Hi All,

It has been a busy month. My son graduated from high school, my daughter graduated from middle school, I turned in my story for MORE Magazine on women, chronic illness and friendship (I’ll keep you posted on when it will appear — a mega thank you to all of you who participated!), joined in several wonderful The Last Best Cure Virtual Book Club groups with wonderful readers, and took my son with me on a work trip overseas that combined some work meetings and interviews with pleasure.

Right before we left, I was cleaning my office in anticipation of starting my next book project (more on that soon), and came across a magazine story I’d written 18 years earlier, chronicling the months after my son was born, when he was suddenly hospitalized at a few weeks of age for a major surgery to correct a life-threatening condition. The story brought back many memories of the stress and terror (if you’ve ever had an acutely ill child, you know what I mean) of those days, and I wept as I read it.

I wept shockingly, in a way I do not think I wept during those long days and nights, 18 years ago. As if, for the first time, I could feel my fear, because it was finally safe to experience it, enveloped as it is now by my gratitude, 18 years later, that my son is here, so unequivocally full of life.

Rereading the words I’d written, reliving those emotions made me realize two essential things. (You can read a copy of Fortune’s Child below; I apologize if it’s hard to read — it’s a scan of the original — click on each page and then click again to enlarge.)

First, it goes without saying how lucky we are that this baby who almost got away is here with us now, that he survived.  And second, as I recalled the fear that reverberated through every fiber and cell of my being during that long year, I wept for something else.

I wept for the very young mother I was then. I found myself wishing that my older, kinder, wiser “now” self might beam back in time and sit beside that young woman, comfort her, hold her as her infant son was whisked out of her arms and away to intensive care.

This took place, I should point out, for those of you who have read my writings in The Last Best Cure about ACE scores, in the same hospital in which my own father had died when I was a child. It felt like an old record replaying, as I watched helplessly as this person I loved, too, also struggled for his life.

I wanted to go back and squeeze my young self’s hand and help her to forgive herself (I felt so certain it was my fault that my son was so sick). And to forgive the whole spinning world, which seemed cruel, unnatural, allowing a child to know so much pain. I wanted to give her a gift and say, Hey, in 18 years, you and this lovely young man will walk the streets of Paris, and you will be able to breathe in deeply, and he will be able to too, and your cells will resonate with that lightness of being that rides in with joy.

Oh my legs hurt, and I sometimes tripped on those Parisian cobblestones, and I often couldn’t keep up with my long-legged boy, given my GBS history, as we went from the Musee D’Orsay to the Tuileries to La Fete de la Musique. But he put his arm around me, slowed down, found a cafe where I might rest, and later, on we went.

The combination of finding this article, and taking this trip made me realize that although in the past 18 years there has been a whole heck of a lot of the Pain Channel, much time in the hospital, a lot of doctors (many brilliant, as in the attached article), and times when life seemed unbearably bleak, the truth is we just don’t know, can’t know, what gifts might lie ahead. We have to hold onto that — that we just don’t know what good might yet come — in our darkest suffering. Suffering is often replaced by wonder, the Life Channel flickers back on. We are not static, time is not static, pain is not static, even when it feels that way. Currents of joy come again — and it is so important to learn how to really be in that current, when it flows our way.

My son’s being here is a miracle. My healing (although not “cured”) from twice being paralyzed and so much else often feels like a miracle. My father’s early death was a tragedy, but my surviving and healing from that, too, is something close to a miracle. I could not have guessed that these things would come to be.

We just don’t know what joy is ahead of the suffering. We don’t know. But we know that everything changes. And that includes the Pain Channel transforming to the Life Channel.

Below is the rest of that article, Fortune’s Child, written and published in 1995.