Remembering the tough times

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

It's 10 days after the operation and everything is getting back to normal. The hole that opened in the earth has closed, and the fear of falling into it is almost - though not quite - a memory. All's well that ends well is what we say, what we repeat.

My husband is home. He is healing. Life, as we've known it, returns bit by bit each day. That's the goal, right? Life as we’ve known it, getting back to normal, putting the operation behind.

And yet I keep thinking that it is important to remember all we learned last week when we didn't know if life would ever be normal again. Epiphanies, the swift, clear certainties born out of fear and faith, tend to dull in the light of an ordinary day.

I read a fairy tale when I was a child about a drummer who marched through a forest of people-eating giants, scaled a great, glass mountain, emptied an ocean-size lake with a thimble, and felled an entire forest to win the hand of a beautiful princess. "Don't kiss your parents on the cheek when you see them," the princess told the drummer, after he had accomplished all his tasks, as he was preparing to return to his home for a while. "If you kiss them you will forget what you have been through, and you will forget all about me."

"I could never forget you," the drummer swore. But he did. He went home, kissed his parents and, presto, he hadn’t a single memory of the giants, the glass mountain, the lake, or his true love.

I hated this story. I didn't for a moment believe that someone who had done all those heroic things would ever forget.

"I believe ordinary life is played out on two stages, situated on two different levels," British philosopher Arthur Koestler wrote "Let us call them the trivial plane and the tragic plane. But on some rare occasions, when confronted with death or engulfed in the oceanic feeling, we seem to fall through a stage trap and are transferred to the tragic or absolute plane. Then all at once the pursuits of our daily routine appear as shallow, trifling vanities. But once safely back on the trivial plane we dismiss the experiences of the other as phantasms of overstrung nerves."

It's true, of course. In times of crisis - sickness, accident, epidemic, war, death - we see things with a clarity that is lost to us when life is untroubled. We see what's important and what isn't. But when life returns to normal, we dismiss these revelations. We chalk them up to "overstrung nerves."

If we were to acknowledge them as truth, we'd have to rearrange our priorities and routines. And we don't want to do this.

But I don't want to forget all I learned and relearned last week. I don't want to forget the kindness of people, not just friends, but strangers - Lorraine and Susan Phillips, consumed with their own husband/father who let me lean on them for a while, who included me in their conversation when words were the only things keeping me afloat. I don't want to forget Mr. Skinner, my husband's roommate, who, despite his own pain and discomfort, found room in his heart to worry about people he hardly knew. I don't want to forget Dr. Mudge - yes, the same Dr. Mudge who was lambasted by the media when Reggie Lewis died. He was my husband's doctor, an attentive, accessible, informative, very wise and very kind man.

Most of all I don't want to forget knowing how precarious life is, how it isn't a given, how tomorrow isn't ever guaranteed, how all of us are just a breath away from not being here anymore, and how important it is to love people while you can, and make time for them, and listen to them and respect them, and be kind, because even the littlest kindness goes such a long way.