Perseverance

It's impossible to tell. In November, 1999, I went into the weekend with a sore throat. It felt like flu. It didn't stop me from going to Barbara's house with my wife to join Jerome and Vicki for minnestrone soup and bold red wine. That night I was out again, this time to Tina's for more wine and to mingle with University of Oregon graduate students. The next morning the sore throat persisted, I thought I might be a little hungover, but I taught the middle school Sunday School class and went on with my day, feeling flu ridden, but I'd felt this way before. I taught class on Monday, but was very tired. By Monday night I was vomiting, my temperature was starting to spike and by Tuesday morning my complexion was turning orange; I was disoriented, walking aimlessly around the house, and purple spots were popping all over my skin.

My wife hadn't gone to work that Tuesday morning. She didn't want to leave me home alone. By eleven o'clock she called friends of ours to take me to the emergency room and my appearance shocked them. I was dying.

I wasn't hungover. I didn't have the flu. I had bacterial meningitis. I spent Tuesday, Wednesday, and parts of Thursday in a coma. I had moments of consciousness and didn't know where I was or who was with me. I called for my mother. I kept repeating, "I just want Christmas." Immediate antibiotic therapy when I arrived at the hospital saved my life. I came to late Thursday and was fairly coherent, though exhausted, on Friday. I survived.

This all came to mind because the Inland Northwest blog Huckleberries reported that a nineteen year old Washington State University student had been diagnosed with meningitis. I immediately prayed for him. I prayed he live and that he be spared the aftermath of meningitis: the fatigue, for years; the clinical depression, for years, often paralyzing; the headaches, for years; the kidney damage (my kidney function is at 30%, but stable); the damage to family life, the complexity of it all.

More than the news about the WSU student brought my illness to mind. I teach writing at Lane Community College here in Eugene. We are four weeks into the fall quarter and I am beginning to read my students' first major essay. I've been talking with them in individual conferences about these essays. They tell me their stories. The common theme is perseverance.

X. writes about being homeless in Salt Lake City over ten years ago and learning she was pregnant, and deciding to have the baby and stay with the baby's father, against all odds, and they are still together. They have persevered through the loss of a second baby, through uncertainty about where to live, or how to make a living. X is very proud of her strength.

So is K. K is a gay man, between forty and fifty. He's HIV positive. He is clean and sober today after a life of addiction to meth and other drugs and alcohol. He's had countless sexual partners. Last week he contracted pneumonia. It scared the hell out of him. He left his house and went to the streets to buy a bag of meth. He stopped. He got on his cell phone. He called family and friends. He stayed sober and clean. He persevered.

Y. can't make it to class every day. She suffers from the trauma of her service in an American war. In war, she was brutalized, physically and mentally. Y is brilliant. She wants to serve the church as clergy. Seizures, fatigue, psychological paralysis interfere. She insists on keeping going. She perseveres.

My deaf student listens closely to all that my students and I say in class through the precise hand and finger movements of his signer. A gay student perseveres with her three children, the demons of depression, and the memories of a meth addiction. Not one of my African-American students had a father while growing up, whether in Oregon, California, Louisiana, or Georgia. Other men stepped in to guide and help them and have helped them persevere. Each of them wants to be a positive influence on others, because they are so grateful for the men who helped them.

The great mystery of life is suffering. Job tried and tried to understand suffering. He comes to know suffering more than he knows God. Finally the voice of Yahweh tells him that suffering is beyond human understanding. It doesn't seem fair. We are born, without asking to be, into a world we didn't choose, and suffering is the bond that we all share. Suffering is attached to everything: our pleasures, our love, our professions, our eating and our drinking. Our lives become a matter of persevering and my persevering students buoy me as I realize that we are in a situation together that is about much more than academic learning. It's about perseverance.