Salamander
Fire Walking

Years ago I read "Tuesdays with Morrie", Mitch Albom's small book recording his final conversations with his old teacher and mentor, Morrie Schwartz, who was dying slowly from ALS. I later purchased "Morrie: In His Own Words" from a bargain book table, which contained Morrie's own observations about the process of dying and how he faced it. I read each once, dismissed them as well-written, pretty collections of witty aphorisms, and found them nice places on my bookshelves. I'm not saying I didn't like the books; in fact I enjoyed them a lot (or I'd have donated them to the local library's book drive, as I do my other mis-purchases from the book store). They were poignant, on the order of "Love Story" or "Brian's Song" or "Steel Magnolias". At the end I had a catch in the back of my throat. But after it was all read and done they just didn't strike me as having any amazing depth to them.

In recent days, though, I've taken those two slender volumes off the shelf and revisited them. I suppose it shouldn't come as any great surprise, but both speak to me now as they didn't/couldn't when I first read them. When I read them originally, I had survived my bout with the heart virus. I had beaten all the odds, and resumed a totally normal life with a totally normal heart. There's a certain sense of invulnerability that comes from surviving a life-threatening situation through no action of your own, and I was basking in that invulnerability.

I won't say that my sense of where I was in the world hadn't shifted quite drastically because of my heart ailment I suffered. I was suddenly made acutely aware that life was a day-by-day gift, and should be lived as such. But the emphasis for me was on life, and it was easy to gloss over the "nearly died" part of it all.

That's all changed now, of course. I don't dwell on dying, nor do I really anticipate that this latest illness will result in my untimely demise. But suddenly death is thrust back into the equation of life in such a way that I can't ignore it. Reading Morris Schwartz's impressions of his impending death have helped me understand my own reactions to the possibility of dying sooner rather than later.

I opened "In His Own Words" at random yesterday and read this:

If you are ill, you can experience more freedom to be who you really are and want to be because you now have nothing to lose.

I can't say I had looked at it quite that way. But it's true, the only way I'd lose is if I didn't take advantage of this time to explore who I am.

The funny thing is, I'm not sure that you have "more freedom to be who you really are" when you're ill. It's really more that you feel more free to act that way. The freedom was always there, if you had the courage to seize it. And I really never have had that courage. Now isn't a bad time to start, though.