A body given
Maybe like you, I do not really know how to navigate the world right now. The wars. The grotesque cruelties heretically done in the name of “Christianity”. The fact that Colorado was having 90-degree days in March. No fucking idea. Sorry. But I do know that amidst all of it, good and beautiful things happen every day whether I recognize them or not, and putting myself on the hook for noticing them no matter what has been a sweet challenge this Lent. (more on that here):
Here God, I got you this basket of my candy bars for Lent
The Lent I gave up listening to the radio in my car was surprisingly difficult. I’d be on my way to the gym, several minutes into an NPR story, before realizing I wasn’t “supposed” to be doing that. Then I’d quickly turn it off, hoping Jesus didn’t notice.
In a way, perhaps it was perfect that my ailing, elderly father would die during the very season in which I was trying to pay attention to daily blessings.
He just came by that sort of thing naturally.
In fact, the day before he died, my father sat in his wheelchair in the hall of an assisted living facility when a nurse walked by and said, “How are you today, Richard?”
With sparkling eyes, because he knew he was cute, he replied, “Never been better.”
“Um, Daddy? I’m pretty sure you’re dying,” I said, as dryly and lightheartedly as that sort of thing can be said.
“And?”, explained Dad.
That was the thing about Dick Bolz: he was not one to fight reality. In the ten years that his body slowly deteriorated from a rare disease about which little is known, I watched as one ability after another was stripped away from him. The doctors could not say why he first needed a cane, then a walker, then a wheelchair, then a motorized wheelchair. Why his gorgeous baritone singing voice was taken away. His ability to drive. To keep living in the suburban ranch my parents bought in 1984. To reliably complete sentences.
Until one day, the day before his death, he sat in the hallway of the skilled nursing unit one floor below the independent living apartment he shared with our mom and said, “Never been better” when asked how he was doing.
And reader, he was answering honestly.
See, my dad didn’t spend the last ten years of his life denying the reality that his body was deteriorating. He spent them refusing to pretend that his bodily deterioration was his entire reality.
The man was at peace with his life. All of it. It was frankly wild to witness.
Two days after his death, I drove to the Anschutz Medical Campus, as I have done many times in the last seven months.
That week had been a blur of collapsed and expanded time for my family: managing his care, weeping, pressing cool compresses to his brow, making sure each grandkid could say goodbye in person or on FaceTime, weeping some more, and then of course laughing a lot because with every last moment of lucidity he was either being hilarious or flirting with our mom.
So I could have gotten away with skipping my assigned workout for the oncology exercise research program I’m in, but I knew moving my body would be good, even though what I really wanted was a sofa and a streaming service.
Driving up to the Health & Wellness Center on the Anschutz campus, I suddenly remembered being driven by my mom and dad countless times in our silver Chevy station wagon to that same campus between 1981 and 1985, when it was still Fitzsimons Army Medical Center, so I could be treated for Graves’ disease—an autoimmune disorder usually contracted by people decades older than I was, and for which the doctors had no explanation. They could not say why a child developed a disease that caused weight loss, tremors, heat intolerance, bulging eyes, a racing heart, fatigue, and a twitchy immune system.
I had only made it through half the assigned movements when I unsurprisingly began sobbing during the second set of kettlebell deadlifts.
Because I realized my father’s body was in the next building over. It had not been taken to a mortuary when he died. It had been taken to the medical campus where I was treated for Graves’ disease as a child and breast cancer as an adult and where I was doing an incomplete set of kettlebell deadlifts trying to get my strength back.
In an act of profound generosity, Dick Bolz donated his body to medical research.
So that maybe the next guy could get some actual answers as to why this shit happens to us.
This is my body, given for you.
A blessed Maundy Thursday to you all.
Love, Nadia
On "the grotesque cruelties heretically done in the name of Christianity". I found this on Tuesday that was really helpful in my navigation-"Christianity is not the fault of Jesus"-Jim Palmer
Thanks to you, Nadia, I am now in a restaurant, alone, crying into my pad thai. And glad in a delirious way that I am. Thank you for introducing me to your father. When my 6 year old daughter was killed in a car crash, I donated her eyes and heart to other children. I knew she would have approved. On a possible long shot, I hope your father and my daughter meet. Those who offer the gift of life to others from the tomb womb of their bodily death must certainly hang out together in heaven. And I am glad your father donated his strength and integrity to you. I deeply wish you well. Bless, Dwight Lee Wolter.