On day No. 12 in the hospital, as my fractured bones heal I realize I’ve been given an additional break —a pause.

When I met a Seattle sidewalk up-close and personal a week-and-a-half ago, it interrupted my schedule: things to do, people to see, places to go. Since then I’ve been given long, seemingly empty hours of “doing” nothing. My arena of activity is limited to a bedside table (15 by 34 inches — I measured it using tape from my knitting bag). The table is piled with notebooks, hospital menu, a few papers relative to injury and recovery, water jug, computer, phone, maybe a snack or two. 

If something I think I want or need is beyond my reach, it’s as unavailable as breathable air on the moon. Like that pillow, just four feet away, that would feel good under my fractured elbow just now. I’m capable of wriggling out of bed, shuffling the four feet (abetted by the hip-to-ankle brace stabilizing my fractured knee), grabbing the pillow, and shuffling back to bed.

BUT I’ve been strictly ordered not to get out of bed or even off the toilet without an “assist.” If I want to move about, someone else has to be present.

Happy Dependence Day!

We love to celebrate Independence and worship at the altar of Freedom (an altar banked with fireworks). When do we celebrate the greater gift of DE-pendence? 

Such a suggestion sounds almost unAmerican. We pride ourselves as being (as my late husband liked to observe) “independent as hogs on ice.” We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. At my age especially, independence is the NO. 1 goal —even though it’s a mirage.

We choose to ignore how much we depend on others. We can’t recognize that because too often the fellow human beings we depend upon are hidden within systems — health care system, transportation system, communications system. You can name many more. Just think about your daily activities and the systems that enable them and the people within those systems who enable you.

The other night (at the risk of being overly specific) my urinary catheter malfunctioned. What a soggy, humiliating situation! Barely awake, I mumbled apologies to the aide as she efficiently got me back on dry land. English for her, like many hospital personnel, is a second language. With her beautifully lilting accent, she replied, “That’s why I’m here on the overnight shift. To help you!”

After she left, I wondered if I’d just experienced a mystical divine presence. She’d seemed uniquely certain of who she was and why she was. It was powerful — as if destiny had hurtled us both through time and space so our paths would cross in exactly that moment, this place.

The African Bantu language gives us the word ubuntu, inadequately translated as “I am because you are.” I understand that to mean, “I would have no reason to exist except that you exist.” I’m guessing our culture understands that in a romantic sense, like the song lyrics: “I was meant for you; you were meant for me.” That’s a start, but ubuntu is universal. I suspect that word or a similar one is not in our vocabulary because it’s a foreign concept. In our individualistic world, co-dependency is considered a mental illness. 

Yet the mutuality of ubuntu is at the root of our humanity, our raison d’être. Thus showing up at 2:30 a.m. to change an old lady’s sopping bed linen becomes not just a job, but a reason for being. 

Happy Dependence Day — today, tomorrow, and every day of our lives!