botanical Gardens in Chile. Although they are grown, they will always be “the boys” to me! 2012

Irresistable street musicians in Vina Del Mar, Chile 2012

A fisherman and his boat. We always marveled at how small the boats were and how big the sea. Concon, Chile 2012

A shrine in a small grotto near the sea in Zapallar, Chile 2012

Carefree days, Concon, Chile 2012

The beatiful coast of Chile, 2012

Our dear friend Eder from Columbia, who will always be part of our family. We loved Eder so much that he eventually worked and lived with us. Eder came with us to Panama, too, but we could not bring him to the states. We miss him every single day.

Pampaneira, a lovely mountain village in La Alpujarra Spain 2013

We lived in the tiny village of Maro in 2011 and again in 2012, just outside of Nerja, Spain. (This photo was taken in Nerja)

Ayo cooking his world famous paella at his beachside restaurant in Nerja, Spain 2012

A lazy afternoon in the Plaza in Verjer in Cadiz Province, Spain 2012

Malaga, Spain 2012

The Spanish Sierra Nevada taken from Granada 2012

The Alhambra in Granada, Spain 2012

Our son Andy in Panama, picking Noni fruit from a tree in our back yard. 2013

Rich and students on a hike through the jungle in Panama 2013

Indigenous clothing for sale at the Boquette market in Panama 2013

A little charmer on the bus from Boquette, Panama 2013

Now we are friends. Panama 2013

Rich and I a few days before our lives changed. Panama 2013

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” Albert Camus. Photo taken at the Rodin Museum in Paris, 2012

 

November 14th, 2013

Filed under: Allen Josephs , Allie Baker

Post tags: Allen Josephs • Allie Baker