My Blog Public Post

I’m sitting alone in a room at an extended-stay rehabilitation clinic in Biloxi, Mississippi.

There’s a dresser with a television sitting on top of it, a bed, and a bathroom I have never been inside, even though I moved here three days ago.

Several titanium rods and screws are holding my right ankle together. Bandages cover nearly my entire lower right leg. Three times a day, somebody brings me a meal on a tray.

Other than that, I am mostly alone.

In less than two weeks, I turn eighty years old.

Before this happened, I was in remarkably good physical shape for my age. I had a solid workout routine going. I shared an apartment in Biloxi, rode my motorized trike around town, crossed bridges, took pictures, built websites, wrote stories, and continued creating a life that still felt very much like my own.

Then I fell from my trike and broke my ankle and lower leg.

I could see the beach that day. I was only a few blocks away from the Gulf, close enough to see its blue water ahead of me.

I just couldn’t reach it.

Once I hit the pavement, the Biloxi medical system took possession of me again. Ambulances, emergency rooms, hospital beds, heart monitors, surgery, titanium hardware, pain medicine, and now this rehabilitation room.

My independent life became a medical schedule almost overnight.

Then my phone bought the farm.

It did this without consulting me, requesting a budget, or even allowing me to put together a proper requirements list. The battery stopped charging, the phone stopped communicating, and suddenly the little device that connected me to nearly everyone and everything was gone.

That phone may only be a machine, but right now it represents freedom.

It is how I reach family and friends. It is how I share my writing. It is how I ask for help without yelling down a hallway. It is how I remain part of the world beyond this room.

And then there are two women in my life.

All three—the phone and these two women—are important to whatever comes next.

The first woman is my daughter.

I lost my place in her life when I was a young father. That loss dictated much of my future and altered the direction of my life more than almost anything else ever has.

Some decisions happen in a moment and continue happening for the rest of your life.

You cannot go backward and become the man you should have been. You cannot reclaim the years that disappeared. But perhaps, while both people are still alive, you can tell the truth. You can listen. You can accept responsibility. You can stop defending the younger version of yourself and allow the older version to finally understand what was lost.

At eighty, I am not interested in pretending the past did not happen.

I am interested in healing whatever can still be healed.

On the other side of my life hovers a woman with whom I am seriously considering a future.

That sentence frightens me a little.

It also gives me hope.

I have survived alcoholism, loneliness, hospitals, broken bones, broken promises, lost years, and more fresh starts than most people are ever given. Yet somewhere inside this battered, bandaged old man remains the possibility that love has not completely finished with me.

I do not know exactly what that future will look like.

I do know that I want a future built on honesty rather than illusion. I want friendship, tenderness, laughter, loyalty, and the simple comfort of knowing that somebody is thinking about me while I am sitting alone in a room like this one.

Perhaps that is what recovery really means.

Not merely learning to stand on a repaired ankle.

Not merely learning to walk again.

Recovery means rebuilding the connections that keep a person alive.

It means finding my way back to my daughter.

It means discovering whether love and companionship are still possible.

It means replacing a dead phone so I can reach the people who matter.

And it means getting out of this room, back into the Biloxi sunshine, onto whatever form of wheels or legs will carry me, and finally reaching that beach I could see but could not touch.

I am almost eighty.

I am wounded, temporarily stranded, and sometimes terribly alone.

But I am still here.

I am still thinking.

I am still creating.

I am still capable of loving and being loved.

And I am not finished.

Peace.

Power.

Purpose.

Pride.

And perhaps, one more time, love.