WHAT DOESN'T KILL LOVE MAKES IT STRONGER

                                    WHAT DOESN'T KILL LOVE MAKES IT STRONGER

Dona Sadock and I have lived a half century long love affair and counting, and not a simple or conventional one.  We met at a literary conference in Milford Pennsylvania in 1965.  I had just published my first novel and was on my way from New York to California on a great road adventure, she was going to go to Europe.

It was not love at first sight for me, it was love at first conversation. When the conference was over, I told her to get in the car with me, not really believing she would, and she didn't.

I ended up chasing her back and forth between California and New York, never exactly catching her, but our destiny together had begun. As lifelong best friends, even while married to other people, as sometimes lovers living together, bouncing back and forth between New York and Los Angeles for both of us, and Paris for me.

In September of 2001, I was living in Paris even while I was President of the Science Fiction Writers of America, don't even ask, and it was my duty to preside over the annual meeting thereof in Philadelphia. I flew to New York, stayed in Dona's apartment there, we went to Philadelphia together, went back to New York, and I went to Florida by myself to visit my mother, then returned to Dona's apartment the night of September 10 and woke up, yes, on 9/11, where and when we became a couple again. 

Dona followed me back to Paris we lived there for s couple of years, and then for various publishing and real estate disasters, ended up in her New York apartment, bounced back and forth between New York and Paris for about 10 years and finally moved back to Paris to stay.

Thus our love story in 300 words rather than the introduction to the story of our life together before  September 3, 2019.  Dona had long had walking problems due to various injuries and mishaps, but we never let that stop our travels together, in France, Italy, England, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Serbia, Spain.

But the night of September 2, 2019, Dona fell, fractured her femur, and had to be rushed to a hospital for an emergency operation.  The operation was a success, but the hospital was something like Faulty Towers rewritten by Steven King, where she was fed unknown drugs and medicines which left her hallucinating and paranoid.  Rehabilitation from such an operation would usually mean a week or so in the hospital and maybe a month or more in a rehabilitation facility, but Dona would have nothing with that and neither would I.

I took her home after four days and we made a vow that she would not be institutionalized for even another day and I would take care of her myself 24/7, with only a visiting nurse to give her needed injections daily for 40 days and sometimes cleaning her and changing bandages for an hour, a rehab woman 3 times a week, and our housekeeper and our friend Soma coming to our apartment once a week.

Our doctor, among other people, thought this was crazy.  Dona could not walk to the toilet. Dona could not cook.  Dona could not shop.  Dona could not leave the apartment.  I therefore could not leave the apartment for more than an hour at a time.

But whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. When I was in the hospital for three weeks after a cancer operation Dona slept in the room with me.  When Dona was in a hospital I slept in the room with her even while in the middle of writing a novel.

But in those situations there were nurses and cooks and so forth.  In this situation it was just Dona and me and she was physically helpless.  But I am a good cook and enjoy cooking, and can shop and clean when  I have to. And after all millions of full time housewives are able to do this. And because I've worked out for 40 years or so, even at 79 I am strong and agile enough to take my love in and out of the bed and toilet.  I am not exactly a nurse but I am what I call a 21st century shaman and know more biological science than most doctors.

I could do this because I had to. I didn't really think about any other alternative.
No retreat, baby, no surrender.

But what I didn't really realize until we were actually in the existential situation for weeks is that we were not just in the apartment together 24/7, we were  alone together.  I dared not go anywhere else even alone for longer than was absolutely necessary, and Dona was really in no physical or mental shape to deal with visitors.

So for those 40 days, we saw no one but each other, except for an hour or less with a nurse daily, our excellent kinesthetic therapist Christina Toussaint  for an hour three times a week, Soma for three hours once a week, the occasional visit from the doctor, one visit by our friend Cynthia, and one visit from our friends Violette Le Quere and Joe Cady on  my Birthday on September 15 when they presented me with the present of a painting Violette had made of me to stand beside of the one she had done of Dona. Which was heartfelt and ultimately appropriate.

Our social life fell to zero, our personal lives were a bad mixture of sharing a prison cell and a hospital room, and to make matters worse, those daily injections of  necessary anticoagulants made Dona weaker, and unnecessary antibiotics gave her diarrhea.  A descent into an isolated  hell.  Or so it would seem to be in the telling.

But what doesn't kill love, makes it stronger. There was no retreat and no surrender, and instead of that 40 day isolation tearing us apart, it  brought us closer together, or perhaps forced us to realize how close together we had already been, or both. When the daily injections stopped and the daily nurse visit was no longer necessary, we had done what was supposed to be impossible, we had done it together.  Dona was still primarily bedridden, there was much more recovery that faced us, but we had triumphed, the worst was behind us, we had done it our way, at home, and together. Dona was improving to the point where we were planning a New Years party to celebrate our return to the outside world by making it so.

Or so we thought until the shit hit the fan in more ways than one.

One day Dona woke up with bad diarrhea again, a bloated bladder, weakness, so sick that now she did have to be hospitalized, and after two days of confusion, our doctor got her a room in the American Hospital, the ambulance suddenly arrived to whisk us there with no preparation, not so much as changes of clothing or even tooth brushes.

