The Lighter Side

The Lighter Side

BALANCE

Once I laughed when I heard you saying/that I’d be playing solitaire/uneasy in my easy chair.  It never entered my mind.

Back in the ’70’s a friend and I attended a landmark symposium in New York on stress.  One of the presenters was half of the research team of Holmes and Rahe whose comprehensive study of the causes of stress resulted in their Social Readjustment Scale.  They found that the inability to adequately adjust to a stressor stimulated the stress response — that chemical cascade Canadian researcher, Hans Selye, (the “father” of stress) outlined so brilliantly and the foundation of what is now known as psychoneuroimmunology.  I would joke with my students that we didn’t experience stress before the 70’s and Dr. Selye.  Our wounded warriors, for example, did not suffer from PTSD back in WWII but from “shell shock.”  Holmes & Rahe placed the death of a spouse as the most difficult circumstance to adapt to, rating it highest on their Social Readjustment Scale.  Indeed, it was a predictor of death within a year for the surviving spouse.

It would seem that my body is not adapting well to the death of the Rose Man.  I continue to have difficulty swallowing the reality of his passing as evidenced by the hard lump in my throat that returned along with another bout of a cold and persistent cough.  It’s well known that stress compromises the immune system leaving us vulnerable to viruses in our environment.  Then I suffered a rather serious burn.  Okay, so a burn is the result of external circumstances; not a grief thing, not a stress thing.  Right?  Not so, according to Shapiro.  A big burn “means a loss of your protective cover,” and asks the question, “Are you feeling particularly vulnerable or defenseless?”  Bingo!

And I haven’t even mentioned the four tires falling off my car as I drove away from the car dealer where I’d had it in for routine maintenance.  In metaphysical circles, the condition of your car equates with the condition of your body.  I suspect that wheels have to do with the moving parts: bones, joints, and muscles, i.e., mobility.  I still need to sit with that for the message and healing but, again, I suspect that it has to do with balance.  When one leg of a 55 year old partnership is removed, the surviving partner is left wobbling out of balance.  Adaptation, then, is recovering your balance.  May it be so — and soon!  Then, please send me patience.

Once you told me I was mistaken/that I’d awaken with the sun/and order orange juice for one.  It never entered my mind.  Lyrics by Lorenz Hart.  A Sinatra classic.

The Lump

Our son was married a few weeks ago in a beautiful church ceremony.  He walked in with the minister but then parted and walked around to the side of the altar where he lit a candle in memory of his dad.  It was our first family event without the Rose Man and his physical presence was sorely missed.  He was in all our hearts.  I returned home with a hard lump in my throat; not a sore throat but a lump that made it difficult to swallow.  It wasn’t hard to figure out the emotional source of this condition.  The throat chakra or energy center is “where you swallow the impact of what is happening in your life.  This is also where you express or repress your feelings.” (Shapiro)  My doctor couldn’t find anything physically wrong but when I related it to an emotional cause, sadness, she said that there was actually a medical term for it; globus syndrome.

My 1970 edition of Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary takes us right back to Freud and his “hysterical” women patients.  Taber’s defined globus hystericus as a lump in the throat in hysteria and other neuroses.  I need a new dictionary; the DSM (diagnostic statistic manual) that categorizes psychiatric illnesses got rid of the neuroses label long ago.  My throat condition fit the Google description of globus syndrome, i.e., doesn’t interfere with eating but it does make it difficult to swallow saliva and medications that are in pill form.  The condition was first identified by Hippocrates some 2,000 years ago.  In his medical notes he documented the condition as a nuisance type of illness brought on by psychological abnormality.  So I ask: is grief a psychological abnormality?

My body continues to speak my mind as I travel through this grief process.  The reality of attending our son’s wedding without the Rose Man was sad and emotionally hard to swallow.

The lump left without medical intervention.  May it be so with my knee.