Pajama Game

recuperation en français

as my grandmother used to say, looking like something the cat dragged in

Once I got past the opioid withdrawal and its attendant nameless dread and constant weeping (!!), I started to feel halfway human. Also like a (temporary!) invalid, because it was difficult for me to move around. Couldn’t handle stairs, so I was relegated to an air mattress in the living room. I lurched around like the Tin Man with no oil can.

It seemed clear right off that invalids should dress the part, n’est-ce pas? And luckily, Instagram read my mind (as it does), and showed me all manner of fancy pajamas and robes, which I promptly and gratefully ordered. While I waited for them to arrive, I went back to my usual habit of demolishing great hunks of Parmesan, comté, and goat gouda. (Before she left, Nellie did a fabulous job of stocking the fridge.) I cooked myself these cute little beef tenderloins that come with a piece of fat wrapped around them, held by a string. I made coddled eggs with butter and Boursin.

I continue to wallow in all the beautiful, delicious fat that France offers in abundance, and man, is it better than hospital food!

It’s a monkish life, the life of a recuperee. I’m up before dawn for a cold shower, then head outside and listen to the drama unfolding in the world of birds. The nightingales especially get very worked up as the sun rises. After breakfast, I lie on the chaise in the sun, bare feet on the ground, and am now as tan as a 1970s teenager. I do the little exercises I was taught in the hospital with my sad little puny thighs. The routine of these mornings is strangely enjoyable.

For weeks, my brain was scrambled and reading or watching TV didn’t feel good; I spent a lot of hours on that chaise not doing anything but listening to the birds and the breeze ruffling the trees and the dogs barking at the neighbor’s dogs and then running to the other side of the garden and barking at the other neighbor’s dogs.

Me again. Another bathrobe. The gauze toile nightgown is the best thing ever

Here’s the unexpected thing: I am—not exaggerating—even in this depleted and barely able to walk, lonely, deconditioned, one might even say pathetic and decrepit state—very very happy. Joyful, actually. So joyful that sometimes I lie on that chaise listening to the birds and the barking and cry happy tears, like a crazy person.

Partly because I love my unruly garden with all my heart and I am still thrilled to be living in France. But it’s not only that—I think it’s that yin-yang thing again—in which if things get really, really bad, you might get lucky enough that after you get through the badness, there is a pot of gold waiting for you, a big, deep pot of real happiness, even bliss. Probably wrong to call it payback, but it sort of is. More of a balancing, maybe. This has happened to me more than once, so now, if things ever get bad, I’m on the lookout for that pot. I don’t think for one second I would be feeling this sustained joy if I had not felt despair in that hospital.

Worth it? Maybe surprisingly…I think it was. Not only do I get to ride this happy train for a little while, but also I learned all kinds of things about myself. I felt things I had never felt before, was challenged in ways I hadn’t been before.

I wonder if have you experienced something similar? In which you go through a fire of some sort, it feels world-ending or close to it, all you want is to be saved from whatever it is but there is no way out but through….and then, on the other side, you realize you got something quite valuable out of the whole terrible thing, something you would not want to give up?

And of course, for a writer, there’s nothing like new experience. I got enough material during that hospital stay for ten novels. And now, in the pajama phase, still gathering more as I lie on the chaise, forced to be unbusy.

And also. If you’ve ever been camping, you know the real satisfaction that comes with accomplishing the most basic tasks. Lit a fire? Cooked something edible? Got the tent up? All of it feels like you’ve done something worth doing, something truly necessary, and large.

With illness, it is similar. My ambitions have…shifted. Not working on my three-book Narbonne series which (of course) I envision will be a literary masterpiece, or adding to the Castillac series with ever more diabolical plot twists. No, not now, not yet. Now, if I manage to wash some dishes? Mow a narrow path through the weeds? Boil an egg? What magnificence! It is a psychological gift that when we are (temporary!) invalids, we can feel real contentment from doing an ordinary small thing. Even when the thing is the kind of thing that used to be just an annoyance to be gotten through on the way to bigger things we considered important.

At this point, nearly a month after leaving the hospital, my recuperation is speeding up. I’m sleeping in own bed upstairs. Yesterday I managed to drive to the supermarket in Lézignan by myself for the first time and do some grocery shopping, which left me wrecked on the sofa for the rest of the day—but I was nearly out of butter, which obviously cannot stand. I can sense full recovery is coming, eventually, and in the meantime I am brimming with gratitude for my life in France, my overgrown garden, my ill-behaved girls, and fancy pajamas.