🦸‍♀️ TREE 425: Dance Me to the End 2

Yesterday, today and Friday we are extremely fortunate to be enjoying words and song choices from writer and maverick writing teacher Alison Acheson. I’m afraid I did the entirely unrelated drawing.

Grow slowly
Jeff

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These excerpts are from my memoir, Dance Me to the End: Ten Months and Ten Days With ALS, a story of my time caregiving. It’s recently been re-released as an audio book, narrated by a voice artist with the perfect tone and pacing, Ellen Dubin. I am so grateful for her part in this story. We do learn from the most exacting times in our lives and, in spite of all, it is a gift to be a student. Mostly, I learned big things about the small. (Lightly edited and reprinted with permission from Touchwood Editions, 2019) —AA

One: Sheets and Heroes.

My oldest son spent many young hours as Batman. I made him a cardboard mask of cereal box, coated with thick black wax crayon. It’s in the scrapbook now, cereal box card soft as flannel. A friend made him a cape with scalloped edge, and I have photos and a strong mental image of him standing, red curls exploding around the mask, arms crossed solidly over his chest as preschoolers do, with grasped elbows, and with his bottom lip out slightly – enough to let you know not to give him trouble.

We like to be heroes.

Days in, after my spouse’s diagnosis, I made a note in my journal of laundered bed sheets, and how it feels at the end of the day to slip into them—so much better. As if that would put a cape and mask on me.

This is what can happen, with diagnosis: I heard the doctor speak, I went into some space of shock. Numbness set in. Like being inside a hamster ball, I could see out, others could see in. But nothing could really touch me. I didn’t eat much the first day, beyond the childhood comfort of tomato soup and a nibble of grilled cheese sandwich. But deep inside me a wee character had pulled on a cape, and her own little Batwoman mask, and she began to grow.

She thought that things like clean sheets made a difference.

And she wasn’t wrong. Sheets can even be capes.

Two.

A bicycle built for tools.

Three.

The song, obviously, has to be Bowie’s “Heroes”.