My Legacy Lies with the Atlantic
A narrative essay by J.D. Walters
My legacy is tied to the ebbs and flows of the Atlantic. I stare out from her shores seeking echoed voices from nameless faces of those who stood and stared before me...those predecessing ancestors who brought their stories with the waves when they came to the same sands where I too can now stand. I look into the grains of glass and bits of shell at my feet--millions of little mirrors making the shore that’s holding me--and I wonder if I’m walking in the same direction as They. I try so hard not to repeat Their mistakes, and so I keep coming back to the Atlantic, to listen and stare at the shadows they’ve left for me to see.
The Atlantic whispers to me my legacy with the echoes from those branches of my family tree, which trace as far back as I can find to the beaches we call Chesapeake. We were in Maryland, and D.C., and in Virginia Beach, all the way back to the Seventeen-teens, and though I don’t know all of our history, I keep coming back to listen. I seek out the truths in the tales of those I meet as we stare out from the shore and share stories. We speak and we Sign about cycles and systems as the Bay cleanses our souls with her salinity.
Since before I can remember, I have sought to explore all the life I could find beyond the horizon that I can see from my small vantage point in the sand. As a child, I wandered through the swamped loblolly pine woods of Poquoson seeking the throughways from the rivers to the Watershed for tadpoles and turtles; and I remember my mother’s hands helping me dip cages staged with raw chicken necks into the water from the docks to catch blue-shelled crabs who couldn’t resist the temptation. I learned about Death over newspaper-taped tables and seasoned the lesson with Old Bay.
I think about legacy a lot when I stare out into the ocean. I stare and I wonder things like “where are we going?,’ “where have we been?.” I think about stories by Joyce Carol Oates, the chicken, and the crabs, and the cage. I think about change. About cause and effect. Moons and tides--the ebbs and flows which weave our lives in time.
I think about facts like “human beings are made of 60% water,” and I wonder if we too are moved by forces we cannot see.
I think to myself that it’s impossible to point at the “starting point” of an ocean, because where would I venture to draw a line on a constantly shifting entity? A horizon seems finite, but I stare with awe and attention because it’s also, somehow, infinity. A paradox. It’s puzzling, so I stare and my mind tries to “make sense” of what my eyes perceive, which is to say find a solution…’ordo ab chao’... “order from chaos”...or some Socratic Latin like that.
Sometimes I think I’ve stared at horizon lines long enough to learn that a line is little more than an illusion made from the viewpoint of the person staring, and they happen to be holding a pencil while having the daring to draw. Therefore, one could say the horizon is only as limited as the liberties of the artist making a memory. For perspective (one’s vantage point), in 2018, when my kidneys could no longer filter or make “order from chaos” out of my bloodstream, I learned some of the more literal ways one can be limited of liberties as the artistic architect of their being. Chronic kidney disease really robbed me of my autonomy.
I don’t think anything can prepare even the most experienced “master” of Selfship for the moment a physician says “ you have 6 months-to-a-year” before dying in your sleep...
...It didn’t matter that I’d known the name of my disease and watched it closely since my diagnosis in 2005; the prognosis didn’t prepare me...
...It didn’t matter that I’d earned a degree in psychology from Mr. Jefferson’s prestigious university and spent several years as a mental health professional coaching other people how to cope; my mental health tool kit was not equipped for this…no brush or pencil to paint the picture in my art therapy of where the story plot goes...
...It didn’t matter that I’d gone to my appointments, and participated in the clinical trials, and advocated with kidney patients all over the country and beyond; even the vicarious experiences of survivors of the same condition could not prepare me for the complete and utter devastation of dying. Nothing does.
The line disappears and there is no horizon, only salt and sand in the wound of uncomfortable places where your plans for the future used to be. A hurricane came like Isabel to swallow my legacy like she swallowed Poquoson and all the loblolly pines in 2003. A new hurricane at age 28 called “ESRD” and a painful lesson called “Dialysis,” which from the Latin would translate to “separation, or dissolution.” I learned how to separate and dissolve myself 4 times a day every day for 64 days before a friend offered me a different solution. A Transplant.
