GRACE

GRACE

I have known J, my cousin, for the past sixty two years and I have never known her to complain about anything - anything. I have rarely seen her in bad humor and God knows she has had ample reason to be in bad humor. When we were little kids, well that was the last time I saw her run. I think that was when she was about ten years old and I was perhaps four? and she was running and jumping like a normal kid. Do I really remember that or am I just remembering the old films that my father took that I recall seeing? No matter, those are my memories and she was smiling and from the stories that we talk about on summer evenings at her home at Montauk she is always impish about how she would misbehave with grandma, playing on her sympathies and getting her to play favorites.

Who knows whether that worked but she was always scheming and living and laughing and getting along; living and not thinking about what she couldn't do but what she could do and perhaps what she could also get away with. That was the kind of impish attitude that she had which served her well during her youth into adulthood.

Always an independent spirit, she insisted on living in her own apartment in Manhattan, she had a career as a laboratory technician; this in a person who has a degenerative condition that gradually caused her to lose the fine motor function of her hands fingers and ultimately the upper and lower extremities. But she maintained a position in the clinical laboratory at Mount Sinai Hospital well into her thirties until her abilities failed, and she needed to seek a new outlet for her prodigious curiosity and talent. And now when the nineteen eighties approached and the era of disability awareness was neigh, she jumped on that horse with all of the athleticism of a pro.

J never wavered and went on to take up career counseling at Long Island University where she became tenured. When I first heard of this I thought, 'well those who can do and those who can't counsel'. (What a presumptuous idiot I was!) She was so much ahead of the game! And all during this political ferment she met and married D, that court jester of a man who has brought the kind of light to her life and mine that is measured in decades of friendship.

During the years that passed, J's condition has deteriorated but she has adapted, with automated wheelchairs, special home help, and special home appliances. Her life has been more difficult than my life but she knows how to live hers with more grace than I ever learned how to live mine.

And D has not been free of the tsuris that has plagued his family . Back in the eighties while D and I were walking in a field with a slight incline, I noticed the difficulty he had in getting up the hill and that began his long struggle and decline with a lower extremity neuromuscular weakness of mysterious origin. It's still pretty much an unknown and there certainly is no treatment, so that in addition to his burden of having to care for J, with her infirmities, he has his own to contend with and yet I have never seen him complain with anything less than good humor. A shrug and a sigh and some resignation perhaps. Not to say there haven't been moments of sheer terror in his life from the unknown aspects of this disease but the acceptance of life that both he and J have undergone is truly remarkable and typically found in people who are much more spiritual than they. And yet here they are!

Some relatives are relatives, I have friends in J and D for the past thirty five years; people of intellect, joy, humor and just plain fun. And sometimes when I hear people complain about how much pain, mental or physical they may be in I just think about J and D and think about how uncomplaining these two joy filled friends are.

Of all the folks I know who have reason to complain in this life here are two prime candidates - but they don't; they live, they don't just manage. They overcome, supersede and conquer whatever obstacle may be in their way because it costs less to focus their energies on solving their problems than on stewing about them. They live through, not aside from life. They are the result and not the consequence of life and I love them for their lives and their friendship.

© November 28, 2010 res