March 20, 2020

Special bows for today:

• Please offer bows for Jeff Ghazarian, a friend of Lilliana Mendez-Soto, who died today at the age  of 34 from COVID-19
• Please offer bows of well-being for Carmen Ibanez, Lidia Luna’s mother, who will be having surgery today for sciatica
• Please continue to offer bows of well-being and recovery for Rev. Les Kaye, Misha’s Zen teacher, who is had surgery two days ago for bladder cancer
• Please continue to offer bows of well-being and recovery for Brendan Haimson, Kate Haimson’s son, who had a successful surgery two days ago for a brain aneurism
• Please continue to offer bows of well-being and recovery for Lilith Armitage, Shannon Bergman’s daughter, who had knee surgery two days ago

 “The opposite of death is love.  Only love can turn mere life into a miracle and draw precious meaning from suffering and fear.” Nando Parrado

I remember exactly where I was when I first read these words in Parrado’s book, Miracle in the Andes.  I had just left New Zealand and was in Fiji for the last two days of a long holiday that ended in a disaster.  I had been stung by a bee on South Island, two hours from the closest hospital with nothing but my Epipen between me and suffocation—I have no allergies except a fatal one to bees. 

We had just driven through one of those tiny towns with only a pub and a small store when a bee flew through a crack in the window and stung my hand.  My husband turned the car around and raced back to the little town and the pub—the only thing open between Christmas and New Year’s Day—to ask for help. Within minutes the town went into action, calling the local nurse practitioner and the fire department to the rescue while my husband jabbed my thigh with the Epipen—I was so scared that I never noticed the pain of that enormous needle.

The next thing I knew there was a giant of a woman in the neon yellow of a fireman’s overalls with tattoos all over her arms and shoulders, leaning into the back seat to say in thick New Zealand English, “How’r youuu dooin’?” When I replied that I was not great, she replied, “Doon’t yuu woorey…weee’re goin’ ta taik caare of yuu.” I confess that I was not feeling reassured in that moment, but it all came true just as she said.  The clinic was opened, the nurse practitioner arrived to start an IV, and then I was whisked away for a two-hour ambulance ride back the way we had just come…by which time I was pronounced fine, except for an enormous amount of epinephrine in my body. 

The next week was a physical roller coaster—my body felt jittery all the time, I couldn’t sleep, food made me nauseous—and our carefully laid vacation plans had to be completely rethought.  We had planned to stay in Fiji on the way home just to make the final flight a little shorter--and that is how I ended up lolling in a small outdoor swimming pool (at a resort that wasn’t even my own) and sitting in the shade of its portico with warm breezes wafting through while reading Parrado’s book.  It was one of the most ironic reads of my life: relaxing in paradise, while in the book Parrado and his companions were suffering from freezing weather, starvation, and no rescue in sight after a plane crash in a remote area of the Andes.  Only his unquenchable love for his father kept him going—the thought of his father’s suffering from believing him dead drove him past the limits of human endurance until he miraculously found his way home.  At the end of the book he wrote, “The opposite of death is love.  Only love can turn mere life into a miracle and draw precious meaning from suffering and fear.” I remember reading those two lines over and over thinking: usually we think the opposite of death is life.  But what is life without love? 

While my own misadventure was not horrific or physically terrifying like Parrado’s experience, the possibility of death was very real the day of the bee-sting. But through the kindness of strangers, and love that didn't need to be personal to be real, my own suffering and fear showed me the truth of Parrado’s words.  I will never forget the tattooed fireperson in New Zealand--she didn’t know me at all, but her first words were ones of love:  we’re going to take care of you. Over the next few months, many of us are going to be connected to deaths from this virus—either personally or collectively—so it is crucial to remember that it is love that makes the difference, love that makes meaning out of our suffering and fear…and we need to keep saying to each other, “I’m going to take care of you.”