Waiting for the Sun

It occurs to me this morning that I have spent a great many nights sitting awake with my heart pounding, waiting for some sign that the sky is lightening, that dawn is coming.  Which is strange, because I'm not afraid of the night.  I find it quite lovely and peaceful.  The vast spread of glittering constellations,  the ghostly arc of the moon.  The call of whippoorwills and the great horned owl that lives in my yard, the wild shrieking of a passing coyote pack.  These are the things I love about the nocturnal hours.

Things I don't love:

Bears.  Last summer I was alone at my family's mountain cabin, getting ready to take the dogs for their 10pm walk, when a snuffling sound outside alerted me to the presence of two half-grown black bears in the yard, scarfing down seeds I'd stupidly left out for the chipmunks.  I scared them as badly as they scared me, and they bolted.  Probably to sleep somewhere nice and cozy.  I however, stayed awake all night, jumping at every noise and shining flashlights out into the woods, positive they were going to send their mama bear to get me.  (They did not.)

Door-to-door salesmen.  You hear all kinds of horror stories about criminals pretending to be salesmen in order to gain access to your house.  So when I encounter one who's a bit too chatty - oh, do you live alone here, ma'am? - I immediately assume they are canvasing the neighborhood and will return under cover of darkness with crowbars, locksmith kits, and bad intentions.  Which means... I stay up all night, all week, with lights blazing and special booby traps set up in front of the front door to alert me in case I actually do fall asleep.

Also, freezing weather.  I never feared this until this winter.  But then, for the last seven years I've lived in a Manhattan apartment building where the big winter problem was that they cranked the heat up to eighty.  Here in the country?  Pipes freeze.  Even, apparently, if you leave the hot and cold water dripping overnight.  Hence you wake up at three in the morning to use the bathroom and discover that your upstairs cold water pipe has frozen.  Hence you spend the next several hours wide awake, terrified your pipe (which is buried somewhere in the wall) is going to burst, your landlord is going to make your pay for it, and oh, yeah, he's going to kick you out while you're supposed to be watching the place for your mother who's spending six months in rehab after having part of her leg amputated.

Hence I am awake this morning, exhausted, and still trying to warm my house up enough to thaw this goddamned pipe.  Did I mention the electric heat chose last night to stop working?  And we are expecting a fresh snowstorm to commence in three... two... one...

And, hence, I was awake once again to watch as the night lightened to gray, and color crept slowly back into the world.  Dawn is, possibly, the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

If it's common knowledge that that darkest hour comes right before the dawn... I will be here.  Waiting up for it.

Brittle

I cannot stop thinking about starfish.  Starfish, sea stars, brittle stars.  Many species have the ability to regrow lost limbs.  Some can even regenerate all new limbs and the central disk of their bodies - all from a single lost arm.

Humans cannot do this.  When injury or illness causes us to lose a body part, it's simply gone.  It can be replaced with a prosthetic, and certainly prosthetics have come a very long way.  But they'll never really be you.

Starfish and brittle stars can chose to shed their limbs.  Special connective tissues soften when the star is threatened, allowing it to lose its limb but keep its life.

If you had to make this choice, could you do it?

I like to think that I could.  I like to think that if I were ever bitten by a zombie, I'd waste no time in taking a hatchet to my own limb.  But I don't know.

Right now my mother is lying in a hospital bed facing a surgery that will amputate her right leg twelve centimeters below the knee.  It is, in her case, a true choice of life or death.  Diabetic complications have disfigured her ankle to the point where it will no longer bear her weight.  The limb is infected.  If it isn't removed, it will result in sepsis and death.

It took thirty-six hours to convince her to agree to the operation.  Thirty-six hours during which she asked, Why bother?  What kind of life can I have with one leg?  Thirty-six hours during which I stared at her in a kind of angry helplessness, and replied, You can have A LIFE.  In which you are not dead.  In which there is a chance, always a chance, of things getting better.

With the persuasion of one insistent doctor for whom I feel immense gratitude, my mother has finally agreed to the surgery.  She has finally allowed herself to feel a sliver of hope that after this operation, she will regain her health, and with the use of a prosthetic, may be more active than she had been able to be in over a year.

I'm incredibly relieved.  I'm deeply shaken.  I'm entirely terrified.

It's not me facing an operation or life without my leg.  But for a while I thought I was facing life without my mother.  My mother, who irritates me and makes me crazy, who succumbs to her depression more than she battles it, who gets into screaming matches with me over stupid, pointless things and then makes me feel terrible over when she starts crying.  My mother who taught me to swim, to makes art out of pine cones and glitter, to love horror movies, and to be a hopeless romantic.

I don't want to live without my mother.  I also don't want to live without my own leg.  I don't know now, if the choice were mine, what I would decide.  I am not a brittle star, just brittle.  And that scares the shit out of me.