When I last "spoke" to you this was just getting serious.  What has happened to me since sent me to the ER three times to no avail, and when I explain how dangerous my situation became after that...well...let me just say that I'm happy to be alive at all right now.

OH but...here's the first of the gifts this humbling has offered, as I wrote it to friends today.  Hell with it if it's not perfectly written.  I'm too sick to care and too sick to be writing, actually.  Just...dig what God is trying to tell me and all the beautiful people I know through this madness:

Today the Prednisone sucked the ugliest lumps dry, pinked up my chin which I had feared would remain parchment paper rough and flaky for weeks.  It talks to me, this drug, and handles its business in mysterious but very logical patterns.

It says, “Keep still for four or five hours and let me go do some house cleaning.  This is going to hurt, but when I’m done, you will recognize what I have done.”  If I do what it says and just surrender, the flames begin to subside in about five hours and the smoke clears…and I touch some previously unhealed place…and I can feel that whatever was in there is now gone.  And then in other places there are big red bumps that let me know that they are waiting to be taken on the next day.  I have no idea how this works, and I don’t care.  But I awaken and the haze sharpens, and I celebrate with loud, triumphant music from my past—Salif Keita today.  A great-great-great grandson of the founder of the kingdom of Mali with a voice that shakes the heavens in celebration of his past…and a future I wasn’t sure I would have a few days ago.

But the gift today…the “here’s why this is happening to you” gift that I have to celebrate is a story I will make as brief as possible, but it took my 59 years to get here, so…try to be patient.  There was a brash, New York “bitch” of a teacher (she called herself this) who made my life Hell when I was still an assistant principal.  And yet, she was one of the coolest women I’d ever met when we talked as women—not as colleagues.  Her name is Beth, and she saw through me so much that I was almost afraid to talk to her on any level while I was still so unhappy in that job.  Her brusque retorts called me out, and even when she was actually in the wrong…I knew that it was the job, not the woman—the whole field of education that was causing the rift between us.

Beth invited me to lunches, dinners…movies…incessantly.  And it wasn’t her I didn’t want to know, it was just that I didn’t want to be reminded of the job after I’d left it.  So I made excuses, but always told myself that as I got closer to retirement I would accept so that we could get to know each other and have some fun.  But as she continued to invite me and I felt more and more guilty about putting her off, I began to resent her.  It wasn’t her fault, it was mine.  It’s like how you hate someone who lends you money, when it’s YOUR problem, not theirs, that you can’t pay them back.

We have had some lunches since retirement, but kept in touch mostly be email.  And when I fell ill, she, like so many, heard the difference in my emails and became very concerned.  She said, “Let me help you.  I’ll cook, I’ll clean, I’ll sit and say nothing.”

Today…that is exactly what she did.  She washed my clothes and folded them lovingly and asked me where to put them.  She talked to my daughter, hugged my dogs and cats and most of all…sat next to the bed and made me laugh and talk about something other than my illness.

Just before she arrived a wonderful “counselor” I cherish called to tell me that beyond the pain of all this there is something “REALLY, really big” to be gleaned.   Maybe even to be done.  I agreed, of course, because I have been thinking of this as one of those stories you hear from the Native people of the world about horrible illnesses that send you off on a “forced vision quest,” from which you return completely changed and with things that must be said or done.  My ancestors have done this before, but never in a way that wouldn’t let me escape my own mortality.

I was humbled so that I could look around and see all the love waiting that I had not so much taken for granted but had, for whatever reason, not believed I was worthy of or capable of returning.

I get it from old friends.  I get it from people I hardly know.  Monday, my primary care doctor sat in the waiting room with his arm around my shoulders as his entire staff frantically called dermatologists he trusted trying to get me an appointment as soon as possible.  They are women who have gotten to know me over the past few weeks, first as a patient, in one case as a “confidante” before one was having an operation I knew something about.  When they saw my rash and the pain in my face…they gave up their lunch hour to get this done for me.

There is such good love just waiting for you to say, “Come and get me!”

I feel it.  And I am grateful.  THANK YOU.