Pondering Eases the Pain: On Perserverance, Loss, and Acceptance of a Limb Lost

I cannot sleep.  Again. The relentless stabs of pain wake me unfailingly now, since accidentally catching on fire on the night of December 29th, each morning at 2 a.m.  I am itching furiously at a phantom monster with long steel fingernails, and staring, disbelieving, in the dim nightlight at these unbelievable scars.

I am wondering how this grotesque, angry, twisted red appendage can actually be attached to my torso, something I lovingly held my newborn baby with as I breastfed him and rocked him to sleep with only two years ago.  This limb I used to climb trees, to sculpt clay, to do yoga and plies, back dives, handstands, cartwheels, and back handsprings, this arm I used, night after night, to hold the palette of colors while my right arm held a dancing paintbrush. This arm I hugged my long-gone Daddy and mother with — now a gnarled and mangled mess  of twisted and stitched pieces of flesh grafted from the lengths of my stripped upper and lower back.Scratching, scratching ’til it bleeds, at that very raging, reddened landscape of a back — once smooth, supple and tanned from years of biking in the sun by the sea — I am at a loss.

I am at a Complete. And Utter. Loss.

My Arm.  My arm.  My.  Arm.

I repeat these words in my head until they no longer makes sense.  My arm. My arm. Myarm. Myarmmyarmmyarmyarmyarm. Army. Arme. Arm Me.

Arm Me.

Dear God, please arm me against the trials I must face now. I am so, so scared.

I am crying.

Silently, shaking, and hard.

I am mourning the loss of a great friend I had taken for granted for so many decades: my young and unscathed body, and most profoundly,

my entire left arm.  Half of the existence i lauded being able to live mostly with my hands.

Then, happenstance, I read a comment regarding my Facebook status update, a comment that I had somehow missed.

I had been lamenting, in a post (replete with brutally honest photographs), the horrors of my newly and deeply scarred arm and back — pitifully and publicly feeling sorry for myself.

My friend Robert, one whose writings i have read to be a very wise man,  simply typed as a response,

“You are beautiful. and courageous to let us see what you look like in these changes.”

This one sentence, in the instant it took to read it, profoundly changed not only my life, but my whole view on aging, experience, and wisdom as related to true beauty.

TRUE beauty. From the INSIDE, out.

Thank you so very much, my friend.
Thank you.

I shall attempt to sleep now, still itchy, but much more at peace.

Namaste.