Daniel's Weblog

Return of Leukemia ?!!

Date: 2005-10-15 12:50

Subject: Bonnie's Blood tests indicate the return of her Leukemia 

Mood: distressed

Music: Tocatta and Fuge in D minor

Bonnie went to the Harvard Medical Clinic to get her blood tests to confirm that she has entered her 36th month of remission from Leukemia. WBC =2.8   Normal is 4.0 to 8.0  ... Oh NO.

This is a devistatingly low White Blood Count. How can this be?

I drove Bonnie to her blood draw in Bellingham this summer. She was required to have blood drawn for a drug test and a TB test so she could work as a Chaplain at St. Josephs Hopsital in Bellingham WA. Bonnie passed those tests with flying colors. Only now have I discovered that Bonnie elected to not provide her prescription requesting a CBC blood test on our regular 90 day schedule.

She has confided that she sensed that there might be something up this summer and simply did not want to know.

Bonnie served as a chaplain to the sick and dying in the Cardiac Unit, but developed amensia around caring for her Self.  We were both shocked by her low white blood cell counts which fell from a perfect normal count of 5.6 last March to way below normal at 2.8.  On the other hand, neither of us was truly surprised.

The other shoe had now dropped; Bonnie had been feeling stressed and anxious for most of the summer months: again trying to control what could not or did not need to be controled. I could see and noticed aloud that her sense of deep peace and well-being was eroding. When this happens I fear she will slide toward the precipice. But we were living and planning for a future with a decade or two or three ahead of us. Thus we were shocked by the sudden inversion of our situation.

You can not be truly surprised when a durable remission from Leukemia dissolves. We find our selves weighing whether Bonnie and her higher power will effect a miracle again, or whether her fatal disease will overtake her biology this time.

We continue to go up and down the emotional scale quickly for days. Dread, fear, anxiety, then determination, hope and thankfulness. We each remembered that we have been around this track before. We know sooooo much more about how to work with this disease and the doctors and hosptials and the research and our friends and family and our selves and each other. We can do it again.

Bonnie says thoughtfully that she felt she had made excellent use of her three year bonus/grant of life. In response I ask Bonnie if we should change any of our plans. Is there a "cruise" Bonnie would like to take?  Bonnie is quiet, thinking for a while. Then she says "No, we're doing what's most important to do in our lives, now."

We become deeply grateful and feel blessed with our children - and grandchildren - and our communities - and our friends. Being with our children, taking care of our grandkids, and studying what is bigger than our selves, is how we find meaning today. This IS our cruise.

We are grateful for life in our community at EDS and our little warm apartment in Cambridge. And then one or the other of us slides into the statistical realites ahead. Oh shit. Which treatment to choose. Chemo again. Chemo nearly killed Bonnie last time and apparently did not make a dent in her Leukemia.

Most of the most promising drug options offer a 15 to 20 percent chance of improvement and an 80 percent certainty that any treatment will make one deeply sick. Kidney issues are common. Just what we do NOT need.

We need a miracle again, as that is the only 'treatment' Bonnie is likely to tolerate well. Then one or the other of us think, 'what if Bonnie simply dies this time?' How much time do we have? Six months? One year? Could we hope for two years? How do we create quality for whatever life is ahead?

There is nothing to do, but to do our best and love one another. We have never been given more than we can bear.

God will see us through.           /Daniel

Sunlight and Gravity

Subject: Sunlight and Gravity -- Mutual Attraction of Humans and Being. 

Mood: thankful

Music: You are the Sunshine of My Life

Bonnie's love and care for her grandson Zachary and his care for his GrandBee reveals each other's essence.  But in the everydayness of life neither seems to be conscious of the love they radiate, as they orbit around one another.

There is a light in which we can glimpse the gifts of the other:  Caring for the Other has radiance we can feel; maybe this wavelength is what we call 'Grace'.

Zachary backs up into his GrandBee's legs to touch her when reading a book or eating a snack, just to be close to her. Bonnie touches Zac's head as she goes by to put the dishes up. Zachary looks up at Bonnie when they are throwing rocks into the ocean. He seems to be looking for more than clues as to what is next, as if to see what posture to take in respect to the Ocean in front of them.

Bonnie is awakened by Zac to go watch TV in the living room. Bob the Builder seems to be a common ground. Can He do it? Yes He can. And so it is. He and they did the impossible together and Zac and GrandBee buzz around each other in everyday life somehow knowing the incredible gift each is to the other: unspoken even when it is spoken. "Love ya" Zac singsongs as he closes his side of a telephone call.

The wavelength and gravity of their relationship is not in the words, but in the regard they share as they orbit around the Other.

