On Bodies

My dad recently spoke at the funeral of a man who was his cousin and best friend growing up.  The man miraculously survived a terrible motorcycle accident a little over a month ago.  He wasn't wearing a helmet and received some pretty traumatic head wounds.  I believe he was in the ICU for a few days, followed by a convalescence at home.  His recovery was going well: he had been in his home for about three weeks or so, doing fine by all accounts.  It was quite a shock when he did die.  Dad had a difficult time.

This man's funeral, as with all other funerals I've had close experience with, gave me the opportunity to be still and take time to think about some meaningful things.  I've thought a lot about bodies.  What a magnificent clutch of parts: the blood, the bone, the curve of breath and vertabrae and flesh; the nerves and effortless signals of sensation; the brilliance and the banality of thought and thinking.  Bodies are a wonder when you really think about them; I can understand why people call them temples.

That being said, I've had a difficult time understanding and enjoying my own body.  I was always that underweight, asthma-and-allergy-prone, sickly-looking kid, often suffering from this bout of bronchitis, that extended case of pneumonia or the flu, sneezing anytime the pollen count was above zero.  I remember spending many winter days cooped up (or "crouped up", as it were) inside, wearing tents of blankets and handfuls of Vicks Vap-o-Rub, wishing I were out in the snowbanks with my younger brothers and the cousins who lived next door.  I hated the fact that, although I loved camping with my family, I could never breathe through my nose when we spent weekends in the mountains.  I desperately wanted to enjoy horses (which were, of course, my favorite animals EVER!!) and other barnyard animals, but the one time I did saddle up, my lungs closed up and I couldn't breathe for two days.  Thank heaven I could at least spend some limited time with the cats and dogs we kept as pets, only resulting in enflamed mucous membranes and itchy, watery eyes.  Allergies were the bane of my childhood.  I even became allergic to the shots a pediatrician prescribed!

Things got a bit better after puberty.  I'm not sure if my body actually outgrew my sickly symptoms, or if I just had gotten used to managing them.  I still carried an inhaler with me pretty much everywhere I went.  My friends will tell you otherwise, and lead you to believe that I often forgot said inhaler and had to leave weekend card-and-popcorn parties to drive home and get it.  I still took a daily anti-histamine to battle against post-nasal drip.  I still loved horses, but had learned to admire them from a distance.

And, as it happened, I was still quite underweight.  I had a pretty hard time watching my young 16- to 18-year old peers, crowing about how much they were working out, comparing the size of their biceps and their calves with each other.  I was a skinny kid and just wasn't a part of the sweaty weight-room scene.  It was upsetting enough that I remember talking with my mom about it.  "Oh, honey," she said, "You just haven't reached your physical peak as quickly as they have.  You just watch and see: in ten years, you'll be the desirable one, and they'll be growing bellies and back hair."  We giggled at the thought, but I admit, I wasn't exactly convinced at Mom's logic.

Serving a mission didn't help with the feelings of frustration in regard to my health or my body image.  I became very ill and was sent home to undergo a a battery of tests to see why I had lost 10% of my total weight in a matter of weeks.  After months of Western medicine's tactics failed, I began to search out alternative means of diagnosis and healing.  Let's just say it was all, quite literally, a crap-shoot!

End Part I