Snow Walk: Enjoying What Is Here

I didn’t write or share as much as I thought I would about making it a year into recovery from brain surgery. 

I didn’t really want to think about it, even as all I did was think about it.

I felt grateful for being able to run again, for being able to drive again, and I felt ambivalent about dwelling all that much on the scary thing that had happened to me. 

And yet, as I move closer to a year and a half, things still come up. Anytime I get a headache, it’s, ”Am I going to die?” (Spoiler: yes, but probably not right now). Sometimes I get a little neurotic about my eye - “Does it still see as well or is my vision fading? Will I ever get my full eye movement back, or is this just the way that it is now?” Probably. 

This afternoon, I had a headache and my eye nerves were tired and not moving as efficiently as I would’ve liked them to. I began to cry. 

Grief, I suppose. Much in the way that motherhood requires a certain amount of grieving for the person that you can no longer be, in service to the person that you are becoming… so, too, does recovering from something like this.

Something that changes you permanently. Even while you recover, the change is still there. Not just in body, but also in mind and in the way that you think and the way that you make meaning out of any little thing. It’s different. The one you were is memory. So there is grief.

Last night I was lying next to my husband and, once again, had the thought that I often have these days, which is, ”Someday we’re going to die.”

Hopefully not anytime soon, but that’s the outcome, even if it all goes well. So off I go, thinking to myself, “Good Lord, I will miss this one day.” I know that I will, and yet acknowledging the missing does not help me become any more present to what will be missed.

That very same husband told me to go take a walk in the snow. It is snowing right now. The creak of my steps, the whisper of snowflakes against my head, geese flying overhead, a few straggler cars trying to make it home, but mostly it’s quiet. I walk, and it does help. I stick my tongue out to taste the tingle of falling sky. 

While out on my walk in the silence, I see a fox. I’ve seen this fox before. Every now and then, she shows up - usually when I’m pondering things like this, now that I think about it.

Who am I, what is death, aaahhhh.

Angst for foxes. 

I see her step into the path. Snow falling all around her as she sniffs the ground. I wonder at her. I become still. She looks up at me and then she is gone. 

I am still for a while longer. Then I keep going. 

Near the end, I come to the oak tree I leaned against often when my daughter was little enough to be worn on my chest while I walked. Couldn’t do that gracefully now, big as she’s gotten (and one could argue I didn’t then, either, but I won’t). 

I lean against it once more. Soften my gaze to try and include periphery. My vision becoming round and soft, my breath doing the same. The thought, “If I do lose my sight, it is better to have enjoyed seeing.”

I’m working on a short story, currently, that speaks a similar message to a Tea Dragon about her horde. Better to have been a participant in what will be missed if it’s gone. It is a message I need repeated, it seems.

The snow falls heavily against the bare trees and the earth beneath. It gathers on top of my head and shoulders, as though I am just one more old giant in the sparkling silence. 

Then the thought, “Isn’t it beautiful?”

I say with certainty,

It is.