Spiritual Sunday
I had a health scare Friday night and, while it turned out to be a false alarm (!!), thoughts fond and wayward went through my head as I lay in a morphine haze in Sewanee’s hospital emergency room. For reasons I’ll explain, the story of Ruth and Naomi also came to mind..
Some background first. Five years ago, when I was visiting my dying friend Rachel Kranz in a Bronx hospital, I picked up an infection that went to my heart, giving me a case of pericarditis and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart sack and heart muscle). Thinking that I had just pulled a muscle playing tennis—why else would one feel a weight on one’s chest and upper back?—I waited until the following morning so that I could visit my primary care physician.
Three hours after she referred me to the local hospital for an EKG (hers being broken), I was on board a medical helicopter because they thought I was having a full-blown heart attack. (You can read my blog post from my hospital bed here.) Fortunately, all I needed was anti-inflammatory medication. If Julia had been with me rather than down in Tennessee with my mother, she would have insisted I go to the emergency room right away.
Which in fact I did three weeks later when the infection returned. I wasn’t about to get scolded again for my casual concern for my health, and it was fortunate that I made the trip. I can report that my heart has suffered no damage and has been good ever since.
Until, I feared, Friday night, when I awoke in the middle of the night with pressure to my upper back and stabbing pains in my upper quadrant. Fearing a recurrence of pericarditis, we rushed to the emergency room, where I underwent multiple tests. The doctors are still not sure what’s up but think it may be a muscular or skeletal problem associated with my tennis and/or computer use. I need to be careful with both.
While I was in the emergency room, however, I thought of my mortality, which is why Wordsworth’s final stanza in “Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known” surfaced:
What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover’s head!
“O mercy!” to myself I cried,
“If Lucy should be dead!”
In my case, it was “if I should be dead.” I then thought of Julia, which conjured up Keats’s line where he imagines his famous nightingale singing to a widowed Ruth:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn…
That in turn got me thinking of Ruth’s relationship with her mother-in-law Naomi. Famously, the Moabite Ruth chooses to stay with the Jewish Naomi after both have been widowed, even though such a life will be uncertain. As Ruth famously replies after Naomi suggests she return to her parents’ family (Ruth 1:6 KJV) “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God…”
I thought of how Julia loves and cares for my mother and would not leave her even if I died. I am deeply grateful for that relationship, which deepens even further my strong love for my wife. And that reminded me of a Marge Piercy poem I have written about in the past.
Such fond and wayward thoughts can show up when the prospect of heart surgery looms.
The Book of Ruth and Naomi
By Marge PiercyWhen you pick up the Tanakh and read
the Book of Ruth, it is a shock
how little it resembles memory.
It’s concerned with inheritance,
lands, men’s names, how women
must wiggle and wobble to live.Yet women have kept it dear
for the beloved elder who
cherished Ruth, more friend than
daughter. Daughters leave. Ruth
brought even the baby she made
with Boaz home as a gift.Where you go, I will go too,
your people shall be my people,
I will be a Jew for you,
for what is yours I will love
as I love you, oh Naomi
my mother, my sister, my heart.Show me a woman who does not dream
a double, heart’s twin, a sister
of the mind in whose ear she can whisper,
whose hair she can braid as her life
twists its pleasure and pain and shame.
Show me a woman who does not hide
in the locket of bone that deep
eye beam of fiercely gentle love
she had once from mother, daughter,
sister; once like a warm moon
that radiance aligned the tides
of her blood into potent order.At the season of first fruits, we recall
two travelers, co-conspirators, scavengers
making do with leftovers and mill ends,
whose friendship was stronger than fear,
stronger than hunger, who walked together,
the road of shards, hands joined.