Last spring, in a strange twist of friends and networks, I met Marianna. Marianna moved from Michigan to Good Shepherd, one of Ashland’s rehabilitation centers, because it was the only one that could meet her needs.
Marianna was a poet, a massage therapist, and a trauma-informed yogi. In the fall of 2022, an 18-year-old t-boned Marianna’s car, severing vital nerves in her spinal cord that paralyzed her from the neck down. Marianna had some movement in her arms but none in her hands and definitely none in her legs. Her vision was affected by the accident. Her ability to keep breathing overnight while she slept was affected by the accident. Her ability to clear her throat was affected by the accident.
Everything about Marianna’s life changed in an instant, and that change brought her to me, in little Ashland, Ohio.
Marianna had no children and wasn’t married. One of her sisters and brother-in-law live about an hour from us, which was another reason why she came to Ohio. Her other sister was a friend of my friend, Tania, who knew I lived in Ohio and that I loved poetry, which is how I became connected to Marianna—would you visit this stranger and maybe have a conversation?
The first time I visited Marianna, I walked from my house to the rehab facility, walked, with my two highly functional legs, wondering the whole way what I was getting myself into. I walked and wondered what it was like to be rather sure you’d never walk again, walked and thought about how Christ-like and holy it was of me to go visit some stranger in a nursing care facility, walked and thought about how proud and inflated that little thought was, but then I thought maybe it was better now and people would forgive me for my pride now that I acknowledged how good I was feeling about myself, doing this good deed. Gag me and forgive me, please.
I walked, thinking all along how this walk took a lot longer than I thought it would. I hoped Marianna didn’t think I bailed on her since I didn’t call again. I thought about how ironic it was that I just finished reading a book on trauma, called The Body Keeps the Score, and now I was walking to visit a woman who had been through a traumatic, life altering experience.
All the time I walked I thought about my highly functional legs, my highly functional lungs, my schedule and how much time I was losing by being late and how much time I needed to get back to do the things I planned to do with my one wild and precious Monday evening. I thought about what books or questions or thoughts we’d share, whether she would think I was odd, or simple, or maybe we’d both get each other terribly wrong, or maybe we’d hit it off.
The first thing Marianna asked me to do when I walked through the door was see if her nurse was in the hallway. Marianna was on her tablet, which was propped on a stand on a TV tray over her hospital bed. She wanted the nurse to help her adjust and get more comfortable. I stood in the awkward way one stands in unfamiliar hospital-like rooms, unsure which place would be the least in-the-way. The nurse came in, and Marianna yelled, “Go Away!”
Oh boy. I thought. What did I get myself into.
The nurse happily ignored Marianna while Marianna said it twice more, “Go away! Go away!”
“See how she treats me?” the nurse said with a laugh. “She’s talking to her tablet, telling it to go to sleep.”
I laughed. Marianna and I would be just fine.
We spent our first visit together talking about how we got here—here, for Marianna, being in a rehab facility in Ashland, Ohio, a city she’d never had a reason to visit previously. And here, for me, from growing up in Northeast Ohio to college, to marriage, to family, to MFA program back in Ashland, then away to a different university for a different job, and then back to Ashland for a marketing job, then long-COVID, then freelancing, and now here, Ashland, bedside with Marianna.
As I talked, it occurred to me how much of my adult life has been defined by the occupations I’ve pursued, dragging my willing husband and unaware children along with me. But behind each of those decisions was that strong gut sense that the Holy Spirit was calling us into something new. I don’t share that kind of thing with strangers, in the same way I don’t often introduce myself as a Christian-but-not-that-kind-of-Christian, because it’s weird to talk like that, to talk about trying to keep your senses open to the movement of the Spirit, to discern and act upon opportunities to bear witness to someone else’s humanity, to step in and be the balm the healer called for. How pompous it sounds, how odd, how mystical. I get it, and that’s why I don’t say these things out loud. It sets a strange first impression. Better to laugh and be open, to ask questions, and to learn where people come from, where they are, and what they hope for, and leave the woo woo spiritual stuff for another day.
