These have been such difficult months. Prior to last October I knew I was disabled, I’d had to wear a “Fall Pendant” since 2019 and have had to “push my button” to call EMT’s to come help me up and in the house when I fell in the garden and couldn’t get up at all. It happened once before but this time that fall was the end of my ability to garden after a lifetime of designing, planting, and writing about cottage gardens and gardening in general. My heart was absolutely broken. But in October I took a bad fall in my kitchen, my knee went straight down hard on my tile floor, and that injury has crippled me for life. I can barely get out of a chair, I have difficulty getting around my house, and I leave my house almost not at all. Only for doctor’s appointments where they help me in and out with my rollator walker, and the occasional vet visit for Molly where the vet tech comes out and gets her and I sit in my car and wait. I can drive but it is excruciating getting in and out of the car due to what my doctor deemed at my last visit likely lifelong chronic pain. It has all been a blow in a thousand directions and has left me feeling, more than ever before, fragile, vulnerable, and frightened. How then do I cope and try to manage the most productive life possible?

First of all I manage by practicing what people today call Radical Self Care. I’m not talking about getting a mani-pedi, lovely though they are those days are long over for me. I’m talking about having to think through every single thing I do to map the steps I take in my own house. No thoughtless flitting about. Every move, every step, is carefully calculated, thoughtfully planned, and it all takes time. It is so painful for me to get up out of a chair I usually have to sit for a minute and just breathe, and calm myself, and then grin and bear it. And then I am unsteady and I grab onto things so I won’t fall. And now my rollator walker lives in my kitchen. I have to sit in it in the morning while I make my coffee because I can’t stand up that long at the counter. The rollator has a sturdy seat and I can stand up here and there and then just sit while I do things, and a great many things I just can’t do at all anymore. But, there are things I can do and that’s what I focus on. And I cradle my heart gently and allow myself to cry when the losses seem too much to bear, and the pain is really bad.

I focus on things I can do… and they are many. My life is almost completely compromised of writing, drawing and painting, and resting frequently. And slow. Everything is slow. I am learning to love living my way slowly through each day, through this life. As I drew, with pen and ink, and painted, with watercolor, the above picture my heart kind of broke open to a very soft place, and I got tears in my eyes. And as I drew these words came into my mind and I jotted them down on the facing page in my sketchbook as I worked…

Each line,
Each stroke,
Each curve of a letter,
matters…
[So too our lives, each moment, each tiny thing.]

The thing about growing older and becoming increasingly disabled is that while at first you fight it, and are so depressed you can barely see your way out of the dark place it feels your life has become, eventually you begin to relax a little, and notice things you never noticed before, or see them as if for the first time. I have always had a lot of bird feeders for example, and enjoyed looking out through my studio windows where the feeders hang just the other side. I would glance up now and again and smile to see them so close. Now, I sit gazing at them for long periods of time, my breathing slows, and I find myself in a meditative state, and in that state slowly, ever so slowly, thoughts float into my mind like koi swimming in a pond, and I watch from my inner mind with my eyes now closed and so many thoughts arise… the next drawing, the new way to structure my book, what I want to write next, my new grandbaby’s sweet smile, my darling Molly who is a rescue animal for me. I have to take medication to sleep, and if I have to go potty in the night and haven’t woken up yet Molly will stand on my chest and gently bump my nose with hers. She’s a wee tiny girl, a chihuahua/corgi mix, and she sleeps with me and spends a good bit of the day in my lap. She is my little guardian angel.

I am moving slowly now, more slowly than ever before, and I am seeing things I never would have had I not come to this place. As in all of life there are losses and gains, they will each come, in their measure, and their time, and the only way to really cope is to look for the gains in the losses. I am beginning to see them, and it is helping me relax into this new reality. And I cradle my heart, ever so gently, and carry it wherever I go, 2 steps here, 4 steps there, then sit, then sleep, then kiss Molly, then I pick up my dip pen and bottle of ink and I draw. I am drawing a new life for myself. What a gift it is.