"But where will GrandBee sleep?" Zac asks.             /D

Dreams of White Light

Date:	2005-11-21 13:20
Subject:	Dreams of White Light and deep peace.
Mood:	Deeply Peaceful
Music:	A Love Supreme

Before Halloween, Bonnie went to North Carolina to help with the harvest of Jennifer's second son, by Cesarean section. Bonnie was delighted to be there for Jennifer and our 4 year-old grandson, Zachary.

By phone, Bonnie regaled me with stories of the day-old baby and how she and Zac went on their annual Halloween trek around the neighborhood in the dark. Zac could not see anything clever about giving people the choice of "Trick or Treat" -- so in exchange for their offered sweets, he would look up and sing out in his four year-old voice, "have a happy halloween".

The night of November 1, I slept alone in our bed in Cambridge. In the morning - I think it was at dawn - I was visited by the following dream.

In the dream, I am talking with a fighter pilot and "Boss" of the Blue Angels.

This pilot regularly landed his jet fighter on the deck of aircraft carriers pitching in 30 foot seas on moonless nights with no landing lights. If he did not catch the arresting wire with his tail-hook on every single landing, he would die in a fiery explosion and sink into the coldest depths. 

In my dream I am talking with this retired fighter pilot and he is telling me about Jesus. I feel a familiar awkwardness around the conversation; I was raised as a Jew and have always felt like the foreigner, and sensed some nameless forbidding around discussions of Jesus. Further, the pilot is a very private man; conversations about Jesus are just NOT part of his normal speech. Yet, there we are and the former Blue Angel is telling me some THING about Jesus.

As I listen, I sense light coming over me, as if rising within me. It is an indescribable light, and feeling of lightness. As the light rises and expands, I lose orientation to the world. The world disappears. I disappear.  Whiteness and light that obliterates everything.  There is only white light.

After some long time in this state of statelessness, I begin to observe the light again, and then get that I am a self, a self observing light.

As I come back to self/consciousness I say something aloud; maybe "I believe", but whatever words I uttered, the words do not mean 'I take a leap of faith'. Just the opposite; the clear sense of my utterance is "I have experienced:  I can not say anything, but I have experienced."

I am then going along in the dream. The scene is just everyday life, but I no longer feel the dullness of everyday-ness. I see a woman. I sense that there is something missing or incomplete about the woman. Spontaneously she is enveloped in light. I did not DO anything, or will anything. The light spontaneously flows to where it needs to be. The woman moves on. She is no longer incomplete.

I begin to awaken. I replay the dream for myself. I am aware that I have both had a dream ... AND that I have had an experience that is NOT a dream. I have a pronounced sensation in my body, distinctly around my heart and throughout my body that I have been filled with light - at once emptied and filled.

I find myself thinking, how perfect; If I were ever to have a religous experience about Jesus, it would HAVE TO come to me as a dream, for I would reject any such event in a church, with the rationale that I had been overwhelmed by some rhetoric. Likewise if I had the experience using drugs as a sacrament, I would attribute the experience to the drugs themselves.

I find myself deconstructing the dream. I see that the fighter pilot is not actually the man I know in my everyday life, but rather a warrior archetype portraying a kind of consciousness.  In the dream, the fighter pilot manifests  'zero-state consciousness' that allows one to fly a gossmar line in the teeth of a gale, through the blackest night and land on a tiny steel deck with an economy of motion and emotion:  He neither forgets nor focuses on what happens if he bounces or misses the arresting wire. 

As I unpack the dream, in my mind's eye I see the Tarot card of the ancient man with his lantern raised to light the path at his feet. I see that God/Reality HAS been a lamp unto our feet so far. All we have done is observe where the path is illuminated and follow where our feet carry us.

As I unfold and replay the dream, alone in our warm bed, I sense that the woman is both Bonnie, and not Bonnie. The woman is Bonnie in that I feel assured (not guaranteed) that all will be fine with Bonnie's health. And the woman in the dream is not Bonnie, as she does not have a distinct face, but rather she is simply the Other.

I think again how we have been following that path of caring for the Other, and the synchronicity of being given a residence at 15 St. Johns to live when we came to the Episcopal Divinity School. I looked up John 15: where Jesus sums up his teaching; "Love each other" He says. This is our address now, and our path forward.

So I am now awake in our bed. I am alone. I am different. I am not alone.

Over the next day or two I think I must go tell the Bishop about my dream, as if there is something more the Bishop should do to somehow confirm me or my dream.

As I hold this thought, I see, on the very face of it, just how silly the notion is.  There is no thing any man or priest can say or do that alters the dream. The experience is the experience. There is no sprinkling of holy water or incantations that can add to the experience, nor authority who can nullify it.

I find myself settled;  I see I need no outside confirmation to seal the dream; Only now do I have the sense I can share the dream.

I love to josh Bonnie by saying I can not understand why she would want to work in a Church for a Bishop; Our God makes house calls. /D