Another Day
VAYECHI GENESIS 47:28-50:26
11 JANUARY 2020 / 14 TEVET 5780
Shared Shabbat morning at Beth Jacob Congregation, Mendota Heights, MN in anticipation of the Beth Jacob Blood Drive on Martin Luther King Weekend
Me. Receiving a platelet donation sometime in the winter or early spring of 2011.
I’m about to share a pretty personal story with you, and you should know in advance that I’m truly okay if you decide to get up and wander into the hall while I’m talking. I’ve had enough PTSD therapy that I’m confident that I’ll be able to do this, but if hearing about death and cancer and blood – even in the context of the Torah – isn’t available for you today, I get that better than just about anyone.
I wrote my first health care directive when I was 18.
If you’ve known me even a little while, that probably doesn’t surprise you. It wasn’t that I thought my death might be imminent; I’ve just always liked having a plan. I’d update it every few years, but it wasn’t until I was 35 and diagnosed with Acute Myelogenous Leukemia and talked out loud with loved ones about what I wanted in death that it felt . . . real.
Baruch HaShem, it’s been 9 years and 25 days since then, but one evening last week, in the course of a few hours, in response to various aches and pains, heart arrhythmias and a sore throat, my brain determined I was having an aneurism and meningitis, a stroke, blood clot, and heart attack. All at once. I wasn’t, and my frontal cortex mostly knew that. My amygdala, however, would not listen to reason. Still, I did not say anything to Liddy as we navigated our evening. And overnight, as I thought about death – again – I did not wake her up. I rode out the evening, slept for some of the night, and woke to the morning. Modah ani . . . alive in another day.
V’yehi erev v’yehi voker, yom echad.
And there was evening, and there was morning . . . a first day.
What was a day when the very idea of “day” was brand new?
What did it mean that a day came to exist and then . . . was?
What does it mean to live in one?
We are not in a time loop. I know we are not in Bresheet.
We are in Vayechi, unusual because there is no space between the end of the last parsha and the beginning of this one. Remember that. The first word of our parsha this week catches me off guard. Partly it’s that, if I’m honest, I’m just not ready for Jacob – or Joseph – to die. I’m avoiding it. Once I read that word, vayechi, he’s dying and I can’t stop it. He’s going to call Joseph to him, and his grandsons, and his other children. He’s going to write his health care directive, so to speak, and his ethical will. He’s going to . . .
But it’s also that, even though it’s mistaken memory, even though I couldn’t find a single commentary connecting these words, vayechi Ya’akov brought to my mind v’yehi erev v’yehi boker . . . a day.
Like Jacob, I have lived many of my days by their hours, and my years by their days.
Maybe even in the expansiveness of God life happens in small units. Or maybe there is a sense in our narrative of time having a life of its own and marking itself by days. After all, like the specific day of Shabbat a day exists whether or not we take notice of it. Whether or not we are even alive in it. The day is not changed by our attention to it, we are.
Like it or not, the word vayechi leads me to other words, “And lived Jacob in the land of Egypt 17 years” it says . . . and they were particular those years. Not clinging to his brother’s heal, not struggling between the love of his parents, not deceiving his brother, not running from death, not working to only be lied to, not caught in a web of emotions and needs and desires of the women birthing and mothering his children, not wrestling with divine beings, not mourning a death, not taken down by his own favoritism, not torn by the rape of his daughter, not terrified by the acts of his sons, not frustrated with the strife among his children, not grieving the reported death of his favorite, not trying to live up to the legacy of being Israel, not trying to come to terms with living and dying as Jacob – Or HaChaim (A prominent early 18th century Morroccan rabbi) and teaches, 17 years full of life, of serenity.
There is also the tradition based on Tana de bey Eliyahu Rabbah chapter 5 taught as well by Or HaChaim that when a person ends their life in a happy frame of mind, their entire life may be considered as having been a happy one. Connecting Jacob with Job, Or HaChaim shares the view that the present can heal the past. Maybe the last 17 held some balm for the years Jacob reported to Pharaoh as having been short and full of suffering one parsha ago.
Maybe.
For me, there are fatal cracks in that logic, even as I also believe that the present can heal the past.
Next we are told there is a sum of days - by my math 53,655 days – and the days of Jacob’s life came to 147 years.
I have to ask again: What is a day?
What does it mean for us to live one?
It has been 3,313 days since my first blood transfusion - my first of thirty-six.
That is 9 years and 26 days ago.
In each of those 3,313 days, there have been about 43,200 blood transfusions in the United States.
Every . . . two . . . seconds.
All day.
Every day.
My first blood transfusion was the night before my leukemia diagnosis so I hadn’t started chemo yet. It was still safe for my literally brimming with life pregnant nurse, Jenny, to take care of me. After 35 years and several months of days full of life, in October I’d gotten a sinus infection that didn’t respond to several rounds of antibiotics and dragged at me. By November I was aware I had a persistent bruise on my thigh, dizziness and exhaustion, and once I hit the December teens I was always so . . . cold. That morning, when I brushed my teeth, my gums had bled. Curled up in the hospital bed, with Liddy laying next to me, my lips dry and shriveled, shivering in a 72 degree F room under the warmed hospital blankets, I texted my friend Stephanie, “I am so scared.” “I know,” she texted back. “Me, too. But you aren’t alone.” I looked up to see Jenny hanging transfusion bags on my pole. At some point during treatment there were about a dozen things hanging on two poles, but that night, December 16th, 2010, as I remember it, it was just the saline and a pump and the A- blood. Jenny flushed my IV.
