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Friends United Meeting |
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April 1998
Breath and Life
By Michael Crook
When I began to come out of the anesthesia after nine hours of surgery, I had a strange nightmare in which I was crouched in a fetal position on the floorboard in the back of a huge car, maybe a Cadillac. I heard the voices of men talking in matter-of-fact tones. In the dream they became rescuers in a gangster scene, rushing me away from danger, like the threat of gunfire from a following car.
Later, as I tried to understand the dream, I would recall that the doctors put me in a fetal position, lying on my left side, before they put me to sleep for spinal surgery. They needed me curled up like that so they could split me open from my left shoulder blade to my lower abdomen, so my neurosurgeon could repair my broken backbone.
When I was more fully awake, lying flat on my back, I began to focus on my wife's loving eyes as she leaned over the gurney. My mouth was full of tubes taped to my lips and cheeks. I could not breathe. I tried to say the words, "I...can't...breathe...." But all that came out were groans.
I fought to breathe and reached up to touch my mouth. Then another face came into view and said, "Don't try to breathe, Mr. Crook, you're on a respirator. Don't fight it. Let the machine breathe for you."
All this happened in a minute or so, but it could have been three days or even forty, to me. Losing the simple ability to breathe on my own, to take a deep, sounding breath way down past my heart, to hold my breath in fear or to heave a sigh of fatigue and resignation, this was the most dehumanizing experience of my life, and the closest to death I've ever been. Over the next two days, I would listen to the gassy rhythms of the respirator, hear the rattling and sucking sounds of the pump under my bed that drained my chest cavity through two big garden-gauge rubber hoses, listen and feel the gurgling of the tube that went down my throat, watch the clear plastic container on the wall filling up with the greenish contents of my stomach.
My journey in the wilderness had begun when I landed hard on the deck of a small boat in the ocean swells off the Florida coast. And it was going to get much harder before my doctor's promises (that I would walk again, that I would be able to lift the baby then growing in Ann's womb, that we could have more children) would be fulfilled. This was by far the most difficult trial, the most extreme suffering I had ever endured and I pray to God I will never have to suffer like that again.
But here is the paradox: I have never been closer to God than during that sojourn of agony and recovery. During the absolute worst of it (the days immediately after surgery) I experienced a physical sensation of being held up by a broad, gentle fountain of warm water, which I knew in my heart was the hand of God. The multiple layers of pain I felt, and the sheer horror I experienced when I considered the hands, drills, saws and knives that had been inside my body, caused my spirit to detach from my body. I was unselfed. I was disintegrated, meaning the physical me was, for the first time in my life, detached from my soul. If not for that real, tangible sense that God was with me, buoying me up with streams of living water, my suffering would have been intolerable, magnified by the utter hopelessness of being utterly alone.
My heart grieves for everyone in every hospital who must suffer through such an experience without faith in God. Hearing my friends and family read to me the words of Isaiah, "He has been pierced..." and "a man of sufferings" was comforting, not simply because misery loves company, but because God has experienced horrible human pain, and has empathy for those who suffer.
I used to tell friends that I doubted whether God was really interested, much less involved, with the dirty details of our lives. The lost car keys, the measles, the bounced checks and burned pot roasts of human reality seemed far too mundane, too unworthy of God's intimate attention and care. Now I believe otherwise. God wants us to be that close. God wants to be invited warmly and earnestly into our lives. God the Sustainer wants to be known in our loaves of bread and our pots of coffee. God knows how we hurt, and hurts with us. Through Christ, I have new life, here on the Easter side of my pain and darkness.
Michael Crook is editor of Green Cross magazine, and a student at
the Earlham School of Religion.
Copyright (c) 1998 Friends United Meeting
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