Tony was on his way out the door, our door because he comes to our home. A Rolfer and almost qualified osteopath, he has been treating me for, gosh, soon it will be almost 10 years. Good thing about Tony. With all my neuromuscular challenges, I have managed to assemble an informal team of healers. The cast has shifted over the years, of course. But Tony is among the long-running stars.

Healing, it turns out, is just that. Medicine is something else. Rolfing and osteopathy are something else. And a real healer, it seems, is frequently in need of what he provides, just in a different form. So it is with Tony. An intuitive, almost magical grasp of the body, coupled with a tortured love-life, in particular. In short, I love him. Jane loves him. And there he was, just yesterday, after having driven a large amount of pain from my afflicted right knee, and having shown Jane how to drive a bit out herself…making his departure.

In the course of which he observed that this knee-healing treatment would have to be adjusted, such was the general course of things, in the next few years. That is to say, that I would be increasingly incapacitated in an undefined way. And since Tony’s grasp of such things is quite acute, I had no doubt that he could define this musculoskeletal decline quite specifically if he wanted to. Gauging the impact of his words as he did, Tony being a sensitive guy, sought to reassure me. “Oh,” he said, “we’re talking seven, eight years in the future.”

I smiled wanly. Tony, who is approximately half my age, cannot grasp that seven or eight years fly by just like that. And that for someone who is a natural worrier, my long-term picture was looking unusually grim. Which goes to explain why about four in the morning I awoke and stayed that way.

The San Francisco architectural firm Lerner and Associates has a bit of the healing touch also, when I consider their contribution to my life, our lives, here in Glen Park. Specializing in disability-related projects, for our remodel they demonstrated a knack for accessibility design for all seasons. They were quite insistent on building in stuff for the latter season, the one Tony was mentioning. And there were ominous things in this plan too, but nothing one had to stare at terribly hard. In fact what they designed was pleasantly out of sight. They simply built in extra beams, trusses and who knows what, into ceiling areas. One is right above the bed, and the other above the toilet. The grim purpose: anchoring hoists that might someday be required to get me into both places.

Has it come to this? That is to say, will it come to this? And the blunt and simple answer is, of course, yes, if I’m lucky.

I know. I know. I survived a bullet in the spinal cord, more than half a century of paralysis, and counting my blessings wouldn’t be a bad idea. Fuck it. The whole thing has been going downhill so long, although I should be used to it, I can’t stop protesting. Just like all those people in Portland. I’ve had it. 

Didn’t I used to schlep my paralyzed self up and down the hill of Vicksburg St., San Francisco, crutching back from Susie’s Service Laundry, with a blue-paper-wrapped bundle of newly clean clothing somehow braced over my only somewhat neurologically intact right arm? Wasn’t that me? Damn straight. And what do I have to show for it? A ceiling full of two by fours waiting to hoist me warehouse-style into my next dysfunctional stage.

All of which kind of ignores Jane. There is the practical level. Will she be able to handle all this hoisting, even if it is semi automated? Although the other questions are more profound. Will I be able to handle her handling me in this fashion? She will, that I already know. The practicalities are something else. But after a lifetime of struggle with relationships, here we are. We have one. Particularly in this pandemic, locked down, locked up, locked in and facing the grim uncertainties together, moment by moment.

Which if I even think about it for half a millisecond, may be the most positive thing I can say about the future.