Change of Plans

A hospital missive on what would have been my father's 82nd birthday.

Rather than our regularly scheduled programming–another installment in our wonderful Spiritual Practice series–I write to you from a hospital bedside after a wild 72 hours that resulted in emergency surgery for my beloved, Chris. She is resting now and expected to make a full recovery; we hope to be home soon. I am grateful for incredible nurses, Loop noise-reducing earplugs, and modern medicine–even if I cannot quite muster up gratitude for our medical system, which is rather dreadful on the whole. 

portrait of an emergency room, including my dad’s favorite blanket

I am also grateful for books, particularly the copy of Anthony Doerr’s memoir Four Seasons in Rome that I stuffed into my backpack–along with a million snacks & all of the electronic charger cords–before heading to the hospital earlier in the week. (For better and worse, this is not my first hospital rodeo.) Ironically, this was Doerr’s only book-length work I hadn’t yet read–though I am a nonfiction writer by trade, I tend to read more fiction than anything else. But Doerr gave the closing plenary address at the Calvin Festival of Faith & Writing, which I was lucky enough to attend earlier this month. 

Doerr, like all writers I know, is a voracious observer: flora and fauna, the habits and details of his children and strangers alike, art and architecture, movement of clouds across the sky, the ways that words and language sometimes work like magic. Four Seasons in Rome is the kind of memoir in which not much happens other than, well, life. Doerr’s twin children learn to crawl, then walk. The United States elects a new president; Rome installs a new pope. Meals are cooked, doctors are visited, trains are taken. It is all too much, it is nothing special, it is exactly enough. 

I appreciate having these words as my companion inside of this hospital room, which is far from what I would call beautiful: a dozen machines chirping, whirring, and beeping, the television across the way blaring an unidentifiable action movie ENTIRELY too loud–the pain, exhaustion, and uncertainty all around. And yet. 

There is no life without this kind of bitterness, the bitter that makes even the most ordinary parts of life sweet. If I can breathe into my experience for a moment, glimmers of life’s goodness come through like tiny pinpricks of life. This joy is sharp, knifed with the knowledge of how quickly everything can change, how contingent it all is. Sometimes the fact causes me to despair; other times, it makes me drunk with wonder and heady with gratitude. To quote Doerr:

“The world is not a pageant: beauty is as unquantifiable as love. Geography is not something that can be ranked…If we creatures are on earth only to extend the survival of our species, if nature only concerns itself with reproduction, if we are supposed to raise or kids to breeding age and then wither and slide toward death, then why does the world bother to be so astoundingly, intricately, breathtakingly beautiful?”

An extra poignant coincidence: today would have been my father’s 82nd birthday. I sat at his bedside, too, in a few different hospitals before he died.  It’s strange but I can actually conjure him, feel his presence more distinctly inside of a hospital than anywhere else, since a hospital is where he and I were last together on this physical plane. He was quick to smile, even when in pain, and genuinely kind to everyone who crossed his path: nurses, doctors, custodians, techs. 

me and my Papa, summer 2000

I learned as much from him in his dying as I did in his living; the two were very much the same. He did not need to pivot when it became clear his life was ending–he was already living life the way he wanted. He did not have to issue communications to the people he loved telling to tell them he loved them–they already knew. And, just as important but often overlooked–he had thought about how he wanted the end to look (as well as not look) and had communicated these things to his family. I am grateful for a lot of things, but up there in the top ten is the fact that when it was time to tell a nurse to place a DNR, I had no doubt in my mind that it’s what my father would have wanted. I watched him leave the planet. I miss him so much.

This life is messy, wild, hard. How are we to exist inside of it all? Here is a poem–simple, direct, true–that offers some advice on the topic, advice I often turn to when life feels like too much. That advice feels appropriate to share now. 

Thank you for being here, and for reading.

xoxo

Nishta

a picture of my cute parents, pre-me

Guidelines

Here’s what you need to do, since time began:

find something—diamond-rare or carbon-cheap,

it’s all the same—and love it all you can.

It should be something close—a field, a man,

a line of verse, a mouth, a child asleep—

that feels like the world’s heart since time began.

Don’t measure much or lay things out or scan;

don’t save yourself for later, you won’t keep;

spend yourself now on loving all you can.

It’s going to hurt. That was the risk you ran

with your first breath; you knew the price was steep,

that loss is what there is, since time began

subtracting from your balance. That’s the plan,

too late to quibble now, you’re in too deep.

Just love what you still have, while you still can.

Don’t count on schemes, it’s far too short a span

from the first sowing till they come to reap.

One way alone to count, since time began:

love something, love it hard, now, while you can.

-Rhina Espaillat