After that first visit, I set up a routine to come once a week, and every week or every other week, depending on my schedule and her schedule of PT and OT, I stopped by to spend time with Marianna. We talked about poetry and writing, our lives, TV series, politics, religion, my family, her family, how long-COVID had changed my life, how the accident had changed hers, the realities and struggles of car and health insurance, and books. I would mention that I live just two blocks away from her room, just passed the university, but that really wouldn’t mean anything to Marianna—she had never set foot in Ashland. Marianna couldn’t leave the building without equipment. There were no landmarks in her memory that could help her imagine my home “just two blocks” away.
I asked her as a yogi how she was handling the limitations of her body’s movement, and she told me she was still a yogi, practicing yoga through her breathing, her meditation, imagining her body’s freedom to flow, remembering what it was like to bend and stretch.
After our initial conversation waned, I read to her essays from Brian Doyle’s One Long River of Song, and together we would laugh and weep, me frequently stumbling through Brian’s long and full sentences, sometimes pronouncing words wrong, feeling embarrassed, but Marianna was always kind, Marianna was always gentle.
In the early days of my resignation from my full-time job, I struggled deeply with being useful. I knew I needed to recover, and the best “work” I could do was rest and let my body do whatever miraculous work of healing it had in it, but still, so much of my identity has been tangled with what I can produce. What use am I, if I am not doing?
The first instruction to the people in Eden wasn’t to be useful, no, God told them to be fruitful and multiply. Be fruitful. Bear fruit. Thousands of years later, Paul would tell the people that the defining fruit of the Spirit is love that manifests as joy, peace, patience, kindness, and a whole host of other bright berries that burst on your tongue.
The whole world is filled with fruitfulness, but we want to find its usefulness.
In the fruitful summer months, everything is bursting and multiplying. There are thousands of seedpods dangling from trees, new shoots of fiddle leaf fern fronds jutting up from their centers, hungry open mouths of baby birds poking their heads out of nests. It seems the whole earth wants us to know and to sing and to celebrate God’s abundance. Be fruitful! Multiply love. Multiply joy. Multiply peace. Multiply kindness.
There were days when Marianna was uncomfortable. Days of pain. Days of suffering. But Marianna was hopeful and resilient. Marianna sought ways to be fruitful, to create beauty, to celebrate the earth’s abundance even when so much had been taken from her.
Last fall, Marianna arranged to visit a different rehab facility in Michigan that was equipped to help her take the next steps in her recovery, toward independent living. She moved away in late October, five months after we had met. I intended to visit her in mid-April of this year on my way to and from Grand Rapids, but my own car troubles and physical limitations prevented me from stopping to visit. She texted via voice-to-text that she hoped to see me again soon.
Marianna died from an extremely aggressive neuroendocrine cancer in late May of this year, diagnosed just three weeks earlier, almost one year to the day since I had first met her and probably not too many days after our last communication.
I miss my friend.
“Be fruitful and multiply” is the mantra of the world. Wherever we stand, we stand and breathe as the lucky ones that get to exist in this world of oceans and sunsets, songbirds and octopuses, oranges and essays.
We are created to be together, and we are created to be.
Monday Meditation:
Take a deep breath and thank God for the way your lungs just expanded, the way your autonomic nervous system knew exactly what to do to filter oxygen into your bloodstream and exhale carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. Feel your pulse and thank God for how your heart keeps sending the substance of your life back and forth from your brain to your toes. Wiggle those toes—can you believe they moved? What wonder! Stretch and flex your fingers, count the freckles on your forearm, blink, clear your throat, you are fearfully and wonderfully made, beautiful in your gracefulness and clumsy stumbling, stunning in your tendons and muscle, bones and skin. Smile and imagine the joy lines that are forming underneath your eyes.
If none of these things comes easy to you, if breathing hurts, if your pulse is too quick or too slow, if your toes don’t work anymore or your fingers hang limp, if clearing your throat requires a suction machine, close your eyes and repeat once more, you are fearfully and wonderfully made, beautiful in your gracefulness and clumsy stumbling, stunning in your tendons and muscle, bones and skin. You are made from love and that love is abundant.
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