My Lesson In Writing

I was recently reading an article about how we as humans seem to take all of the good things in our lives for granted, and sadly we don’t really appreciate their value until they are gone. And in many cases once lost they never return, and we live with the remorse of our lack of understanding and gratitude. That made me think of a time not quite a decade ago when I got very sick. Obviously, my health should have been what I was afraid of losing, but at the time I didn’t really understand how sick I had become.

I have a series of oddly disjointed memories from the month plus that I was sick, but I know that there is about a week that I completely lost from my memory. Up until this illness, I had been relatively healthy and fairly active, so lying in bed or on the couch for weeks caused some of the worst leg cramps and atrophy that I had ever experienced. Many of my memories of those weeks were during the early morning hours when I would get up and pace around the house in the dark, trying to relieve the cramping in my legs.

Even significant events that occurred during this time were just grey blurs for many years. One in particular that stands out is that I met my future son-in-law for the first time, but did not realize it for several years. Finally one day, something clicked in my brain, and I had this fuzzy image of him visiting while I was sick. But at no point during those hazy weeks did I ever worry or experience any fear that I would not recover.

It was not until I had started to regain some strength and mental clarity that I made the discovery that would scare me deeply. I was beginning to have an appetite and my husband offered to go to the store. He was eager to get anything that I said sounded good to eat and asked me to make a list for him. I walked into my office and got a pencil and a legal pad but suddenly realized that I was unable to write. I could hold the pencil and drag it across the paper, but the scribbles looked nothing like letters. I sat and stared at what looked like the scribbles of a small child and began to cry. How could life go on, if I couldn’t write? All of the sudden something that I great pleasure in doing was now difficult and even scary. 

This was something that came as naturally to me as breathing, and if this had slipped away from me then what other parts of me had disappeared? As it turned out, there were some memories that had faded and all but disappeared, but writing was the only physical skill that had seemed to desert me during my illness. Over the next few weeks, I sat and practiced writing letters and numbers. I was ecstatic to learn that some of the muscle memory was still remained, hidden somewhere deep inside my body. The loss was only short term, but it made me understand just how much writing meant to me, and how much I should have always appreciated and treasured the ability.

As a result of that illness, I try to remember that writing is a privilege and a gift that I need to use wisely and be thankful for each day.