I was leaving the YMCA yesterday and saw a houseless man with one leg in a wheelchair, the other having been amputated just below the knee. He was using his one leg on the ground to propel him forward and seemed to be used to getting around that way as he was not actively struggling with it or seemingly upset.
I’ve worked with so many patients who have gone through amputation surgeries and for whatever reason, this type of loss is one of the ones I am most drawn to support people in. I have been with houseless folks pre-surgery, showing me their black feet (when I say black feet, I mean BLACK feet…this was a new sort dead tissue for me to see before working at an inner city hospital) as a kind of anticipatory grief practice. I knew the next time I saw him, instead of his uncovered black feet, I would see two nubs covered in bandages. We imagined how his life would change, being discharged to the streets without feet. We joked about the difficulties of stealing from stores in a wheelchair when his practice had been to run. The wounds from these surgeries require high levels of hygiene, which is completely impossible in a tent.
I’ve had so many patients at the VA who had undergone these types of losses years earlier only to adapt and come back to us with other health issues. But sometimes the trauma of those losses remained unprocessed. It is a strange thing to lose part of your body.
I bring all of this up to say, there is a certain kind of disorientation that comes from waking up to a new/changed/different body. And though I am unbelievably lucky so far to have kept all my wanted body parts, every once in awhile, I wake up to my very different life and feel a sense of surprise. Surprise that I left my seventeen-year marriage, surprise that I am the only adult in my house, surprise that my house is full of pets, surprise that my life has fully de-centered men in every way. Of course, this feeling of surprise is often followed by a little thrill of excitement and pride.
It seems kind of shitty to even compare this type of total reorientation in life to something as major as losing a foot or a leg. Like, in some ways, saying this is just not cool at all. I’m guessing my houseless friend isn’t feeling thrill when he looks down at his new nubs and bandages. But I think all humans experience grief and disorientation. And the feelings themselves are often so similar even if the details are really different. Maybe he is thrilled to know that he will no longer have to see those black dead feet. I’m not really sure.
Perhaps having a beloved but dead body part excised in order to live a safer and healthier life is not unlike leaving a relationship that has since died* and feels like a weight one can no longer bear. That in leaving behind what is dead, new life is on the horizon. Even if it’s not the life that was imagined and sacrificed so highly to reach for. It’s an opportunity. A new future that is unwritten.
I was raised to believe that divorce is a bad thing. And certainly there is a lot of pain in divorce and it is a hugely destabilizing process for children and adults.
And. Would I tell my houseless friend that it was a bad thing to remove his blackened feet? No. I don’t think I would. There is a quiet dignity in burying our beloved dead body parts and relationships. It is intellectually honest. And it makes room for the spirit to breathe again, to stop the creep that dead tissue sometimes does, invading healthy tissue in a race to win it all.
In many ways, I’ve left behind the binary thinking of good and bad. I’m learning to be in my body, to awaken desire, to FEEL, really feel the full human experience. It is a wild thing to be alive.
*Please know that these comments are specific to my experience and a relational dynamic I was part of and participated in for two decades. This is not a reflection on the personhood of my former spouse.