Where I am coming from

And some things I'd like you to know about me. The longer version.

I am a woman in her eighth decade on Earth who has had a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis since her mid-40s. I am a writer, a retired journalist and editor. I also play the violin, make quilts, and, until recently, cooked everything from scratch and made all our bread using sourdough starter a friend gave me in 2012, the year the end of the Mayan calendar failed to break the rhythm of the Universe.

In early 2020, I got the wake-up call, along with the rest of the world. Covid came, and our lives took a sharp turn. For some it was a full stop. For so many others, the call was clear: Slow. Down. Now.

In the pre-Covid days my husband, Robert Jaffe, and I had incredible food! Unbelievable friends! A wonderful house! Great retirement leisure!

We had so many ways to grow: music, reading, writing, travel, cooking, creating. For Robert, foreign language study, listening to music, rediscovering his Russian and Yiddish roots. For me, creativity with fabric, yarn, writing, food, travel and playing music. For both of us, strong and enduring friendships, many spanning decades.

We had blessings heaped upon blessings.

Everything was fresh and new. Even the sourdough bread was made by hand.

Earth is turned and a new garden is readied

All this time, the multiple sclerosis was messing with my body, continuing the slow decline common with the variety of the disease I have, which is progressive.

As I neared my 70th birthday in 2020, the MS got suddenly worse. A stint in the hospital while I worked through visual hallucinations (fun but scary, caused by medication for MS fatigue that I had been taking for decades) was followed by rehab and then assisted living.

Suddenly, so much of my old life of gratitude was unattainable; I couldn’t live in that beautiful sunlight-suffused house with the golden oak floors. I couldn’t cook so joyfully with the seasons’ bounty. Fabric, books and my violin are with me now, and there is always writing. I am home while not at home. Robert is still living in our old house, debating when and whether to join me. I am doing what I can with what I have.

Gratitude and love

And I am still grateful. Deeply, endlessly grateful for every moment as the Universe whispers to me in its only language, which is love.

So even before the virus scare changed everything, I had to slow down, and fast. I thought multiple sclerosis had already moved me into the slow lane, but now I’ve progressed to the shoulder. Real life is zipping by, and I am potting along.

But guess what? Now that I am going slow, I can see, there along the shoulder of life, amid the scree and the scrabble, the tiny flowers of resilience, poking through the cracks in the asphalt.

Resilience comes in many forms

Growing

It’s like this: the slower I go, the more I stretch. My life stretches out before and behind me. Shadows lengthen, but they deepen, too.

Life is so remarkable, yet many of us, myself included, spend so much energy denying that. We think every little burr can be smoothed down by the emery of eternal busyness and social media schmoozing.

We commute instead of communicating. We shop instead of sharing. We spend hours online while ignoring our neighbors who live just a few steps away.

Why would we even want to meet the neighbors? Other than proximity, what can we have in common? Covid has shown us that we are closer than we think.

Everyone has a story. It’s time to trade in the cyberfriends for the folks next door.

Or keep both.

Connecting

Everything has a purpose. The Universe led me one way—I spent years in quiet and meditation—and now is leading me back to a place where I can share my insights. The voice that speaks love welcomes me. Is there is any other way I can describe that moving force, the impulse that moves the world, that is in every electron, every cell, every corpuscle? It speaks to us even when we don’t listen.

And its only language is love.

The passing of love through the dark matter of the Universe, the language of love connected to every electron in every living being, every rock, every plant, every planet: That’s the love I want to write about. What brings us together, what binds us even when we think we have broken all bonds.

In an era of pandemic, civil unrest and climate change, we can’t know what the coming reality will be, but I want to help tease out the possibilities. I think the things that matter to me matter to others. We are all connected, constrained, and cut free by the boundlessness of the Universe.

Once, I sewed dozens of face masks and gave them all away.

What I want

I want to understand the language of the Universe, the language of love and forgiveness—and share that understanding.

We, tiny motes in the Universe, tiny beings with free will: what can we do? Faced with conflicts and collapse and conflicting theories and beliefs, there is one thing, a linchpin: Forgive.

Forgiving sounds easy, yet it takes hard work. But if we let ourselves live it, if we surrender to it, it leads inexorably to faith.  Faith in the Universe, in God, in whatever you conceive of or want to call Providence, the Power that connects us.

Faith can call us to forgiveness, too. In fact, the first faith is that I can forgive. The second is that I can write about it.

—Fran Gardner, September 5, 2022