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ABI, An Saol, Brain Injury, family, fiction, life, resilience, sabi, travel, writing
We are always come and go, fall and plosh.
Jack Kerouac, Big Sur, Chapter 7
How to stand firm against what seems to be an unrelenting tide of demands, crises, indifference, and incomprehension?
How can you Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break, but it stands firm, as Marcus Aurelius said in his Meditations?
(Just to be clear: I am not an avid reader of Marcus Aurelius, but I was looking for a quote that would help me make my point – and this one does the job quite nicely, I thought.)
For some time, we had planned a short weekend away for a special occasion. Something we don’t do often.
Then, one of Pádraig’s carers went on a very long sick leave. Another discovered that they had a wedding this weekend. A third one got the flu. A good friend who was going to come for the weekend got sick too.
It got so close to “no carers, no weekend away”. In the end, it was family who stood in and made it all possible.
When we walked out to the North Sea this morning, towards the Arche Noah, against the wind, towards the incoming tide battering the beach, under a seriously dramatic sky, we were thinking and talking about our lives since Pádraig’s accident.
We were told that marriages break up under the pressure of living with someone with an injury like Pádraig’s. The advice was that we had a choice to make between him living at home or us staying together.
Like many people, we are always come and go, fall and plosh. And we’ve staid together like the promontory against which the waves continually break.
We’d never have got to where we are on our own.
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