Words, Miracles, Life Expectancy, (and other things)

It seems like everyone else is “coming out” these days, so I might as well, too. I always struggle with how much to share of my personal life, especially when it comes to my health.

I have often felt very alone in my health challenges. It’s embarrassing because people often don’t understand, especially if it’s an invisible illness like migraines or fatigue. In subtle and not so subtle ways, our culture teaches that illness is a personal deficiency; if we do all the right things, it’s in our power, whether it’s conventional, non-conventional medicine, or a combination.

The other part that’s hard is that everyone wants to offer their words of wisdom and a miracle cure.

You try, you hope, you put all your faith in it, but still your expectations of how things (and life) should work out…they mostly just don’t.

Before the pandemic, I had chronic fatigue for almost 20 years.

Just when I thought I was done with it, I got Covid—twice now!

That didn’t help my expectations for my health (and life) to change for the better.

Then, in order to finish with my last year of seminary (I expect to be ordained this coming January!), I pushed hard and crammed a lot in.

After I finally handed in my final coursework and completed the last two intensive weeks of study in early July, I crashed.

If you have experience being bedridden fairly often or for long periods of time, you understand. You don’t want to tell people yet again that you are too fatigued, have a migraine, whatever…you come up with some other excuse, maybe.

Even more than that, you just want to get on with life in the “usual” way—get on with all your accomplishments (like becoming a rabbi), but you don’t know when that will be.

Often the symptoms are inconsistent, so you start wondering if it could be something else—maybe worse. Like with the pandemic, there are lots of unanswered questions and expectations for Covid’s trajectory, and for how your life “should” be after you recover.

If we didn’t have a miracle cure for Covid, then the vaccine was supposed to be a miracle prevention.

I heard two fascinating episodes on Insights at the Edge, a podcast from Sounds True.

One is The Life-Changing Science of Spontaneous Healing. The answer here is, it’s actually not spontaneous, though is very exciting.

The other episode is called, Is There a Holy Grail of Healing? The answer is—no. There are no miracles. Though, again, that doesn’t mean there’s no hope. It just means it’s more complicated.

And since it’s more complicated, you still end up in bed.

If you’ve spent long periods of time in bed, you know that your mind goes in all different directions.

This time for me, I was doing a lot of “life review.” Of course, that was after I stopped catastrophizing, and finally sunk into acceptance of where I was.

Then, something wonderful happened.

My mind started going back over my life. I started to think of how incredibly lucky I’ve been, and what a truly amazing life I’ve had so far. The thought came that, if I were to die tomorrow (or today), I would be satisfied. I cried in gratitude.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t want to die. I want to be healthy and strong when my daughter gets married in September, for instance, and in my darker moments, I begin to worry that I won’t be. And there are so many other things I still want to do and experience.

But the place I ended up was, I have had so much love in my life, and that’s really all that matters. My dreams of what else I want to do don’t matter at all, really. All the accomplishments…the competition…the envy…none of it matters. It’s just our stupid, petty, human stuff.

Only the love matters.

I have to keep that in mind because I don’t know when I will die. But Moses does—sort of. He knows that he will not enter the Promised Land. God has told him so.

In the parsha this week, the first readings of Deuteronomy/Devarim, which translates properly as “things” or “words,” Moses does a life review. He knows that he will go up on a mountain and die, just like his brother Aaron did, directed by God.

Most of the parsha is in Moses’ voice, as he talks to the Israelites and reviews their journey, step by step, from slavery into and through the desert over the past almost-forty years.

He reminds them how bad they’ve been, not having faith in God’s miracles. God has shown them so many miracles, yet they still have so little faith.

Moses speaks in frustration; the current generation will not enter the Promised Land because of this. God is angry with this stiff-necked people.

But in the same breath, Moses says, “You know what? Me, too. I won’t enter the Promised Land, either, because God was angry at me, too.” Moses reminds them of one of the miracles God performed for the people, when Moses himself showed a lack of faith; the people were thirsty, and God told him to speak to a rock, and water would come forth. Instead, Moses hit the rock.

“So, yeah. Me, too,” Moses says.

Now that this current living generation has experienced a pandemic, more people understand what I’m going through, though now it’s transformed to “Long Covid.”

As much as I don’t draw pleasure from other people’s suffering, it’s nice to be understood better. It’s nice to hear, “Me, too.” People no longer offer me miracle cures. They just commiserate. With love and affection.

The challenge for me, like Moses, I suppose, and like everyone else out there, is to retain that feeling of, “All that matters is love, and I’m so lucky to have it in my life. All the rest is bonus.”

I want to keep the flow of love front and center in my awareness.

I want to keep reminding myself that no miracle is greater than the type of conversations that keep love flowing.

Because for all our thirst, the thing that quenches it most is love.