Tamara SellmanOuroborosExcerpted from Something On Our Minds (Volume 3)* (2015)The way of multiple sclerosis parallels the stealth of a boa constrictor—muscular, quiet, hidden, coiled around one's brain, opportunistic for the moment it can slide in and swallow your nervous system, part by part, in one long, slow digestive assault. You try to avoid stress, that favored mantra from the neurologist's office rendered useless in the face of real life, a series of nothing but stressful events, linked by rare pauses in space and time, if one is lucky to enjoy the luxury of remission. MS consumes quality of life, at least, and not quantity, so technically you don't die from it…but that doesn't make it any less sinister. * * * People die, in real life, from all sorts of other unexpected things. You received the news in a text from your brother just minutes ago. Your mother has died, her brain intact, unlike yours, her body riven by crippling arthritis. Cause of death, respiratory failure, due to pneumonia. Awake, conscious, she succumbed when the morphine exceeded her ability to breathe, and suffocated. As you surely will do here, in this feed store, despite its high hay lofts and capacity to house a circus. You tell yourself it is allergies that knot your throat, though you are only sensitive to chemicals and not the floating fibers of straw, the underlying notes of manure. The feed store is a converted barn much larger on the inside than it appears from the road. So much like the lives of the chronically ill. * * * You've come here with her before, to buy cheap pansies and rubberized garden gloves, to pick up your weekly CSA share. The feed store was then, and is still today, a place for breathing, wide open double-high rafters, light shafting through windows open to the sun and bees in reconnaissance, a place bearing the images held to your mother's from life grown up on a dairy farm. To think your mother died because she could no longer breathe—despite the longevity of her lung cancer survival at over twenty years—seems improbable. Maybe she, too, carried a secret snake coiled in her chest in hibernation. She had two aunts and two cousins with MS. Wrapping your brain and heart around this sudden news of her passing renews in you fears both old and recent. It took you years to learn to breathe underwater; only at age forty did you master it without holding your nose. As for the small confinements of your new normal after diagnosis� They never bothered her like they bother you now—the tube of the MRI still requires lorazepam, a washcloth over the eyes, a mother's swaddling of blankets around one's body by the imaging tech, as if to prepare you for your own burial. You are not sure you will ever get used to any of this. * * * On the bench next to you are packets of bulbs, a mulching fork, a bag of hummingbird nectar you will no longer be able give to her. You hold your breath, hoping the snake doesn't notice. After all, even though you once feared suffocation, your bigger fears, every day, twine around the potential loss of the eyes, the legs, to bladder, and ironically, never the lungs. It will hit you later, the way your body will absorb this stress, this loss, like poison. The way the boa constrictor waits for the chemical imbalance to unravel nerve fibers, to send inflammation as a flood of tenderizing blood to repair what cannot be fixed. And behind the rush of this pointless healing: the yawning pink maw of the snake, its only goal to feed on broken places, digesting them whole with potent enzymes in a process stretched over weeks, leaving irreparable the bare spots, the lost functions. The boa constrictor moves a third of a mile an hour, the same speed in which you process the news now and for months after, grief presenting as the stabbing, vice-like squeeze around the rib cage, called an MS hug, not at all alike the one you wish you could give your mother now.
*A review of Something On Our Minds (Volume 3) can be read in the current issue of Wordgathering |