The End of a Long Illness

• I was supposed to visit my favorite cousin last evening, but he wasn't feeling well, so we cancelled.
• I was supposed to have dinner with a new friend on Saturday last weekend, but she wasn't feeling well, so we cancelled. My husband and I did go, later on, to a second party we'd been invited to, and left early.
• My husband and I haven't been out to eat, except under duress, in months.
• I have begun exercise classes, and dropped out after one session.
• My best friend is working four hours a day, six days a week--not a killer schedule--but we have postponed a lunch date half a dozen times.
• My stepdaughter reconfirms each time we have a lunch date: I do always make it to those, but sometimes leave out a few errands I had meant to do on the way home.
• I haven't been impelled to call or see my brother for months. He lives 24 miles away. He's a funny guy, always amusing, and my sister-in-law is a great baker who stocks the house with delicious cookies and pies at all times.
  

This morning, I began to wonder what all this was about. I admit to having been alternately horribly depressed and heart-achingly frightened until Mr. Obama won the presidential election. My relief at the outcome of the election was enormous. As far as I can tell, most of the nation (and most of the voting nation, after all, did vote for Mr. Obama) was as relieved as I, at least on that score. Certainly, we are all still concerned about the financial future, and many of us are licking our wounds from a recent financial drubbing; a few of us still, sometimes, uselessly gnash our teeth at having let the scoundrels have free rein with our future for so long. A very few of us are hoping against hope that one of Mr. Obama's first acts will be the beginning of the restoration of the Constitution.

However, none of these musings begins to explain the weakness in the most basic threads of our social fabric, that of our relationships and interactions with our closest non-domiciled friends and family.

I think I have an explanation. After the first euphoria of hearing that there might, indeed, be a cure for our illness--which one might label Bellicositii ignoramicus fiducii (OK, some garbled pseudo-Latin for ignorant costly war, and I invite a Latin student to send me something better)--I think we are in 'bed rest' mode.

When one has endured a long illness, but has been told, "Just rest another week, dear, and you'll be fine to go about your business once again," one does just that. One rests. One avoids new opportunities for stressing one's body and mind. One adds some custard to the beef tea and toast diet, to build up one's strength for the marketplace once again. One works on one's wardrobe a little, making sure the outfits for the first days out will be clean and mended and attractive. One adds a small bit of difficult reading to the 'beach novels' of the worst part of the illness to attempt to gain enough knowledge of current events to re-enter the working world, if not also the world of work.

I think that's where we are, complicated by the fact that we are also, after such a long siege, a little incredulous, afraid to believe that our deliverance from this malady is at hand. Wanting it so badly, not wanting to jinx it. I think we are experiencing that last week of being housebound before being released into the big, wide, wonderful, exciting, demanding world again.

I am taking my Obama stickers off the car today, because my stepdaughter needs to borrow the car, and they would embarrass her. Yes, she was a McCain supporter; one cannot control one's own children, never mind a stepchild over 21. But then, my parents were embarrassed by my political choices, and I by theirs. So we'll let that ride for a bit, until she's about 35 and has been grappling with reality for a while. I don't like it, but I also believe the St. Francis prayer, and this experience calls for wisdom to know the difference.

But despite all these musings on my stepdaughter's incomprehensible political stance, I have been afraid to remove those darn stickers. I'm afraid of a jinx. I'm symbolically afraid that if I eat too much custard and too little beef tea, the disease will return. And I'll die. I have literally had to argue myself out of it, and succeeded, but only because I've already ordered some "We Did It" stickers in celebration, and they should be here by the time I get my car back. That's my excuse, and my band-aid for the heebie jeebies, and I'm sticking to it!

We do that when we are getting over an illness, also. We fear to jinx things; if we have always brushed our teeth from left to right, we aren't going to change it now. If we always wear our brown shoes on Mondays, well, the red ones just won't cut it until Tuesday. We maintain a steady state so that we can be receptive to the benefits on offer. The benefits of fresh air, new sights, pleasing sensations, mastery of our own fate once again.

We want so very badly to go out again, in health, that we hoard our small store of hard-won health against the greater health to be had very, very soon...if only....If only we adhere to doctor's orders. If only we do not tax our recovering system too much. If only we are brave enough to interact with our God again in some way other than begging, "Please, please, please....take this curse from me!"

So I'm not going to worry about it, which would tax my personal recovering system in any case. Soon enough, perhaps on January 21, 2009, we will all doubtless engage with the world again, stop walking on the eggshells of a fragile promised deliverance, and begin to enjoy the bounty we once had and can have again, enough and to share, if only....

If only we take care of our spirits, and make them loving, generous and kind.

If only we take care of our bodies, and enable them to endure the work of putting a fractured world back together again.

If only we take care of our minds, and see that we don't lose them again into a black hole of greed, cynicism and ignorance.

If only we relax into the hand of our God, whatever God that might be, and know that It Is Done Unto Us as We Believe...and we believe in God, the Good.

Repeat three times, and three times three times, ad infinitum.