A short dissertation on a word

 

Celebrating another birthday on that path to old age
note the walker I'm sitting in

The word that’s on my mind today is resilience. The dictionary defines it as the capacity to recover quickly from difficult circumstances. I think of it as the ability to bounce back. Several years ago I was in the hospital with stage four acute kidney failure, caused by an antibiotic that I should have known better than to take. I had already within recent years been hospitalized for a hip reconstruction (a fractured hip so bizarre that people in the hospital looked at me and said, “Oh, your ‘the hip’” and a diagnosis of atrial fibrillation. By this time I was feeling a bit down when a medical resident, a woman, came in to talk with me.

I said, “I guess this means that my health is going to change forever.” I was having a pity party, but I saw visions of dialysis three times a week dancing in my head. She replied, “Oh, I don’t know. You seem to be pretty resilient.” Right then, right there, that woman, probably unknown to her, gave me a great gift. I began to think of myself as resilient. I was in the hospital for six or seven days, but every day my creatinine (high is bad, low is good) came down. Eventually I went home and over the next months my creatinine came down almost to normal levels. The nephrologist saw me every three months, but my triumph came when he said, “I’ll see you in a year.”

I think so much of resilience is in our minds, and once I began to think of myself as resilient, I began to bounce back. Christian says I’ve been resilient about other things, like moving into the cottage. There are lots of things I cannot do these days, between the confines of the cottage and the limitations of my mobility: I cannot give the big parties I used to love or even the elaborate dinner parties for six that I loved. There are some recipes that I’d love to tackle but can’t with a hot plate and an toaster oven—those that boast of a skillet dinner you start on the stove and finish in the oven are beyond me. I have a closet that is nonfunctional for me—the hanging clothes are so high that I cannot reach them, even standing, and have to plan ahead so that I can ask Jordan to get this shirt or that down. But I love my cottage. Christian says I have made it work.

This is not to brag about my health or resilience to my friends who are walking the eighties path with me but to suggest that it helps to give yourself a message of resilience. When I posted about life in a tiny house yesterday, one friend wrote that she didn’t know if she could do that or not, but then concluded she probably could. My message is that we can do almost anything If we set our mind to it.

It seems to me a companion word to resilience is flexibility. It’s too easy to cling to the old ways, the ways we’ve always done things, from cooking to child raising. Living with one of my grown children who is raising an adorable seventeen-year-old son, you have no idea how hard it is to keep from saying, “When you were his age, you had to be home for Sunday supper.” Or some such. A long-time friend was here the other day and mentioned how angry she was to be quarantined at a daughter’s house for Thanksgiving because she developed covid. “But I apologized,” she said, “Their house, their rules.” That’s flexibility. And perhaps apologizing is resilience.

To my friends walking with me, think about those two words: resilience and flexibility. How do they apply to your life?

Okay, sermon over.