I sat today, waiting for a delayed bus,
With a tiny, fragile-looking woman who had come alone to church.
As we sat, and talked, and waited,
The strong and vibrant lover of adventure
That she is poured forth. I felt her soul.
Her wispy stature and her hesitating steps
No longer mattered.
She is not that body. Nor am I mine --
Our bodies just clay vessels that we borrow from the earth.
We saw what’s real.
Reflection
Our bodies challenge us endlessly, as they suffer injuries, ailments, weakness, flaws, and aging. We think they’re us. But we’re wrong. They’re vessels made of clay, urns for our spirits to inhabit while on earth.
Your lifelong challenge, my Love, was to transcend your body’s weaknesses – especially your paralyzed arm. You often said, bitterly, that nothing was possible. You could will your torn arm to move all you wanted, and it wouldn’t happen. Therefore, you did not believe in possibility.
Yet one lesson you provided to us all – inspiring us -- was the demonstration that it is possible to manifest whatever one wants in this life – except moving a paralyzed arm. Your body stymied you. But you were not that body. You transcended it.
Because of your injury, you learned that doctors can provide hope and support to suffering people, and you chose to become a doctor. You spent many months at a time at the Episcopalian Hospital of St. Giles the Cripple, in Brooklyn. You found, in the 1930s, in that small, specialized hospital, the doctor (Joseph Episcopo, MD) who still, historically, ranks as the world expert in treating Erb’s Paralysis, the condition you suffered as a result of your torn arm.
As a young patient in a charity hospital for crippled children, you experienced the excitement of medical discovery, through multiple surgeries amazingly creative and advanced for their time – transplanted muscles and tendons, for instance, and mapping the neurological system of the brachial plexus; also turning your paralyzed hand so it no longer lay turned out, backwards, by breaking your arm and then resetting it so that your radius and ulna healed grafted onto each other with your hand turned in the proper direction.
You always said you were a much better doctor because you’d learned compassion from your long experience as a patient.
You described beautiful experiences while in the hospital. Although from a Jewish family, you learned and loved the great Christian classical pieces of liturgical music, and enjoyed the beauty and excitement of Christmas. You described how the children helped each other – those who could walk getting things for those who couldn’t, and those who could do things with their hands reaching, fastening, and doing for those who couldn’t.
You went to school in the hospital; you flourished amid teachers who understood that physical disability did not define the child, and who allowed your brilliant mind free range.
This in contrast to your public school experiences where the teachers assumed you were mentally as well as physically disabled, and where you felt desperate to get your snow suit, boots and mittens on so that all the other children wouldn’t leave you behind when it was time to leave for recess or to go home at the end of the day. You had devoted all your energy in Kindergarten and First Grade to learning how to get dressed and undressed twice as fast as normal, so you wouldn’t be the last child, isolated and disdained. In the hospital, you could catch up intellectually and learn without fear.
Our life stories are our history of dealing with the vicissitudes of the bodies we have inhabited. These stories are very real in our minds. But, paradoxically, the stories are only a means – a context -- for our spirits to reach their full potential in this lifetime. Transcending your disability, accepting your body -- knowing that you weren’t your tortured body -- was your life's challenge. When you had achieved that enhanced awareness, you were ready to leave the body behind and move into a higher life.
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Ellen: Making Change at the Supermarket
She puts the change and the receipt in my left hand,
[The only one that works.]
What to do?
How to separate them
Without putting them down.
How to put the money in my wallet
Without spreading it on the counter
To pick it all up again,
With one hand.
Behind me on the line the others wait ,
Watching me will the coins into my purse.
Fearful lest I take too much time,
I silently order the bills to be in sequence,
I pray that they will align themselves easily,
So there is no need to sort them.
My will cajoles them into my wallet
Lest they notice, enraged,
That my little right arm is still, paralyzed, ashamed.
Ellen Scheiner- Feb. 19, 1991
Rev. May 21, 1996
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