A funny thing happened when Jerry and I were about to give talks to a group at the Princeton School of Theology. On our way to another building, where the meeting was to be held, I stepped forward on what appeared to be the surface of a veranda continuous with the indoor floor. Unfortunately what I believed to be continuous was actually an unmarked step, discontinuous with the concrete veranda below it. Utterly unprepared and landing hard, I knew I’d broken something.

What was broken turned out to be a hip, fortunately mended by a surgeon at the Princeton facility to which an ambulance quickly drove me. After a few days for recovery from the surgery, they moved me to a fine Rehab facility closer to home. Some days later, I was released and allowed to return home. So far, all seemed to be in place and my recovery set to continue safely on course.

But that wasn’t actually what happened. Rather, each institution, which had its own must-take medications and must-not-take prohibitions, failed to communicate properly with the next institution, and all failed to coordinate the remaining instructions that were to be followed by me once I was back home.

In consequence, my body was flooded by remedies some of which should have been discontinued, while at the same time suffering the absence of other remedies that should have begun.

My vital numbers went into free fall. Death would certainly have followed had the ambulance crew not quickly applied their life-saving remedies.

So it was with that history – near death by mistake – that I spent some days in one wing of Intensive Care at our local hospital. What iatrogenic conditions had to be treated there are matters that we need not review here. Suffice it to say that I’m back home now, and lucky to be back in the Land of the Living.

The story is unusual, at least I hope it is, but there is an even stranger story running alongside it. 

I am happier now than I was before all this happened!

How on earth can that be? Do I have any explanation? Well, here is what I come up with, putting together recent clues that I’ve uncovered.

Yesterday, I was looking for the draft of an essay that I’d been sketching prior to the successive hospitalizations of May. Having no clear recollection of where I’d put it, I was thumbing through my recent journals, thinking I might have penned the draft in one of them.

A byproduct of that search was the view it gave me of my state of mind prior to the injuries and treatments of May. I saw how I’d been thinking in March and April, before all this happened. Much to my surprise, my journal pages record a state of mind filled with anxieties and minor discontents. Puzzled, I tried to see or figure out why those journal entries disclosed such a discontented tone. A tone quite foreign to the one I would strike at present.

Here’s my explanation, as near as I can reconstruct it. Let’s go back about 25 years, to the time when I first fell in love with Jerry. To me that experience was like breaking through an opaque skylight to the blue sky far far above it. A sky much higher than any I’d been prepared to experience.

How did I handle that experience? After I’d plumbed it enough to see that it was quite real, my present conjecture is that I must have pulled the lower curtain-of-sky back over it, to conceal it. Why would I have done that? I must have feared that such a degree of openness would also have left me vulnerable to attacks or other negative experiences of unpredictable kinds. As a result, I may have also closed myself off, at least in some degree, to the clear joy I felt when I first fell in love with Jerry.

I must have done all this unconsciously – especially since it sounds like a real dumb move to have made. But the unconscious is not necessarily the sharpest of one’s mental faculties.

Anyway, the fracture plus near-death encounter had to be suffered without cover-ups or evasions of any kind. The combined experiences were too dangerous for evasions.

As a result, and it’s the last thing I would have expected, they gave me –

no hiding place from joy.