(sweet) Surrender

I wonder, little sweetheart, if this is something I’ve already told you, but the day I was finally released from the hospital last May, when Sylvia and your Mom helped me into a cab and then settled themselves into the front and back seats, too, and we pulled away from the curb there, I rolled down the window, relived and grateful to be alive and finally going home.

As we turned right heading toward Columbus, we passed The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and as I breathed in the warm, fresh spring air, the first I’d had in my lungs in nearly a month, I could hear the sweetest choir of birdsong serenading me and I began to cry.

Later, as we drove southbound for home and Columbus turned into Ninth Avenue past W59th Street, I heard a song come on the radio from the front seat. The driver had it tuned to a popular rock station. It was an old anthem by Cheap Trick, “Surrender”. The guitars and the ending chorus chanting “we’re all alright” had me singing along and Sylvia, who was sitting next to me, took my hand, smiling, and said “don’t get too excited”, still worried about my heart after it had stopped beating for ten minutes during my pulmonary embolism just five days before.

I never had a particular attachment to that song before but now whenever I hear it my mind returns to that moment, as it did today in physical therapy. I was finishing the last of my exercises, wrapping up a two hour session and interrupted it briefly to go into the office and tell the chief therapist, Todd Bryson (you would so like him, little sweetheart), the story. I mentioned all I’ve just said to you here, little sweetheart, and added that there I was, hobbled, in a sling, both legs attached to  hoses, wound vacs, a cane across my lap. And he said “and look at you now”, very kindly encouraging my progress.

It’s been quite an ordeal, little sweetheart. And I’m grateful to your parents and to dear dear Sylvia - my goodness, there’s no one quite like her, so lovely and generous and fierce and good. You two are of the same stripe, little sweetheart. I know you know that and, indeed, knew it well before me. I suspect you brought her and I toward each other.

As in all things. I’m so grateful for you. Surrender, indeed. We’re all alright. And we will truly be so again in The Forever. Isn’t that right? 

With all my love forever.