Using Memory To Dissolve A Clot

After suffering a brain clot, I memorized a slightly paraphrased poem of Kate Bowler. The prayer spoke to the helplessness and confusion I felt. Let me share it with you, and then you can see if there might be something in it for you, especially during these current troubling days.

Blessed are we who allow our hearts to break,

For it will take some time for the long and slow dissolve,

For the brittle unreality to release its grip on me,

Until we fully embody the healing that was, is, and shall be.

The line that drew me in was: ‘for it will take some time for the long and slow dissolve.’ I applied this metaphorically to my clot. (The neurologist told me in situations like mine, the brain clot rarely, if ever, goes away.) This was the hook that got me to memorize the whole blessing prayer. It gave voice to a hope no one else would. I memorized the rest of the poem, too. I suppose I thought it might be a good exercise to rehab my clot-addled brain.

As it turns out, all the lines would prove to be filled with prophetic magic. Maybe in another post, I can talk about the entirety of that. But it was the first line of this prayer that was the most difficult for me to embrace. It is the one I want to write about because I feel the story of ‘the first line’ has relevance to the trauma our nation is experiencing.

Initially, I felt the opening line of the poem did not apply to me and might be patently wrong. I had been broken; I hadn’t allowed anything. Nor did I feel blessed. Fred, as I called the thrombus in my brain, was an uninvited guest. He had trespassed into my house, trashed the rooms, and torn down all the dreamy paintings of a vigorous retirement. And then he had boldly kept up permanent residence in my living room.

But I memorized the entire prayer. To leave out the first line didn’t feel right. And I repeated the entirety of it several times a day for the first few months of my convalescence. During this period, I came up with all sorts of reasons that explained how my clot was a freak accident, a false flag, maybe even a radiographic artifact that would disappear on a repeat scan. The thrombus did not seem to affect any of my vital functions, such as my speech or the memory of where I keep the dark chocolate, so it couldn’t be that bad. I would wait for Fred to leave, and then I could conveniently forget he had ever come.

I kept telling myself my head wasn’t hurting, my balance wasn’t off, and the 3 am nausea was probably from something I ate. Forgetting what items to pick up at the store wasn’t that big of a deal. Yes, I was late to file taxes, but who needs to remember to pay taxes? I didn’t really need blood-thinning medications, but I would take them for now. And I for sure didn’t need any more medical tests; that would only result in discovering more shit to worry about.

I was fine. My clot came because I had been dehydrated, used too much zinc, and walked with my head down. All things I could correct. I was voted MVP of the game of denial. In my acceptance speech, I mentioned how one needs to use anger to silence those pesky truths.

But Fred kept a steady drum beat. He was unchanged on scans. My sleep stayed scattered. My balance stayed off. (I tried, unsuccessfully, to learn to moonwalk to prove I was okay. To envision this, just imagine someone walking backwards and having a seizure.) Stomach pains consistently woke me up in the middle of the night. My thinking stayed fuzzy. I got irritable, and I used that anger to buttress the wall of my denial. With my teammates of repression, suppression, and distortion, I kept redirecting the lens of my reality.

Oddly, I also kept reciting the prayer, all of it. It gave me comfort. It hit a cord that something deep in me resonated with it. I felt better when I said it. Sometimes a blessing is something you do and have no idea why.

Eventually, the prayer, in conjunction with my body’s refusal to whitewash things, won me over. I surrendered and embraced the feelings of fragility, vulnerability, loss, and fear I had been avoiding. I allowed these feelings in, feelings that I knew were going to break me. It was a gradual thing, I suspect, but my emotional memory makes it feel like a switch. My body might not have had the choice, but my heart did, and it had chosen. There is an odd beauty in how a heart can take a punch and not feel it for months.

The memorized poem had worked magic in me. The words were bees. They stung me and made honey in me. The phrases seeped into me and calmed the guard dogs of my denial. Because of the strength they gave, I could accept that my expiration date on Death’s calendar had gotten moved up. I could accept I was going to die one day, accept that I was weak, accept that I was not a strong man.

I took my hands off Truth’s throat and let her speak. Insights percolated up in me. I admitted my aching stomach meant I wasn’t digesting something. My poor balance was from the clot, and also meant my emotions were off kilter. And my headache was, in part, an unacknowledged fear banging around in my skull. The clot was a loaded gun I had played roulette with. The chamber that would kill me had been empty, but there were five other chances. I needed to be cautious.

I experienced this new fuller reality as a visceral fact, an honest wordless conviction. My mind and body felt in sync for the first time in a long while. With this embracing of the ways things actually were, rather than how I wanted them to be, healing came in ways it hadn’t.

Over time, my memory improved, my balance normalized (still can’t moonwalk though), and my stomach quit hurting as much. Would this healing have happened if I hadn’t allowed my heart to break? Possibly. Maybe even probably. One miracle of life is how healing finds a way. But allowing my heart to break was a blessing that helped provide the fullest healing possible.

Fast forward to today. Dealing with Fred, it turns out, was practice for me in digesting what is happening in America. People of color are openly mistreated. Women fight for basic rights, are abused, and gaslit. The ultra-wealthy prey on our children and have spun chaos and crazy narratives to cover their sins. What I see on TV as murder, others interpret entirely differently. When the country I love and the ideals I thought it represented are revealed as calculated ploys rooted in greed, the dissonance created in me leaves me slack-jawed and numb.

I know I need to break. I need to allow in feelings that will crush me. And I suspect there is much worse coming, and I will need to break in ways I can’t imagine. The temptation to deny or get stuck in my anger is strong. But I know, the best (only?) path to maintaining my sanity, to wisdom, to wholeness is allowing myself to break.

So, I have gone back to reciting the poem. Once before, I was amazed at its prescient wisdom of my need; perhaps it will work its magic again. The words were a gift from the future, when I was in a dark place. I memorized and repeated them before understanding how powerful they could be. I was guided and changed to get beyond the anger and denial, without my knowing how. Is it too much to ask this witchcraft to work again? I hope not.

But these days, transcendence is hard to come by. In my psychiatric mind, I know that the abuser is losing their soul, and that the wealthy are trapped in unhappy prison-mazes. They are slaves. If there is a heaven, I know that if you can’t find it here, you won’t find it after you die. But those thoughts are still fired with bitterness and moral outrage.

I want to be the kind of person who wishes that these hostaged people find freedom and love. I want to believe that the joy and hope of inclusivity and decency will reach them. And I do, a little, maybe, sort of?

Meanwhile, I will keep reciting the blessing prayer and watch to see what percolates up.