Before I separated myself like oil from an ocean, someone loaned me a new organ--a kidney I nicknamed Bean. I feed Bean with love and a thousand ‘thank you’s’ as a daily routine. He keeps me connected to the lessons I’ve learned before and still cannot conceive--lessons learned while not dissolving completely from too much dying--and I’m thankful for the pieces of me that are both mine and not.
I steer myself to an infusion once a month to make my body more open-minded to the “otherness” of the foreign organ giving me life. From my vantage point connected to an IV pole at two o’clock on a Tuesday every month, I see needles in the veins at my wrists that will bruise black and blue for weeks after I leave and I smile. I smile because I have transitioned to a new phase state where I no longer separate myself from my own waves everyday, and it gives me a unique perspective. The needles and the pain and the bruises are welcome when they are life-giving.
In recent days, while I stare at sunsets behind foggy glasses from behind a mask that keeps my immunocompromised body safe from a virus, I wonder…
What if being “well” meant embracing “myself” in the “others”? Like my Bean that’s biologically “not me--” anatomically male of non-native proteins, which is sustaining life from a very visible spot. I can point to a “there,” and know with the rest of me that ‘wellness’ is not entirely confined to the organ residing in that space. “There” is not there giving life by itself. The organism contributes too--the ‘me’ that gets to choose the way.
A wise nephrologist once told me that a kidney functions a lot like a compass: multifunctional in four cardinal directions where the captain must understand all the coordinates to stay the course.
We navigate the cardinal points: North is the primary function of blood filtration, which shares the Southern roads of cardiovascular regulation and blood pressure, while the Western winds make iron and raw materials for the marrow, and to the East we moderate minerals like calcium and phosphorus for healthy bones. We navigate them all together to measure rates of filtration: like how many teaspoons of blood can pass through in a minute? We calculate with math to make a map--an educated guess on what’s going on--to know where are we going. To compare where we’ve been. I used to make life like “normal” with about 25 teaspoons of blood filtering along with the big hand on the clock, until one day I watched myself deteriorate to 5. It didn’t happen overnight, but I know that everything slowed down and it suddenly took me seventeen minutes to walk a quarter of a mile, and I remember feeling without direction. Dr. Vanessa Grubbs wrote a memoir with that beautiful metaphorI borrowed about teaspoons while teaching me that I had been asking myself the wrong question to learn directions or how to read the map.
“What is health?” I inquire of the horizon from my vantage point in the sand staring into the waves. I ask as I hold high a bag of dextrose solution--the dialysis that made me know separation and osmosis so intimately that my eyes now blur to the lines between the water and the horizon; between “you,” and “me.” I think about a neuroscientist named Peter sterling and what he wrote about despair, andI wonder if we all melt into the blackened blues of the Atlantic as one allostatic ocean without a real horizon dividing us from what’s infinite...eventually. Do our lives flow through the strait of Gibraltar to touch the continents that cradled our civilization before returning to the space where we stand and share stories? I wonder...
I wonder what it means to be “well,” and the only answer I can come up with for myself is to stop giving into the temptation of trying to draw lines to define where “legacy” lies in the water, lest I find myself cast into a cage.
I stare at my scars and trace my fingertips along unfeeling skin, and I see the lines of a story baring the bloodstains of my mistaken behaviors as I stare out from the shore. I listen to the stories of the Atlantic at the behest of those who came before me, and I lay myself bare as I howl truths to a horizon that I’m still trying to understand. I stand in the sand and I scream until the ethereal sound of primal rage makes a change that turns a tide into a new shore.
I stare at my scars in the mirrors in the glass and the shells I walk upon and where I see the stains and the shadows my footprints have made, I also see hope.
I see hope for a way to wield the reins of my own allostatic osmosis--to master the waves and currents of that overflowing supposed-“sixty percent” of water within me and calibrate to a cardinal knowing of Selfship. My course is to study the coordinates of this shore--to steady my feet until I meet again that horizonless Atlantic space beckoning me back to the spaces where legacies actually lie...where the crustaceans cast together to make a world of muddy water clean.
…’ordo ab chao’...”infinity”
… or something not so metaphorical like that.