Changes

“The accident caused an alteration which involved a quite unnerving primary change. It produced the unsettling sensation that I had been forced to become something different from what I was, and, more strangely, that I was both the spectator and the subject of the change.”

Tony Moore, ‘Cry of the Damaged Man’, p. 28

The above quote comes from a book written by a surgeon and rehabilitation specialist who is sharing his experiences as a patient recovering from a car accident involving a 30 tonne truck colliding with his vehicle. He tells his story from a patient’s point of view but with a doctor’s knowledge and experience of the hospital and medical system.

It touches on something a well-meaning friend of mine said in the heat of an argument some months ago. She had said, “I want the old Cindy back.” This sentence rings in my head and wakes me up at night sometimes because it is something so separated from the soul of who I am now to even think about the person I was before Oscar’s diagnosis. I have absolutely no idea who she was. I even went to the trouble of going through my photo’s from before D – Day (diagnosis day) and I can honestly say I have no idea who that person was. That old Cindy is a complete stranger to me and as sweet as it is that my friend misses her I have no such feelings. I just simply do not know who she was and do not have the time, interest or inclination in figuring it out. For me, there is no loss in this – just change itself.

“…in spiritual terms loss isn’t reality, it’s a concept created in the mind. When the mind applies judgement to change, what gets created is loss.” p.223, ‘The Path to Love’, by Deepak Chopra.

The human mind and its ability to judge is an important function that separates us from the beasts and ensures our survival. We all judge because we all think and the thought process is what labels our experiences. No one person is ever immune to this. We all wish to be ‘open minded’ and we all fail at this at times, especially when our life is in crisis.

Who wouldn’t resist the sudden change of their child having cancer? Who wouldn’t feel the need to fight against the loss of their child’s innocence and the childhood you imagined for them full of healthy development and joyful memories? It is natural to resist and you cannot beat yourself up about it. You do the best you can in each moment of now and sometimes you don’t do as good as you hoped, sometimes you do better and all of the time you are trying your best to find your way in the darkness that is a foreign world full of new scary medical jargon, nasty procedures and genuinely life threatening circumstances. No one knows the ‘right’ way to cope and no one knows how it ‘should’ be done. You just stumble through as best you can.

For me, the one thing that I kept focusing on was the idea that love heals. This is a cliché and means different things to different people but it is what helped me to get through the days. It is only the mind that resists change, formulates the concept of loss, tells you that you can or cannot do something. If you instead shift your focus from the head to the heart you find that none of these fears and forms of resistance exist. Instead, love lives in the moment, holds your hand and allows you to sit with ‘what is’.

To heal the ones we love and ourselves we go on a journey into the darkness where only love will provide the answers we are looking for. Reasons fail. There is no reason that any child should suffer the way so many do before they have had any time to enjoy life. There is no reasonable way to respond. There is no rule book on how one ‘should’ respond to circumstances that are so confronting to our every perception of life as we have previously known it. The only answer that makes any sense is: love.

So, I may not recognise the Cindy that existed before D-day but I do not care. Perhaps she had a lot of qualities that I ‘should’ miss. But I don’t. I love this Cindy because she doesn’t give her power away as much as she used to and she understands that her power resides only and always in love.

 Take care beautiful people and remember when you are resisting the changes of your life you are merely judging yourself and it will pass. Love awaits at the end of every tunnel of failed logic. Love will always find its way back to open you up and accept yourself and your circumstances. Love will be waiting for you when your ego surrenders to the truth of wherever you are today.

p.s. Our hospital visit went well today. Oscar’s bloods are coming back up slowly, though the platelets need to catch up. We will be back there again next Thursday to make sure the platelets have returned to the normal range. x