Starting Over

The year 2020 is coming to an end. It is likely to be recorded in history as The Year of the Great Covid Pandemic. For many it has been a year of quarantine, sequestering, forced lockdowns, job loss, illness, and death. For me, it has been a mixed bag, miraculous in one respect, tedious in others, enlightening, and very saddening.

It started in a very normal way with typical cold and windy upper mid-western weather. But from the start I experienced dread as well as hope. There was dread because I was scheduled for reconstructive surgery of my right hip at the end of February and after 42 years of deterioration, a successful outcome was questionable. Hope because perhaps I could walk again without pain; dread because my father was in his 90s, and not in great health; hope, because of all people I know, God was mostly likely to smile down on him.

I saw my father for the last time, the weekend before the surgery. At that point he was in palliative care. He knew the end was near, and as I departed, he whispered in my ear “I wish I could go with you”. That broke my heart.

On February 27th, the surgery began. From what I gather, it was lengthy, and touch and go. It wasn’t exactly just a standard joint replacement, but a complete re-construction. As the anesthesia began to wear off, I knew immediately that something was missing. A mind can do wonderous things if given time and 40 years of slowly increasing discomfort allowed for a lot of adaptation. But, when the pain was suddenly gone, I knew I had left a dark place. Even with over 12 inches of sutures up my side, my thought was “so this is what it feels like to be normal”. By evening, I had made 2 circles around the post-op floor. albeit with a walker.

For over forty years, every time I saw my father, he would ask me how my hip was doing and if the pain was bad. He worried. So I called my mother and told her to let him know that the surgery was successful, and I was alright. He could finally stop worrying. He died three days later.

I had scheduled 2 weeks of time off from work, after which I would work online from home for 8-10 weeks. However, by the next week, everybody was sent home to work. The Covid lockdown had started. For the next 8 weeks I stayed in my house except for the 1 hour of physical therapy, 3 times per week. The worry was that the re-lengthened right leg’s muscles would not stretch easily and there were years of atrophy from which to recover. Therapy was predicted to be long and difficult. I knew within the first two weeks, such was not the case. There were several activities that I loved, but years had gone by since I had given up on ever enjoying them again. I could hike, maybe even backpack, get in and out of canoe without flipping, and maybe even Telemark ski down a backcountry bowl. My whole attitude about life changed. I started walking, first around our 11 house cul-de-sac, then the neighborhood, working up to 2 miles. When the weather warmed, my two friends from work, joined me in hikes at the local forest preserve. They pushed me hard. I started to refresh my old 1980s era backpacking equipment. My son in Colorado, sent me a new JetBoil backpackers stove for Father’s Day.

The first week of June, I joined him in Colorado for my first hike in many years at altitude in the Rockies. On a return from a visit with my mother in Minneapolis, I picked up a new Wenonah Kevlar solo canoe. In August, I managed 5 days of strenous hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park. And, in September, I drove to the Snowy Range, west of Laramie, Wyoming and for the first time in 28 years, went solo backpacking for 5 days.

So, I feel as though my life has restarted. So many things forgotten have been re-learned, from lugging my home on my back around a mountain, to simply tying the shoe on my right foot. I even jogged across a parking lot to beat rain drops into the grocery store. Time is flying by so fast, and I have a short window to enjoy many things not done in decades.

My cousin Diane reminded me with a posted quote of poetry by Robert Frost,

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.“

But all my life, I took the well-traveled road with less risk, bowing to more responsibility, living up to my father’s example of always doing what needed to be done, without complaint. In 2020, I suddenly discovered I had made a full circle, and was again at that fork in the road, and this time…

Check in occasionally. I will tell you what lies down that less traveled way.