Long Ago and Far Away

One Sunday afternoon when I was a kid, my family drove to the beach. I had more energy than sense, swam out into the ocean, and was promptly slammed to the sand by a huge wave. I ran, crying, to my mother.

“Mommy.  Mommy.  I have something in my eye.  I have something in my eye!”

She examined my right eye.  “I don’t see anything.”

“It’s there.  It hurts, Mommy.  It hurts me.”

“Maybe it’s a grain of sand.”

She took me by my hand to a drug store, bought some eye wash, and showed me how to use it. Finally, with wash streaming down my cheek and a red right eye that had no white, she showed me a grain of sand.

“See, Alan.  Here’s the grain of sand that was in your eye.  It came out.  See?  It’s right here in my hand.”

“But it still hurts.  My eye still hurts.  It’s still in there Mommy.”

“Alan, it’s in my hand.  It might still hurt for a while because your eye remembers that the grain of sand was there.  But it won’t hurt for very long.”

It did hurt for very long.  For two hours.  I kept crying until the pain disappeared.

Switch to the present.

Two hours ago I received the following message from a close friend, with startling news about her daughter.

“Just wanted to let you know that we are in St. Joseph’s ER with Brita.  She has very high blood sugar and we think she may have diabetes.  Her sugar reading was at 211 this morning. I am devastated.  So sad that I can’t even describe.  —Rina.”

Ten years ago my daughter, then seventeen, had a blood sugar reading of 398 when she was diagnosed with Type I diabetes in the emergency room at Encino Hospital.

Rina’s immediate fear is of what this diagnosis might mean for her four-year-old daughter, Brita. She sees a life filled with needles, sleepless nights, and physical vulnerability. Today, that fear is immediate and real.  My daughter was almost an adult when she was diagnosed.  Even so, my wife and I spent many nights slipping into her room to make sure she was still alive and not in a coma.  She has Type 1 diabetes today, and has learned to live with her disease. So have we.  I in no way minimize the impact of Type 1 diabetes.

The pain from a grain of sand in my eye literally blotted out the sun many years ago, but time brings perspective.  Today it is a distant, not painful, memory, and I mostly remember my mother’s care and reassurance.

So, too, will the initial shock of Brita’s diagnosis fade, and the condition will become a part of her life.  As my wife told Rina, “Brita will never remember a time when she didn’t have to stick a needle into her finger to test her blood sugar.”  Until there is a cure, or a work around.

In situations like these, I suggest a perspective that I call “Long ago and far away.”  Pretend that you are on the moon, looking at yourself and your immediate problem from there.  Or pretend that you are on a distant star, a million light years away.  Your immediate condition will seem unimportant from there.

Of course, “long ago and far away” is much easier to write about than it is to put into practice—especially

when you’re right in the midst of a crisis. At this moment Rina’s catastrophe is up close and personal, and much larger than just a grain of sand in a tearful eye.  And this time it is her daughter, not mine, so I am not as close to it.

But even in the worst of times, struggling to maintain perspective can make all the difference.  The experience of pain can give us a greater gratitude for joy.  The reality of illness can give us a better appreciation of normal health.  The prospect of death gives me a greater incentive to write today.That is why surgeons do not operate on close relatives.

We only have today.  Let’s make the most of it.

Alan