Pool of Tears - Part three

Friends had kindly offered their living room as a bedroom for the duration of my Sydney stay.  All my waking hours were redolent with the whirring and machinations of life support and its indicators.  I ate reflexively; all social intercourse was cursory and frustrating.  Sleep provided no release.  I cried inside a lot. I thought of Alice:

          ‘I wish I hadn’t cried so much’, said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out.  ‘I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears!  That will be a queer thing, to be sure!  However, everything is queer today.’ *

I often woke in the early hours to ring the ICU for updates.  My spiritual ‘toolbox’ was quickly exhausted.  During these dreadful nights, I pleaded with intangible entities, deities and saints of the Hindu and Buddhist pantheons, and other curative forces imagined and believed in by countless religious followers.  Unashamedly, I prayed to our home-grown Catholic saint and one of Carolie’s heroes, the educator Mother Mary Mackillop, to intervene in her survival. 

I had spurned organized religion most of my life, believing it to be more about power and control than spiritual practice, but this was different.  My intuitive brain yearned for spiritual succour.  Some comfort came from chanting and praying in the early hours.  Images of despair and anguish assailed me.  In his insightful “The Pains of Sleep” Coleridge # writes,  

                    But yester-night I prayed aloud

                        In anguish and in agony,

                        Up-starting from the fiendish crowd

                        Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:

                        A lurid light, a trampling throng,

                        Sense of intolerable wrong,

                        And whom I scorned, those only strong!

                        Thirst of revenge, the powerless will

                        Still baffled, and yet burning still!

                        Desire with loathing strangely mixed

                        On wild or hateful objects fixed.

                        Fantastic passions! Maddening brawl!

                        And shame and terror over all!

                        Deeds to be hid which were not hid,

                        Which all confused I could not know

                        Whether I suffered, or I did:

                        For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe,

                        My own or others still the same

                        Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.

My nights during the early days were frequently thus, without the poetic voice.  

I railed against a teaching service that required its senior teachers to work extraordinary hours to manage ridiculous workloads.  I railed against workplaces that tolerate bullying and undermining of dedicated souls.  I railed against an apparent obsession with comparative testing and reporting regimes for primary schools, rather than just focussing on realizing the full potential of each child.   

Burst aneurysms have other causes but logic was not shaping my nightly cogitations.  Again, caught between the need for rational explanations and an intuitive acceptance of pain and tragedy as merely way stations to a deeper understanding, I struggled to separate the real from the illusory.

I raged at my weaknesses, failings and sometime depressive responses to life’s pressures and difficulties.  Adrenalin and stress amplified the self-examination to screaming point; it was exhausting yet strangely cathartic.  I felt fragile, vulnerable, but the nightly angst seemed to help steel me against daily terrors.  I had not a clue what was happening; the psychological underpinnings were a mystery.  It was uncharted territory. 

In retrospect, I was struggling with ego. I needed to get beyond my hurt if I was to be a useful partner in the healing process.  I needed to get beyond ego to quell fear and uncertainty.  It was not about personal fear and loss; it was not an intellectual exercise in determining cause and effect; it was about finding the humility to sublimate the sense of ‘self’ that ruled my daily meanderings; it was about the essential unity of life.  

Plotinus, the founder of Neo-Platonism, illuminates the idea that “life begins and ends in a mysterious unity which surpasses our normal understanding”:

         

What, then, is it? The power which generates all existence, without which the sum of things would not exist, nor would intellect be the first and universal life.  What transcends life is the cause of life; for what activity of life which is the sum of things is not primal, but itself pours forth as if from a spring…It is a wonder how life in its multiplicity would not have existed unless before multiplicity there had been a simple principle.  The source is not fragmented into the universe; for its fragmentation would destroy the whole, which could no longer come to be if there did not remain by itself, distinct from it, its source.  Universally, therefore, things go back to a Unity.+

Of course I was not grappling with such weighty ideas at the time but, with hindsight, my nightly quest for answers evolved over the days, enabling me to find more humility and be less concerned with personal ego.  I could not have intellectualized any of this at the time.   

Something helped me get to the ICU each day; clinging to hope as a life raft in a pool of tears.

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*              Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Folio Society, London, 1961, p. 16

#              Coleridge Selected Poems, Oxford University Press, 1965, pp 181-2

+              Tacey, op. cit., pp 84-85