FRAYED—BLOG POSTS IN THREE PARTS

BODY — BOAT — BLOG

PART ONE: BODY

“Soul,” I said, “let’s not forget soul.”

“Right,” she said, lifting an edge of the chilled rice-pack covering her eyes and forehead against pain shooting through her head from her right temple, through the right eye to the left. “Soul.”

So far, we had named body, brain, spirit, and emotions, energy as things we possess, things commonly considered, certainly or supposedly, to be parts of us, but about which we are apt to say, “I have,” rather than, “I am” this or that. 

Do you see where I am going; or what my dying friend and I were exploring?

July 30, 2021 Friday 2:00pm

“Are you busy?” she asked by phone. “Could you take me to the ER? My head is killing me.”

And it was.

That headache was killing her. Indeed. Glioblastoma, stage 4.

September 25, 2021, Thirty-one minutes into what we call Saturday, she died.

What Glioblastoma can do, does do, did do with my friend can be read about, can be researched, can be messed with by science, but so far, we humans haven’t been able to enter the ring with it and deliver a knock-out.

And so, she, a nurse, and I, a theologian, talked about what we are, we humans; what it means that we care to exist, do exist, and how, somehow, we may exist beyond this physical dimension.

“What is the ‘I’ in the statement: “I have a body, I have a brain, I have emotions, energy, consciousness, and will.” Who, or what, is “I”?

“A pronoun,” said my dying friend, referred to by some as the smartest, kindest, bad-ass woman walking on earth. And there it was, what we desperately needed other than chocolate: Laughter, relief to our  . . . our what? Our souls? 

If Einstein was right, that existing energy can neither be added to or diminished (I admit to limited understanding of physics and I think this declaration belongs to that discipline), and that we are, above all else, energy, Then—protasis/apodosis—existence in some form is unavoidable.

What form? Where?

We agreed that the body she inhabited was doing its finishing work, that her reliable brain was fraying, yielding to cells designed to devour and rule, but would, ha ha, in the long run die with the death they developed. We wept, yielding to mystery, we submitted ourselves to the unknown, to God, to the unavoidable sense of something holy with us in this horrible reality.

With the best possible care, with affairs well in order, with the love and presence of family and friends, with all medical comforts, my friend’s brain frayed, bound to that dying brain, her body cooperated. Bit by bit, beginning with toes and fingertips, she died. But, what about that pronoun?

PART TWO: BOAT — Coming Soon