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It’s ironic that my two-week stroke report coincides with Sept 30th, the feast day of St Jerome. My Gatto Chair position at St Francis Xavier University is to research and eventually write an historical novel on Paula, the rich young elite Roman ascetic companion of, and patron to, Jerome.

I’m not getting any of that work done now, here in the hospital. My dean and chair are graciously paying my usual stipend while we figure things out.

Jerome’s letters are hilarious. He’s a famous braggart about the self-inflated hardships he faced. I’ve been thinking on that when I have to ring a bell and wait on the harried staff here to come help me go to the toilet or move me to my wheelchair. Or just about anything.

I hope I don’t sound like drama-queen Jerome when I report on my week.

I started official physio sessions this week. They will be twice a day, once on weekends. A team of four came in to assess me. They seemed pleased with the progress even since my last charting. I was surprised to hear I might be up to three months in hospital, eventually with times to go home overnight and weekends, depending on my progress. They pushed and pulled and asked me to imagine I was moving my unresponsive arm, and told me they could detect some of the muscles attempting to respond. While one had my foot, behind me another started waving. I turned my head to see what she was doing and apparently passed that test, by proving I still have my peripheral vision.

From my window I can see up toward a white water-tower and Mount Cameron farm, once the spot where the radical and dynamic sisters of Saint Martha raised food for the hospital and the university. Sometime during the week while looking at that I decided my three month goal will be to try to walk up the small rise to that tower with Sara. No one was around when I first thought that and for 30 seconds or so I wept giant wracking quiet sobs, perhaps at the shock of the contrast with a walking pilgrimage just two weeks prior, then got on with life.

My gentle physio coaches, Lee and Jay (who has tattoos of the Muppets) had me going through the movements needed to get my left foot off a bed and on the ground so I can swing myself to a sitting position on a bed … no mean feat with no strength in my left arm for pushing up and nothing for my right to grab. My core strength will be great after this. Sunday (yesterday) at the end of the session, Lee asked me to walk the twenty feet between the parallel bars with no one holding my elbow or waist. It was my first unassisted walking since the full stroke, and scary as hell. But it felt great when I was done. After physio I slept 20 minutes.

My arm, in brief: with a lot of grunting and core tightening I’ve managed to curl my left-hand fingers slowly into a light fist. I can now bring my thumb to my forefinger using intense concentration. Just yesterday I imagined doing a bicep curl and my forearm lifted slightly. I also managed a slight wrist movement for Sara.

The physios said that what I’d already been doing – imagining using my arm and hand in real time, as if they were working – was in fact their initial strategy. I’m already on the right track.

A friend sent me a photo of the candles they lit for me Sunday morning. It means a great deal. For a Lutheran, the extent to which I appreciate and crave candles lit for my recovery is perhaps strange. But everyone’s words and gestures have me feeling surrounded with care. Buddhist friends have let me know they spent meditation sessions with me as their focus, another dedicated a walk to me, there are prayers in congregations across the country, and my name has been read in more than one synagogue in the weekly prayers for health. A letter written in fountain pen, homemade muffins, cards, flowers, a fruit basket, emails, lucky origami stars, emojis, thoughts. They’re all importanyt I’m grateful. Thank you – the support sustains me.

Sara is such an incredible care-giver and coach and sponge-bather and daily smoothie provider and cheer-leader … and yesterday — my jailbuster! Yesterday afternoon was sunny and warm. Instead of taking me to the usual roof-top patio on our wing, she wheeled me right on past into the elevator, then out the main entrance of the hospital into the light and air. We headed for the nearby grotto garden. The bees were buzzing in some purple aster and brown-eyed susans and other late flowers, and we found a wooden gazebo where we read to each other so I could practise improving my speech and enjoy the sun.

Then, before she left, Sara held my arm and hand carefully and I danced to some tunes on my laptop from my wheelchair. She moved my left hand and arm to match my right. If anything will get this arm going, it might be dancing!

I wonder what Jerome would have thought of the first song to pop up on my mixed playlist. It was: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

or as Sara calls it, my strokaversary….

today I felt a bit tired, and down when the doctor told me about possibly having to go to Halifax for another heart test and the lovely, kind physiotherapists remarked that some folks never recover use of their hand. i’m officially a 2-person transfer here in the hospital since i tangled my feet two days ago and fell on my way to the chair.

whats been hardest is not being absolutely sure my condition has bottomed out yet. i know it will be a long hard road to whatever recovery i’m fated for. but i’d like to be going the right direction at least.

hard to believe i walked 90 km with my youngest up the southwest coast of cape breton just a couple weeks ago, and 23 km from Pomquet Beach to Antigonish on the eve of the stroke. right now my pilgrimage is to shuffle my walker to the end of the hall with one of the saints who works here helping hold my completely unresponsive left hand on the handle and me coaxing my reluctant left foot to listen to me and lift and step.

but then tonight I was able to lift my bad foot up on the bed by myself, in what seemed a momentary miracle, and I think I moved my thumb a hairbreadth (Sara saw it too). I’ll take these small victories for now.