The hospital was far from home. I was not about to leave her there alone.  I would stay with her in the hospital room  for as long as it took.  We were first told that it would be 3 days so I didn't think sleeping in a chair would be a big deal.  I had done this before for her and she had done it for me.

But it turned out to be a full week and something strange rather wonderful happened during those 7 days.

When we were told that we would be living together in the hospital for a week, not just 3 days, because all I had with me was the pants and shirt on my back, my phone and a cheap pair of reading glasses, I would  go home and bring back changes of clothes, a hairbrush,  a tooth brush, good glasses, some  books, maybe even my small computer. But somehow, after the second night, I decided not to do it.

Dona was going through many tests, and was getting intravenous medicines and feeding, and was afraid that her own French wasn't good enough to go through it without me. My French may not be perfect to say the least, but my deep and wide knowledge of human biology down to the molecular level was more state of the art than those of most medical specialists.

I am what I call a 21st century shaman, being among other things,  a writer of science fiction who has published about a dozen stories in NATURE and read the magazine weekly, so I could look at the interactions as an educated generalist.  As Buckminster Fuller once told me, "If you can speak their own language, you can converse with any specialist on their own level."

Things being what they were, with Dona's complex of medical problems being interactive, I did not feel I could entirely trust the team of specialists to concentrate on their intertactions and feedback loops.

So I decided not to go home at all by myself.  I stayed with Dona. So I didn't shave, didn't change clothes, slept in a chair and then on a cot.  What the hell, I had sort of done this before.  But as the days began to pass, I learned, or rather understood, something that I had already read.

Certain cultures do not conceive of time, place, and action as separate things, but as strings of  holistic events. Dona and I were going to be in a hospital room together for seven days. That was the given time and place of the holistic event,  which were fixed,  but our actions were  not. They were  up to us to complete the string of holistic events.

Be here now, not in the tiresome hippie sense, but in a way Einsteinian.  Live not in the past nor the future but in the series of holistic events which are  the real now.  That is the science of it.
Don't live in the imagination of the future or the memory of the past but in the holistic present.  Our reality was that we were going to be in this place and time for seven days. With no changes of clothes for either of us.  With Dona bed ridden and me sleeping on a cot.  With nothing to read. With nothing to do but watch television, eat, and talk to each other.  The medical tests and procedures were arduous but only consumed a small portion of time,and one would have supposed that the times between would be so boring that we would end up at each other's throats, something that we were not exactly unaware of in our half-century story.

But the magic of it was that we found that while we were so much older in that past, we were younger than that now.

With nothing to do but watching a surfeit of television we found ourselves enjoying each other's company as we had not in too long a series of holistic events.  There was a kind of purity to it.  Crazy as it might seem in the telling of it, those seven days became a kind of vacation from everything outside that holistic event. Within which we found each other anew. A karmic honeymoon such as we never quite had in the previous half century.
                         
That has stuck with us after Dona came home with me after her second stay in the hospital. She entered the American Hospital with diarrhea, a bloated bladder due to ecoli infection, severe malnutrition, inability to walk at all, among other symptoms, but the medical staff there was top drawer, and she left in much better shape physically.

But what they ameliorated were mostly second order results, symptoms, and the antibiotics they had to use created their own negative symptoms--more diarrhea, general body weakness, loss of appetite, malnutrition, etc.

Antibiotics by definition kill bacteria, but not generally selectively. And it is now understood that the human digestive and urinary tracts contain hundred, perhaps even thousands, of bacteria species which have co-evolved with us--the biome culture.  Many of them, perhaps the majority, are neither harmful nor helpful, but others are essential to human health.

Currently, fully understanding tof he  biome culture is frontier biology, and therefore "medicine" lags behind.  But I knew enough to give Dona the current state of the art probiotic, which re-establishes a healthy biome, at lease as completely as currently possible, and argenine, which strengthens the circulatory system.  She was fed addition calories and proteins intravenously  in the hospital, and at home such things have continued with similar drinks.  And this has become enough to raise a healthy appetite and Dona is now eating two or three meals a day too.

So except for her mobility problem, Dona's physical health is now approaching normality asymptotically, and with it her spirit.

However....

Certain convicts released from long enough prison terms end up punching cops or doing something else to get themselves back behind bars. They had adapted to that holistic reality because they had no free choice to the point where they couldn't cope with any other.

Well our wonderful apartment in Paris is certainly no prison cell, but in a way we have been trapped together inside it for three months, and as we adapted to that week in the hospital room so positively, so have we adapted to three months of social isolation because we had to.

But this was much longer, and in a certain sense, more attractive and therefore more addictive.  Six windows opening to a mini forest in  Paris overflowing with books. Good food, if I say myself.  Computers.  Music from half a dozen sources including the keyboard I have more or less taught  myself to play in these three months.

Not exactly the joint or the bughouse.  But we have now approached the end of the sentence, we have worked for it with all our heart, all our knowledge, all our powers, and we've done it ourselves, we've won our liberty, and the only jail wall standing between our return to the great wide world is that of fear.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt said: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

As Frank Herbert wrote: "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

Whatever hasn't killed our love has just make it stronger.