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“It’s not surprising that this has happened,” said the nurse practitioner from hospice, come to evaluate my continued participation according to Medicare guidelines. Twice last year, I was almost discharged for not being sick enough.
From behind her mask, her dove-gray eyes filled with compassion as she responded to questions of my physical decline the past two weeks: sunken brown eyes, skeletal frame, snaking veins crisscrossing my abdomen, thighs, and arms, and protruding ribs like a xylophone. In my bathroom mirror stood the image of a forlorn Nazi prisoner milling around the ice-packed grounds of Auschwitz. I paused and looked again, pinched the flabby skin of my bruised forearm. This was real.
“Your symptoms give specificity to your decline,” she continued, “especially the weight loss, despite the amount of food which you eat. Your advanced years, your weakened metabolism, and your diseased lungs also stress your breathing and wear you down,” she said while folding her notebook and dropping it in her pouch. “You now fit our hospice template: six months or less to live.”
I heard the words, “six months or less to live,” that defined the limits of my terminal illness, but still had to open my psyche to this reality and to surrender more deeply to the implications of my transition. I’d been in a holding pattern for over two years, blogged my experiences, worked the Twelve Steps of Chronic Pain Anonymous, and even participated in ZOOM meetings for the terminally ill. Now, there was palpable change in my body that required response, providing that my mental faculties hold out.
No more denial. No more rationalization. No more idealization.
More than ever, each twenty-four hours is a gift from Creator God to be cherished.
It seems that monuments honoring notables with charismatic gifts leave larger-than-life impressions upon viewers. Such is the experience studying photos of the thirty-foot sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr., commissioned by the Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin and erected at the West Potomac Park next to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. This was in 2011.
King’s star flamed with his nationwide support of the Montgomery bus boycott, in 1963, but sputtered with his blood-stained shirt on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in 1968. For fifteen years, his biblical passion interfaced with racial segregation, poverty, human rights violations, and the Vietnam war—enhanced by his bass voice trained in oratory. Thousands joined sit-ins, marches, even suffered killings, burnings, beatings, and imprisonment. Deep was the hope for peace that swept our country.
Most remember pieces of King’s story, influencing the nightly news during those years.
But what did happen? In my perception, the MLK sculpture suggests a clue. Standing erect in suit and tie, his eyes piercing off into the future, his arms folded, his right hand clutching a sheaf of papers, he seems bound to the stone from which he was chiseled, his lower legs, unfinished. Seen from behind, the stone also casts a shadow; in the analytical psychology of Dr. C. G. Jung, the shadow symbolizes the undesirable aspects of our unconsciousness. That Dr. King was not immune to such aberrations is obvious. He had his enemies.
And grief spilled upon cracked sidewalks, just beginning to flower that April evening.
Trick or treaters, masked as princesses, pirates, ghouls, inflated by assumed identities, may again canvas our neighborhoods this Halloween, their parents watching from the sidewalks. Winds will nip ankles, flit crisped leaves across lawns beneath a waning moon. The drama, the hilarity will deepen.
Perhaps you have also donned a mask for such haunts when a kid or for Mardi Gras carnivals? Perhaps experienced masked performers in a play or ritual performances of native peoples? Or worn masks for Covid protection? Or still do?
You are not alone. Peoples from cultures all over the world have donned masks for such purposes. The oldest one, made of stone, dates back to 7000 B.C., the pre-ceramic Neolithic period; it is kept in the Bible and Holy Land Museum in Paris, France.
But there is another way of considering masks.
As children growing up in troubled families, we can develop masks or defense mechanisms that later thwart significant relationships in family and at work. A gnawing emptiness results. Nothing is significant. Addictive behaviors soon follow. Some visit the consulting rooms of psychologists or other helpers and begin the painful process of owning their self-constructed masks and learning to discard them. Perhaps for the first time in their lives, they experience their spiritual center and live from this Source. They thrive, at whatever age.
I know. I’ve been through this process. And here is the result – I keep it in my study!
Heart Whisperings 