Musings on Surrender

Hi dear friends and family.  

This past week we celebrated Peter's 65th birthday.  We gathered in his living room with close family and friends, the fireplace crackling, and a delicious potluck spread, including a cold stone ice cream cake that was out of this world.  It was a lovely reprieve from the heaviness of recent months as well as a reminder of how life is relentlessly speeding by.  65 is a reflective time, for sure...a time of eldership and deep looking back over the years gone by.  So is illness.

During the past eight-plus months, loss, pain and uncertainty have been both companions and teachers for me.  I still hobble around due to my broken hip which the surgeon told me did not heal properly and causes limitations every day.  There is little they can do as further surgeries would not help.  Then there's the side effects of radiation and the loss of all my hair which may not come back this time.  On a humorous note, there is a little slender rectangular patch of hair growing back around the nape of my neck.  Nowhere else but there.  Peter tells me it looks like a mustache.  We jokingly thought to draw two eyes, a nose and mouth on the back of my bald head and walk in to some store backwards.  Can  you picture all the shocked faces?  I admit, I don't quite have the nerve for it but my playful boyfriend does.  It does mean that I'll have to shave now! 

All these circumstances, and more, create a deep impetus in me to truly learn to let go (not give up) of the way I always felt/desired my life would turn out in my 60's.  What I consider to be the premature loss of mobility and the possibility of life-altering circumstances, including cognitively, shakes my feisty soul.  I've always been a fighter.  Now I turn that feisty energy inward and rest it in the hands of the Loving Universe.  There is only one refuge: surrender, meditation -- placing my entire being into a much vaster Reality than this physical body.

I want to hold my loved ones closer to my heart. I want to be less distracted by the life’s minutia that can so easily rob me of time best spent in love and gratitude. It seems that loss and change can be a huge reminder of the preciousness of each moment.  In the end, that is truly all we have.

As I write this, I await the results of my 4th, and hopefully last, test of my spinal fluid.  The doc at City of Hope may require more, but I'm sure I'm at least half way there.  Then begin more qualifying tests before I can begin the transplant itself.  After two months of constant pneumonia, my temperature is normalizing and cough gradually subsiding.  Phew!  2013 has been a year of constant challenges!  The moments go by as I await Dr. Polikoff''s call about my last spinal fluid test and if they still find no cancer, and all I can say to God is "My life is in Your hands."

November 13, 2010 was the date of my diagnosis.  It's hard to believe three whole years have gone by and I'm still here -- despite all the statics for adults with ALL.  Obviously there is still more for me to learn here and I'm grateful for the time I'm given to learn it and to love more and more.  Thank you, my dear well wishers!  Your positive thoughts and prayers mean everything to me!

Heidi

Does Time, as it Passes Really Destroy?                           Rilke

Part Two, Sonnet XXVII

Does Time, as it passes, really destroy?
It may rip the fortress from its rock;
but can this heart, that belongs to God,
be torn from Him by circumstance?

Are we as fearfully fragile
as fate would have us believe?
Can we ever be severed
from childhood's deep promise?

Ah, the knowledge of impermanence
that haunts our days
is their very fragrance.

We in our striving think we should last forever,
but could we be used by the Divine
if we were not ephemeral?

The Last Two Months....

Wow, has it been a challenging couple of months -- two stays in the hospital due to pneumonia, the completion of 13 radiation treatments to my spine and brain with all the side effects, numerous episodes of a-fib.  This is why you haven't heard from me in awhile.  I'm home now, still recovering from pneumonia, which I understand takes awhile.  Am also waiting for the green light for the bone marrow transplant.  So far I've cleared two out of four weeks where they can find no "irregular" cells in my spinal fluid.  Once I clear the fourth week I start a battery of tests and if I clear those, I'm off to City of Hope for another difficult journey which could cure me once and for all!  After that, NO more radiation or chemo ever again!  I can start building my body up again.

What does one do during the arduous hours, days and weeks of such a long illness?  -- and with setbacks (or some new problem) seeming to happen every week or two?  Whenever I feel that life raft of hope slipping through my fingers, my friends, especially Peter, will pull me back on board....like this morning when I was in a long a-fib and he comforted me with these words "We'll get through it together, Heidi."  The love and companionship in those words were just the right dose of the only kind of medicine that really matters.  I converted back to a sinus heartbeat about an hour later.

When strong enough, I paint, read, listen to visualizations/affirmations and count my blessings.  I wouldn't be honest if I said this was easy.  Peter and I have been reading a book together called "The Deepest Acceptance" by Jeff Foster in which he says to accept even our non acceptance.  We can't fake acceptance, but we can lean into the arms of whatever we resist and try to welcome what already is and what we have absolutely no control over.  It certainly takes less energy and heartache than struggling against it.  So today I'm grateful that the a-fib converted and I'm grateful for the medication that mitigates the pain in my body, and I'm grateful, especially, for all of you who keep rallying by my side, your prayers and love, and for art. In my good moments, I'm grateful for my valor to keep fighting the good fight.  I guess I am a warrior, like Peter told me this morning.  There is just something in me that doesn't want to give up.  I can barely see the light at the end of the tunnel now, with the possibility of a bone marrow transplant.  I'm lucky I have the possibility of qualifying for that when so many types of cancer don't have that option.

It's a beautiful day outside.  I wish all of you deep peace in whatever circumstances life finds you...

Love you,

Heidi

brief note from Peter...Heidi is well and able to leave the hospital in the Bay Area Sunday----Hallelujah!!

Heidi is fast asleep this evening so just an update from me(Peter/Pedro)---She is much better with no temperature for a couple of days now and we had a good fairly long walk around the hospital today...Tomorrow after this week long delay and about 9 or 10 days in the Kaiser Richmond Hospital we head back to San Diego...Heidi and I send our love and best wishes to all!

oh if things were always black and white....then a vacation would just be a vacation

all in a day's work....

Heidi after three weeks of radiation....

Every Day About Dusk The Bagpiper Walks Above The Sea At The Inn At Spanish Bay Along The 17 Mile Drive