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Starting
Over (And Over)
By
Eleanor Vincent
Recently my life fell to pieces – again – like a carefully
completed jigsaw puzzle carelessly knocked to the ground. I had
just spent nine long years clawing my way back from the death
of my older daughter Maya, a nineteen-year-old college student.
A gifted young actress, she was bucked from the back of a horse
on a spring afternoon in 1992 and went into an irreversible coma.
 Once
again, in the fall of 2001, I found myself staring at the puzzle
pieces of my life so perplexed by a new round of loss that I couldn't
imagine that unexpected miracles would result from losing my job
and confronting a debilitating injury. But they did.
Notified of my impending layoff by a junior HR specialist half
my age, I sat there in stunned silence. All the secretaries in
the headquarters office where I worked could see us because we
were in a conference room with floor to ceiling glass windows.
The HR guy pushed a stack of documents across the tabletop toward
me. “Too bad we have to meet under these circumstances,”
he remarked. Visions of losing my house and subsisting on food
stamps danced in my head.
The layoff occurred on September 12, the day after the World Trade
Center bombings. It amplified the surreal sense of fragility we
all felt that day. As if that weren't enough, I aggravated
a painful knee injury several weeks later. By the end of October
I was wearing a hard brace, a contraption that looks like an erector
set with padding, and I could barely walk. Using a cane I could
manage a lopsided hobble. Outside my doctor's office, little
old men sailed by me on walkers with resentful looks of impatience
at my turtle’s pace. I found myself unemployed and disabled.
After numerous phone calls to an individual euphemistically known
as a “patient advocate” in my managed care health plan,
I was able to arrange outpatient surgery to repair my knee. A
final check from my ex-employer arrived on the same day as my
operation, delivered to my front door while I was still stoned
to the gills on Darvocet. Two neat X’s made by the scalpel
of my surgeon glowed fresh and red on my left knee.
A friend drove me to the credit union where I used my crutches
to hold myself upright and fumble with the automatic teller machine
to deposit my check.
“God, this is great,” I told myself, trying to follow
the precepts of one of my favorite spiritual mentors. When Rev.
Edwene Gaines says “greaaaaat” with her Southern drawl
and raised eyebrows it makes me howl with laughter. She is a traveling
Unity minister from Alabama and she puts people on a 21-day diet
of no complaining. “Honey, your life will be transformed
if you do not complain, not even once, for 21 days,” she
promises. “But if you slip up, you have to start over.”
I will go on many of Edwene's diets during the coming months.
Enforced stillness has its perks. One of them is reading. A Buddhist
nun named Pema Chodron wrote a whole book on situations
like mine. When Life Falls Apart took me deep into
the Zen of disintegration and the noble truth of groundlessness.
A dreamy little smile of pre-enlightenment danced on my lips as
I turned the pages. I thought to myself that the Buddhists really
had the falling apart space cornered, better even than the Unity
metaphysicians who urge “taking dominion” over circumstances.
The truth is that Edwene and Pema both were right. When things
fall apart, let them. Try not to panic. Don't complain, at
least not if you want to feel strong and centered. Wait patiently
for the jigsaw pieces to form a new, more beautiful puzzle.
During those months of forced idleness, I made huge strides toward
completing a manuscript I'd been working on since my daughter
died. My diligent agent finally sold the book to an independent
press. Swimming with Maya: A Mother's Story lands on bookstore
shelves this month. It's the story of Maya's death and
its amazing outcome: new life, health and sight for the six people
who received her organs, two of whom have become my friends. Both
of them were the parents of young children at the time they received
their transplants, children they never thought they would live
to see grow up. Those kids are now in college, just the age my
daughter was. Her loss - and the resulting miracles - still make
me cry and laugh at the same time.
Maya's death taught me a key secret: Don't take disaster
personally.
After nine months of unemployment (and convalescence) I found
a better job in another department of my former company. Go figure.
Life is a mysterious journey of disintegration and reassembling.
When the chance to start over arises, I take it and celebrate.
Eleanor
Vincent can be reached at eleanor@eleanorvincent.com. She lives in Walnut
Creek, California. Her book, Swimming with Maya: A Mother's
Story (Capital Books) is available now.
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Renewal
