One
day you’re on the go, vibrant, athletically active, and doing heavy labor for a
landscaping project. The next day, your
teenage daughter is dressing you, bathing you, and tying up your hair. Both of your hands and wrists are bandaged
up. In the coming days, she and your 21
year-old son will be opening the fridge for you, pouring your water, making you
sandwiches, tying your shoelaces, clipping your fingernails, driving you
wherever you need to go, and cleaning whatever you and they agree to, which is
not much, leaving you with a home and a yard in much disarray. You have to Let Go.
That
was me in August, 2022 after I had fallen six feet from my kids’ play gym while
clipping tree branches from it and the beam I was leaning against gave
way. Thankfully, I immediately fell into
a dream-state which cushioned the force of my fall, spared me from pain, and
protected me from shock for the first 90 minutes after my fall, as described
here in Part 1.
It’s
said that physical pain is mental, something I now know first-hand. For the first hour and a half after I fell, I
was in a dream-state and unaware of pain. Once I began to regain normal consciousness, I
became aware of a mild headache. As it
grew, I complained of it and asked for some pain medication. The doctor said I could have no medication
until the CT scan had been completed and examined. To me, he seemed nonchalant to my growing
headache, but he was probably smiling to himself that I was not complaining of
pain in my two broken wrists (or the yet-to-be discovered crushed ligaments in
my right hand). Not until about three
hours after my fall and a half hour or so before I received pain medication did
I begin to feel the pain in my wrists and hands. Quite how much physical pain that dream-state
spared me from I will never know. But
for that and much more, I will always be grateful.
“Thank
goodness I had no concussion,” I texted my mom and two best friends the
following morning with my working fingers.
“Back & neck OK, I can walk and 4 working fingers. And 2 kids who are awesome – much to be
grateful for.” By divine mercy, I was
also naïve about how little I could actually do and how long my recovery would
be.
A
week after my fall, I texted them again with my orthopedist’s warning to do
barely nothing through August, and closed, “I’ll heal, but this is hard. Thank goodness I didn’t injure myself more.”
“I
know taking it easy isn’t your style,” one friend replied, “I hope you find
ways to relieve your anxiety. Healing
takes time and better to not re-injure those delicate bones.”
I
agreed. ”I’m working to keep it all in
perspective, especially that I wasn’t more injured. The orthopedist was surprised my injuries
were minor compared to what they could have been.”
But
I didn’t agree enough. I kept improving,
able to do a bit more each day, and kept wanting to try something new every day. Two or three weeks after my fall, “new” meant
simple tasks like sweeping the floor, straightening the blankets on my bed,
pouring water, wiping up the water I had just spilled, making toast and
spreading margarine on it, cleaning a few dishes, heating soup in the
microwave, and making coffee. That last
one turned out to be harder than expected.
My coffee maker has its own reusable filter that needs to have the old,
wet grounds knocked out and cleaned before scooping in new grounds. In addition to opening a lid, pouring water,
and scooping new grounds in, I also had to knock out those old grounds, a
simple task that sent pain surging from my fingers to my elbow.
I
was counting on good news at my four-week appointment with the orthopedist, but
she informed me my x-rays showed that while my left wrist was healing, but my
dominant right was not. “Our bones are
like twigs,” she warned me. “Too much
bending or stress builds on the break.”
Again, I texted my trio: “my body is not invincible and I have a very
hard time releasing myself of that delusion!”
That I am not
invincible was just the start. Life
without hands showed me I had much to learn:
Humility:
when your teenage daughter is bathing you and your college student son is
clipping your fingernails, you have to become very humble very quick.
Take nothing
for granted: when you celebrate a thumb that works so you can dress
yourself, you start to see how much you’ve taken for granted.
A gentle
touch: You don’t realize how hard your touch can be until every touch brings you pain. You’re starting to get better, so you’re now
opening doors, pressing the walk button at a crosswalk, closing your dresser
drawer, shaking someone’s hand, patting your teenager on the back for a job
well done, squirting out hand cream, and knocking out those coffee grounds:
those things you’ve done every day for years and taken for granted, and now
they bring pain. You wonder if your
touch has been too hard, and then you wonder if your speech has been too hard,
and if you need to seek a more gentle way to touch, to speak, and to live.
Forgive
yourself: You were foolish and you
fell. Now forgive yourself and learn.
Release
yourself from other people’s expectations: there are those who think you should
heal fast and get back to life. But your
body knows, and it tells you. Listen to
your body and set yourself free from those who think they know your body better
than you do.
Show
compassion: If you find yourself impatient with anyone, remember they might
have just fallen. Maybe they can’t use
their hands. Maybe there’s something
else they can’t do that you can’t see.
Show compassion.
Slow down! You’ve forgiven yourself – good. But if you don’t want to re-injure yourself,
slow down!
Let Go! No matter where you are, where you’ve
been, how hard you’ve fallen, nor how stupid you were when you fell, let it all
go.
By
the time of my fall, I had already and very recently had to let go of more than
I ever thought I could. Within the past
year, I had already lost both my marriage and my teaching career, both of over
two decades, and both so seemingly strong.
My marriage had been a strong partnership for service and home projects,
parenting, and friendship and concluded itself amicably, after turmoil and grief
along the way. In my teaching career, I
was continuing to excel, even with my office and classroom moved into my
bedroom for the pandemic, but I was caught in a political drama outside of me,
a pawn by top administrators, mostly new and from far away. I learned that no matter the excellence of my
own performance, I am not invincible. To
release a career I was passionate about and my marriage all at once called for super-human
strength in Letting Go.
I discovered a
remarkable truth, one that people say, but you have to discover for yourself: there
is much freedom in losing and letting go.
When everything we’ve thought we need to do and need to be is taken from
us and we can’t do and can’t be what we’ve thought we needed to, we discover we
don’t need to do that or be that. We
have the freedom to let go of all of those expectations we’ve placed upon
ourselves and that we think others have placed upon us. We also discover that whether or not others
have in fact placed those expectations upon us doesn’t matter. Either way, we have the freedom to let go.
As we let go, we
also learn one of life’s greatest lessons: Life will work for you if you let
it. This is true even when you lose what
you love. As I was learning to literally
let go during my life without hands, I had no knowledge that before the year
was out, I would have to let go yet again, also of something very significant, from a fire to the place where I worked and played, a story I hope to share in
a third part in a few months.
The universe
provides what we need for our own growth and, ultimately, for our abundant
life. Security and being in control
might be what I had wanted, but they were not what I needed. What I did needed: to surrender, slow down,
and Let Go!
Return to Letting Go, Part 1: The Fall
© 2023
by karina. All rights protected. Please
use with permission and/or a link to this blog post.
