Sylvia's Journal

I knew that this week was somehow going to be important and different than the previous ones. I woke up with the idea that I had nothing to write about and then finding my head overflow with stuff to explore this morning.

This is the ‘pregnant’ quality of any transition. It is clear that I am in that phase. I’d recognize it from a mile away. We have a saying in Dutch ‘walking with your soul under your arm’ (met je ziel onder je arm lopen) which is what I did pretty much all of yesterday. Having your soul under your arm, and not being able to put it anyplace is tiresome. This soul is a heavy thing and while carrying it around you cannot do anything else. Axel saw me shuffling around the house, sitting down, picking up a book, putting it away again, checking email, responding to some, and walking away again, and so forth. Restless. Breathless.

I found myself gravitating towards the section of my bookcase where the B-authors are grouped. Transition is Bill Bridges’ territory. He has written much about the topic. I am a big fan of his. I pulled out the book he wrote about his own personal transition after the death of his wife. I looked for the marked pages of which there are many. The very first underlined phrase was “There is no beginning that does not require an ending, and no ending that doesn’t make possible a new beginning.”

So what’s ending? I think this week I am ending my status as a patient. But I am not quite back to where I was on July 13th. I am not whole, or healed. The new beginning is not there yet and so I continue to remain in this no man’s land of transition, with my soul under my arm. How long this wandering will go on I cannot guess. It is an uncomfortable time, a time of suspense and not having much of a focus or direction; it’s time in which I have to admonish myself to “hang in there!’

Having written about what happens inside me, there is, in this household, always much to write about what happens outside me. Our neighbor Kurt and his grounds keeper Paul, who had made our back door ramp last July and then dismantled it again in November, showed up in the morning to do the refrigerator switch again, the old one back upstairs, the new one down to the cellar. Sita had been haranguing us about this fateful switch made sometime in the summer. But all is back to the old normal again and Sita stood in front of the old refrigerator with its freezing compartment at the bottom, beaming.

After dinner Axel, Sita and I sat with three large cookbooks on our laps trying to figure out what to cook for our very small and intimate Thanksgiving dinner. Jim is pulled back into his own family so there will be just the three of us. You don’t cook a turkey for three people. We finally agreed on pea soup, a home made bread and pumpkin pie for desert. That will give me some focus for today and force me to put that soul down for a bit.

Earlier in the day I talked with Joan who is having surgery today on her shoulder and her elbow. The doctor will be removing her elbow plate and loosen up her shoulder joint by removing some of the scar tissue, or something to that effect. She was dreading the surgery, as I would. Keep her in your thoughts. She will be back at home tonight where her son who flew in from California, is caring for her, as Morsi is still in Egypt.