Jan is a gift on many levels. Our friendship has grown stronger over time. Jan is a walking, talking embodiment of love and encouragement. Our friendship and our book talk/walks have encouraged one another in compassion, forgiveness, and accountability. Jan has helped shape me into the ever changing person I am becoming. We comfort and challenge one another. We see not only who we are, but who we can be.
We just finished a book and it's time to decide on another. Jan suggested an Anne Lamott book so I have been skimming a couple of them to see which might suit us at this time. We don't have to love a book, but it does need to have fodder for discussion. I downloaded "Small Victories' from the library and the first few pages astounded me. I am pretty sure they were written just for me!
Here's an excerpt, bits and pieces from the first few pages. I can't say Russ and I are on our 'Victory Lap', but I can say watching Russ and others with PD shouts victory and I stand in awe of their faith, courage and perseverance.
Prelude to "Small Victories" by Anne Lamott:
Victory Lap
The worst possible thing you can do when you’re down in the dumps, tweaking, vaporous with victimized self-righteousness, or bored, is to take a walk with dying friends. They will ruin everything for you.
First of all, friends like this may not even think of themselves as dying, although they clearly are, according to recent scans and gentle doctors’ reports. But no, they see themselves as fully alive. They are living and doing as much as they can, as well as they can, for as long as they can.
They ruin your multitasking high, the bath of agitation, rumination, and judgment you wallow in, without the decency to come out and just say anything. They bust you by being grateful for the day, while you are obsessed with how thin your lashes have become and how wide your bottom.
My friend Barbara had already been living with Lou Gehrig’s disease for two years on the spring morning of our Muir Woods hike. She had done and tried everything to stem the tide of deterioration, and you would think, upon seeing her with a fancy four-wheeled walker, needing an iPad-based computer voice named Kate to speak for her, that the disease was having its way. And this would be true, except that besides having ALS, Barbara had her breathtaking mind, a joyously bottomless thirst for nature, and Susie.
Susie, her girlfriend of thirty years, gave her an unfair advantage over the rest of us. We could all be great, if we had Susie. We could be heroes.
Barbara was the executive director of Breast Cancer Action, the bad girls of breast cancer, a grassroots advocacy group with a distinctly bad attitude toward the pink-ribbon approach. Susie was her ballast, and I had spoken at a number of their galas and fund-raisers over the years. Barbara and Susie were about the same height, with very short dark hair. They looked like your smartest cousins, with the beauty of friendly, intelligent engagement and good nature.
Barbara’s face was set now, almost as a mask, like something the wind is blowing hard against, and she’d lost a lot of weight, so you could see the shape of her animal, and bones and branches and humanity. Yet she still had a smile that got you every time, not a flash of high-wattage white teeth, but the beauty of low-watt, the light that comes in through the bottom branches; sweet, peaceful, wry.
We set off.....
This is a musical grove. The redwoods are like organ pipes, playing silent chords. Susie pointed out birds she knew, and moved a few obstacles on our route, as Barbara rolled on. Susie is the ultimate support, a weight-bearing wall. She’s not “I am doing wondrous things,” but simply helping both herself and Barbara be comfortable in the duo of them. She has lots of sly humor, but no gossipy edge, except in a pinch.
I have been to Muir Woods hundreds of times in my life, from my earliest days. This was where my family brought visitors. I got lost here at four, amid the crowds, but it was different fifty years ago. For the parents, a missing child was scary, yet you did not assume the child was dead. I was always afraid, lost or not. I got lost so often—once for more than half an hour among sixteen thousand people at the Grand National Rodeo—that until I was seven, I had notes pinned to my coats, little cards of introduction, with my name and phone number: If found, please return, as if I were a briefcase. I have gotten lost all of my life, maybe more than most, and been found every time. Even though I believe that the soul is immortal and grace bats last, I’m afraid because Barbara is going to die, and Susie will be all alone.
I love Wendell Berry’s lines that “it may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
I have a lot of faith and a lot of fear a lot of the time.
I asked Barbara, “Are you afraid very often?” She shrugged, smiled, stopped to type on her laptop, and hit Send. Kate spoke: “Not today.”
We were nearly to the end of the trail. Most of us do as well as possible, and some of it works okay, and we try to release that which doesn’t and which is never going to. On the list of things she could still do, Barbara included: “Clip my nails with a very large nail clipper, hear songs in my head, enjoy a baseball game, if the Giants or Orioles are winning.” Making so much of it work is the grace of it; and not being able to make it work is double grace. Grace squared. Their somehow grounded buoyancy is infectious, so much better than detached martyrdom, which is disgusting.
This is not what Barbara and Susie signed up for, not at all. But they are willing to redefine themselves, and life, and okayness. Redefinition is a nightmare—we think we’ve arrived, in our nice Pottery Barn boxes, and that this or that is true. Then something happens that totally sucks, and we are in a new box, and it is like changing into clothes that don’t fit, that we hate. Yet the essence remains. Essence is malleable, fluid. Everything we lose is Buddhist truth—one more thing that you don’t have to grab with your death grip, and protect from theft or decay. It’s gone. We can mourn it, but we don’t have to get down in the grave with it.
I ponder why this speaks to me. Is it the ambivalence of it all? I see people in our lives who 'don't do sick'. There are people who grace us with multitudes of love and comfort, but have no clue how to connect with Russ. There are those who don't have the patience to have more than a few minutes 'conversation'. And then there are friends. They care, they sit, they listen. They lift us up. They understand. They see not only who we are, but who we can be.