This week’s offering is less an essay than an anecdote that will have interest for few, but just at the moment is rather compelling to me. Every stage of life has its surprises, but old age—or to use Cicero’s somehow more disturbing term senectitude—is a kind of Brunswick stew of alarums aptly characterized as one damn thing after another. Very often the things involve physical health. This time it is not I but Joan who is in the hospital. The situation is naturally worrying but prospects also hopeful; and her hospitalization provides the context rather than the substance of this little essay. There is other, literary, indeed biblical context in two of Christ’s parables—the hidden treasure in a field (Matthew 13:44) and the woman sweeping her house to find a lost coin (Luke 15:8-10).
Joan has been hospitalized for several days with some kind of scary viral brain infection in the general category of meningitis. She is very ill, but the signs have turned in the right direction. Our adult children in New York have rallied around, but they both have very busy lives and/or demanding jobs. Circumstances, including unknown and uncertain immediate prospects, are of course disquieting. At the immediately practical level, I am dependent on others to get to the hospital. We are blessed in having good friends.
But on to the anecdote of lost treasure. Two days ago, in the afternoon. I realized with a shock that my wedding ring was not on my finger. The ring does not date from my wedding. I got it about ten years later in Italy: a modest gold band which exploits simplicity to enhance significance. Now it was gone, but not exactly mysteriously so. I have been reading about “wizened” old men since childhood. Now I was one. My fingers had simply shriveled! And since those fingers spent a fair amount of time at a computer keyboard in my office, I knew where, surely, my wedding ring must now be. I admit that from a conventional point of view my library office might be considered rather cluttered. I think of the phenomenon as the chaos antecedent to creation. An uncharitable observer might call it a mess.
Most things that I can’t find eventually turn up there. So I began with my long work table. After extended searching I had found lots of useful stuff, but no wedding rings. I didn’t really have a Plan B, but I continued searching through more and more unlikely locations in the house. No luck, only a terrible feeling in the pit of the stomach. Because that was the only place it could be. Nonetheless, whistling in the dark, I spent the next two hours searching diligently through places I knew full well would prove sterile. Eventually I abandoned myself to silent, slightly panicky despair.
The next day we visited Joan, nearly comatose, in her hospital room. The “we” was Christie (my Ghanaian health aide) and Frank (a close family friend and former colleague). Joan’s hospital bed, deep in the room near the windows, left enough room for only a single caretaker to walk around it. I was hovering over her head in that narrow space. She was in a state of unnerving somnolence, eyes tightly closed. Christie was on the same side of the bed, but at its foot. Suddenly she started talking about a “miracle”. Shen took a couple of steps forward, leaned down, and picked up the gold ring that had silently slipped off my finger more than a day earlier. That true story deserves to be in the Legenda Aurea or the Gesta Romanorum. Late on Tuesday the doctors came up with a diagnosis of which they are confident: babesiosis. I had never heard of babesiosis. The strange word derives from the name of its European discoverer, a Romanian pathologist named Victor Babes. It is a dangerous condition initiated by the bites of infected insects. I presume it is in the same pathological family as Lyme Disease, though rarer. There are only about three thousand cases a year in this country. Wooded areas of the middle and upper eastern states must be full of infected insects. Babesiosis must be treated energetically. But it can be treated, and they have begun treating it. So I must hope that surely old Dame Julian of Norwich was right. All shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