Events this last week proved how unintentionally fitting a name can sometimes be. The Peregrine Lunar Lander, a joint NASA-Astrobotic mission launched January 8^th, is no longer expected to reach its goal. It was set to be the first commercial space probe, and the first American vehicle since the last Apollo mission in 1972, to land on the moon’s surface. However, several hours after launch, Astrobotic issued a photograph showing damage to the outer insulation of the craft. The statement noted that because of a propellant leak and difficulties in orienting the ship, a landing is now considered impossible. On social media, Astrobotic went on to state: “At this time, the goal is to get Peregrine as close to lunar distance as we can before it loses the ability to maintain its sun-pointing position and subsequently loses power.”

As a scholar of pilgrimage and pilgrimage studies, the name Peregrine (“pilgrim”) strikes me as uniquely suited to the Lunar Lander, which will now wander through space.

“Peregrinus” originally meant “foreigner” or “resident non-citizen [of the Roman Empire].” But already in ancient times it became the term for a pilgrim. For instance, a Roman pilgrim who travelled from Trier, in modern-day Germany carved his name “Peregrinus” as a thanksgiving on a votive offering stone at the Sulis-Minerva springs in Bath, UK, perhaps two millennia ago, and you can still see the stone there.

Eventually, the word “Peregrine” came to describe a special type of pilgrim, perhaps more related to the fate of the spacecraft that will now drift through the cosmos. My colleague and friend Sara Terreault at Concordia University, Montreal, describes (in this article: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/ijrtp/vol7/iss1/4/) how in the early Middle Ages, “peregrination” became a new type of pilgrimage that proceeded not toward a sacred destination, but away from a beloved homeland. The pain of this permanent separation from home was seen as a kind of “white” or living martyrdom, as opposed to the “red” or bloody martyrdoms of so many early Christian saints. Especially in Ireland and England, and amongst “Insular” monastics, this type of pilgrimage became a movement which sought holiness in exile and wandering. Bernice Lamb-Senechal has also written about this special type of ancient pilgrimage, here: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/ijrtp/vol8/iss1/9/. John Schultz and Ian Reader have identified a similar contemporary phenomenon among serial pilgrims on the Japanese Shikoku pilgrimage, in Pilgrims Until We Die: Unending Pilgrimage in Shikoku (Oxford University Press, 2021).

In the wake of the lunar let-down, scientists are scrambling to recast definitions of “success” for their mission. “Every challenge presents an opportunity to learn and refine our approach,” stated Dr Minkwan Kim of Southampton University in The Guardian. However, the failure of the Peregrine Lander can’t but be a blow to those who placed remains on the ship, hoping for them to have a permanent resting place on the moon. The human remains included DNA or ashes from George Washington, John F. Kennedy, and Dwight Eisenhower, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, Star Trek founder Gene Rodenberry, and several cast-members of the original Star Trek series … Scotty (James Doohan), Bones (DeForest Kelly), and Uhura (Nichelle Nichols). It’s noteworthy that the plans to deposit human remains on the moon went ahead over the formal protests of the Navajo Nation, for whom the moon is sacred, as it is to many Indigenous peoples (https://www.npr.org/2024/01/08/1223377817/navajo-moon-human-remains ).

Now, because of a propellant or valve failure, the Peregrine will become a true space wanderer. For better or worse, it will live up to its name. Like the ninth-century Irish pilgrims who set out in a boat with no sail or oars, trusting themselves to where the seas and winds might take them, Peregrine is truly on a course for the stars, boldly going where no one has gone before.

By http://i300.photobucket.com/albums/nn13/etmassey/star-trek-cast.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26911344

The lovely folks at McGill Queen’s Press have given me a discount code for 30% off my new book, “Prophets of Love,” to share with friends and family.

If you are reading this, I consider you friend or family (and the chances are pretty good you actually are!). So the code is MQF2

If you’re in Canada, order online and use the code HERE.

If you are in the UK or Europe, email direct.orders@marston.co.uk and use the code with them.

If you’re in the US or the rest of this big world that both Cohen and Paul loved (however differently), email orders@press.uchicago.edu and use the code with them!