Donated red blood cells must be used within 42 days of collection. Donated platelets within 5. I don’t think I had a unit of liquid gold platelets until the next day, but I do remember that night I had two units of red. I’d worked enough blood drives to know that two people within the past six weeks had donated that blood. Laying there, praying that it would keep me alive long enough for the doctors to figure out what was wrong with me, feeling my lips plump up and my body get warmer, I thanked them.
The average bone marrow transplant requires 120 units of platelets and about 20 units of red blood cells. One unit of blood is about a pint. None of my other treatment would matter if I weren’t able to live long enough to have it. An average adult has 10 pints of blood in our bodies. There were some times I needed 4 at once. That isn’t atypical. The average red blood cell transfusion is 3.4 pints. Before my own transfusions, I hadn’t realized how dependent cancer treatment is on blood donation. I was only slightly more aware of needs from things like accidents, sickle cell anemia, prematurity, and open-heart surgery.
During one of my platelet transfusions, I had an allergic reaction to the platelets. Yes. That can happen. I alerted my nurse to my itchy face, my swollen lip, and as she gave me a high dose of Benadryl through my port and I began to fall asleep I wrenched open my eyes and looked up at the golden bag. “I’m so grateful,” I thought. “This totally sucks, and it’s also the only chance I have.” When I woke up, the bag was gone and in its place some other medication. My face didn’t itch. My lip wasn’t swollen. And there was evening, and there was morning. Another day.
At any time, 38% of the population in the US is eligible to donate, and less than 10% do, but donor eligibility is also political. The Red Cross must comply with federal regulations and cannot unilaterally change them, but on its website now asserts that it believes blood donation eligibility should not be based on sexual orientation, that this organization understands the difference between sex and gender, and is committed to working toward an inclusive and equitable process. The FDA defers a man who has had sex with another man for 12 months, even if those men are monogamous. To be clear: That policy is not based on science. In the context of the Red Cross donor history questionnaire, gender is taken to be self-identified and self-reported, there is no deferral associated with being transgender, and eligibility is based on the criteria associated with the gender the donor has reported. The Red Cross issued a new statement on the FDA’s policy in November 2019 and it is posted on their website. They invite advocates to join in the dialogue.
One of my “blood sisters” – I mean, we have only ever met online, but we are both bone marrow transplant recipients – she had 64 transfusions during her treatment. The one time we talked on the phone she asked me if I ever think about “them”. I knew what she meant, and I do, but as she went on her description of her experience fascinated me. She shared that sometimes she feels like her dreams are the residual thoughts and feelings of the more than 100, maybe even more than 200, people who each donated a pint of blood that made up her 64 transfusions. She said sometimes her body feels crowded – not in a good way, or a bad way . . . just . . . crowded.
Of course, these days our donor marrow is what’s making blood in each of our bodies.
As I’ve shared previous years, my not-Jewish-German donor is A+. So now, I’m A+, too. I don’t experience my body as crowded, but my relationship with my body is also nothing like what it was capital “B” Before. My body and I, we have some trust issues. I would not, like Jacob, describe my life as short and full of suffering. But . . . I might say that my days Before were actually more full than my days are Now. They were more extraordinary. Bigger. Before getting sick I chose to make my Hebrew name also my last name, Amy Ariel – Beloved Lion of God. It felt like the right name for fully claiming my own life, and for living it . . . big. These days my favorite days are quieter. Sunny. Warm. Days spent helping people in smaller spaces. Days spent reading. Teaching. Days spent in my garden. Days with Liddy. More of them than I’d like to admit are interrupted, and sometimes disrupted, with the lingering affects of cancer, treatment, and medical trauma. Even so, I get to have them. In so many ways, my life is unexpected.
I find myself wondering about the days in Jacob’s last 17 years. What did they actually look like and feel like? Were they sometimes disrupted by the lingering effects of something in his other 130 years? Were they often wonderfully ordinary?
Remember how there is no space – none at all – between the end of the last parsha and the beginning of this one? Some sages and rabbis explain that this structure makes a statement about the closing of Jacob’s prophecy, or about the slavery to come. Well, the last word of the last parsha is m’od. I can’t remember where, but I read a tongue in cheek translation of m’od some time ago, “with the force of muchness.” Muchness - In Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland that essential something that makes us – us.
If we take some liberties . . . maybe we could get “with the force of muchness lived Jacob.” And maybe, in the end, it’s less about the happiness of his last 17 years and more about their ordinariness. Their Jacobness.
One person, every two seconds.
Most of the time, when we donate blood, or volunteer, or help someone who plans to give remember to stay hydrated, or advocate for science-informed and inclusive donor eligibility policy, the person whose life we are sustaining on the other side of that donation is marvelously ordinary. They are probably so scared. There is no doubt they need every misheberach prayer we can send their way. We are helping them hold onto their muchness. And maybe that blood will be all they need. Or, more likely, that blood will mix in with the blood of lots of other people, and all together a life gets sustained.
Maybe for an evening . . .
. . . and then a morning.
Maybe for a day.
Maybe even a whole sum of days.
Beth Jacob’s Blood Drive this year is next week on Sunday, January 19, from 8:30-2:30. Sign up for that drive or one near you here. If you have questions about reserving a spot or volunteering, you can ask Dave Honan or Sharon Benmamom.
Please do consider committing one of your days to helping someone like me have another one.
Shabbat Shalom.