piece by peace

It's Christmas - the day, the eve. I grapple with a squirmy annoyance, primarily the rude wrestling matches between aeons of "shoulds," hiccupy sadness, dejected dissociation, and then some errant clumps of joy. The latter do not arise when I tap a wand; Come, o joy, I beseech thee, come amidst the dross - 'tis Christmas already, come! My little joy blips come to me with visiting friends.... some expected, some not. They come with the and who dressed YOU today? hospital volunteers bringing was dis? fistfuls of cards that I am opening one at a time in a chosen 12 Days of Christmas manner of acceptance.... they come when you phone, or heck, when I phone you. They come when we connect, breezily or intimately. They come when a box arrives and my gut tightens in shock, surprise, delight and this wretched wave of unworthiness I am loathe to confess. I am surrounded by love, tiptoeing in, skipping in, whispering in. And I am hounded at times by a frozen 4th chakra (the heart) that crossfires with my brain and doesn't quite believe it.

I want to walk out the front door of this place and not return. I am "fine" - freakin' fargging fine 'n dandy, except for the slight complication that I have no immune system to speak of right now. How can that be? I'm up and about, doing and being as much as I can muster from the you can't pass through the double doors, girlie confines of this particular oncology ward. No white blood cells to speak of. No neutrophils to speak of. Zip. None. Zero. I am told repeatedly that this is how long it takes after getting blasted with such a high dose of chemo as I did this time around. And I thought I'd be brushing off my cookie crumb-cluttered palms and out of here lickity split, thank you very much! I'm in Remission! I feel FINE! Get my ass home! Yet here comes another low platelet day, another platelet transfusion. Rah rah sis boom bah. So this is the way to treat leukemia while I look to the horizon for a bone marrow transplant and choke while I attempt to contemplate the horrors of dealing with insurance issues? 

Evidently it is. 

I had a wonderful side jaunt looking for websites speaking of the origin of the Twelve Days of Christmas being a hidden catechism during a time when being Roman Catholic in England was basically banned. I mean, really; it's a silly ditty.... except when I ponder that for example the "4 Calling Birds" represented the Four Gospels and/or the Four Evangelists. It's a lovely link. And you can Google it yourself.... until you get to Snopes.com, the great equalizer of all things suspicious. Snopes thumbs its nose. I don't. Nine Ladies Dancing? The nine fruits of the Holy Spirit. In this Hospital Room, when Christmas both bowls me over and finds me crying with loneliness for the companionship with my friends OUTSIDE, please, not here in mini-blip yet precious visits.... in this Hospital Room, I like the Underground Catechism. And I listen to the carols over and over on Minnesota Public Radio as well in as my fat 'n sassy iTunes collection.

The worst of it was missing singing with my Church choir - missing most of Advent, in fact. That is my soul food. Perhaps I should just give it all up and find a proper Religious Community and be submersed in that which so fills me. Today I am hospitalized with leukemia, and what did St. Paul's do for me here? They grabbed this person and that, including one of my dearest friends from Seattle, they put their heads together, about 200 feet of ethernet cable, a wireless router, a webcam.... and live broadcast the Christmas Eve service to me here in my room, here on my laptop. L'il ole freakin' me! I was texting back and forth with Jay Luther, the webcam master (I think he'd like that term); "A little to the right, please,"...... "Like this?" he'd say... and so forth. We were technical, we aimed for precision, we were silly, we were downright tacky. And I watched in tears, managing to put some paper tape over my Macbook Pro iSight camera so they couldn't see me cry while I watched the service I so desperately wished I could be in. It was dreamy and surreal. My joy is in my participation, when I am there and in the midst of it. I felt like a little kid peeping through a hole in the fence, except this was by invitation only and they did this for me. And it was dreamy and surreal.....

So to all of you blessed angels at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in San Rafael - thank you. If I could've crawled through the ethernet cable and stumbled into my red choir robe, I would've so been there..... and in my own limited yet heart-overflowing way, I was. Thank you. 

On the First Day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, a partridge in a pear tree: "The 'true love' mentioned in the song doesn't refer to an earthly suitor, it refers to God Himself....The partridge in a pear tree is Jesus Christ, the Son of God." 

As it resonates in your heart, so it shall be.