I know a man who soars above the city every night. In his dreams, he twirls and swirls with his toes kissing the Earth. Everything has motion, he claims, even a body as paralyzed as his own. This man is my father.
Znam čovjeka koji lebdi gradom svake noći. U snovima lebdi i okreće se dok mu stopala ljube Zemlju. Sve je u pokretu, kaže on, čak i paralizirano tijelo poput njegova. On je moj otac.
Three years ago, when I found out that my father had suffered a severe stroke in his brain stem, I walked into his room in the ICU at the Montreal Neurological Institute and found him lying deathly still, tethered to a breathing machine. Paralysis had closed over his body slowly, beginning in his toes, then legs, torso, fingers and arms. It made its way up his neck, cutting off his ability to breathe, and stopped just beneath the eyes. He never lost consciousness. Rather, he watched from within as his body shut down, limb by limb, muscle by muscle.
Prije tri godine kada sam saznala da mi je otac doživio snažan moždani udar, ušla sam u njegovu sobu na intenzivnoj njezi na Neurološkom institutu u Montrealu i vidjela ga kako leži mirno kao mrtvac, priključen na uređaj za disanje. Paraliza mu je polako oduzimala tijelo, najprije nožne prste, zatim noge, prsa, prste i ruke. Konačno se proširila i na vrat, onemogućavajući mu disanje i zaustavila se točno ispod očiju. Cijelo vrijeme nije izgubio svijest, već je iznutra promatrao kako mu se tijelo gasi, ud po ud, mišić po mišić.
In that ICU room, I walked up to my father's body,
U toj sobi za intenzivnu njegu, prišla sam očevu tijelu
and with a quivering voice and through tears, I began reciting the alphabet. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K. At K, he blinked his eyes. I began again. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I. He blinked again at the letter I, then at T, then at R, and A: Kitra. He said "Kitra, my beauty, don't cry. This is a blessing." There was no audible voice, but my father called out my name powerfully. Just 72 hours after his stroke, he had already embraced the totality of his condition. Despite his extreme physical state, he was completely present with me, guiding, nurturing, and being my father as much if not more than ever before.
i drhtećim glasom i kroz suze počela sam recitirati abecedu. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K. Trepnuo je na K. Krenula sam ispočetka. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I. Tada ja trepnuo na slovo I, zatim na T, pa R i na kraju na A: Kitra. Rekao je: "Kitra, draga moja, nemoj plakati. Ovo je blagoslov." Nije se čuo glas, ali moj je otac snažno zazvao moje ime. Samo 72 sata nakon moždanog udara već je prihvatio svoje stanje u cijelosti. Unatoč ekstremnom fizičkom stanju, bio je potpuno prisutan; vodio me, njegovao i bio je moj otac onoliko, ako ne i više nego prije.
Locked-in syndrome is many people's worst nightmare. In French, it's sometimes called "maladie de l'emmuré vivant." Literally, "walled-in-alive disease." For many people, perhaps most, paralysis is an unspeakable horror, but my father's experience losing every system of his body was not an experience of feeling trapped, but rather of turning the psyche inwards, dimming down the external chatter, facing the recesses of his own mind, and in that place, falling in love with life and body anew.
Sindrom zaključanosti najgora je noćna mora mnogih ljudi. U francuskom to nekad nazivamo: "maladie de l'emmuré vivant." Doslovno: "bolest živ-zazidan". Za mnoge ljude, možda i za većinu, paraliza je neopisiv užas, ali iskustvo moga oca dok je gubio svaki sustav u svom tijelu nije bilo iskustvo zazidavanja, već okretanje psihe prema unutra isključujući vanjsku buku, suočavanje s vrelom vlastita uma i ondje se iznova zaljubio u život i tijelo.
As a rabbi and spiritual man dangling between mind and body, life and death, the paralysis opened up a new awareness for him. He realized he no longer needed to look beyond the corporeal world in order to find the divine. "Paradise is in this body. It's in this world," he said.
Kao rabin i duhovan čovjek koji visi između uma i tijela, života i smrti, paraliza mu je otvorila nove svijesti. Shvatio je kako više ne treba gledati povrh tjelesnog svijeta kako bi pronašao duhovni svijet. "Raj je u ovom tijelu. U ovom je svijetu.", rekao je.
I slept by my father's side for the first four months, tending as much as I could to his every discomfort, understanding the deep human psychological fear of not being able to call out for help. My mother, sisters, brother and I, we surrounded him in a cocoon of healing. We became his mouthpiece, spending hours each day reciting the alphabet as he whispered back sermons and poetry with blinks of his eye. His room, it became our temple of healing. His bedside became a site for those seeking advice and spiritual counsel, and through us, my father was able to speak and uplift, letter by letter, blink by blink. Everything in our world became slow and tender as the din, drama and death of the hospital ward faded into the background. I want to read to you one of the first things that we transcribed in the week following the stroke. He composed a letter, addressing his synagogue congregation, and ended it with the following lines: "When my nape exploded, I entered another dimension: inchoate, sub-planetary, protozoan. Universes are opened and closed continually. There are many when low, who stop growing. Last week, I was brought so low, but I felt the hand of my father around me, and my father brought me back."
Prva četiri mjeseca spavala sam uz oca, brinula o njemu koliko god sam mogla i pokušavala umanjiti svaku njegovu neugodu, razumijevajući duboki ljudski psihološki strah nemogućnosti pozivanja upomoć. Moja majka, sestre, brat i ja zamotali smo ga u čahuru izlječenja. Postali smo njegov vjesnik provodeći sate i sate recitirajući abecedu dok nam je on šaptao propovjedi i poeziju treptajima oka. Njegova soba postala je hram izlječenja. Njegov bolesnički krevet postao je utočište onih u potrazi za savjetovanjem i duhovnim vodstvom, a kroz nas moj je otac bio sposoban govoriti i ohrabrivati, slovo po slovo, treptaj po treptaj. Sve je u našim svjetovima postalo usporeno i nježno dok su galama, drama i smrt kojima je bolnički odjel bio ispunjen polako padali u drugi plan. Želim vam pročitati neke od prvih stvari koje smo transkribrirali tijekom tjedna poslije udara. Sastavio je pismo koje je oslovio na svoju sinagogu, a pismo je završilo ovim riječima: "Kada mi je zatiljak eksplodirao, zakoračio sam u drugu dimenziju: u začetku, subplanetarnu, praživotinjsku. Svemiri se kontinuirano otvoriše i zatvoriše. Kada su nisko, mnogi prestaju rasti. Prošlog tjedna bio sam tako nisko, ali osjetio sam Očevu ruku oko sebe i On me vratio."
When we weren't his voice, we were his legs and arms. I moved them like I know I would have wanted my own arms and legs to be moved were they still for all the hours of the day. I remember I'd hold his fingers near my face, bending each joint to keep it soft and limber. I'd ask him again and again to visualize the motion, to watch from within as the finger curled and extended, and to move along with it in his mind.
Kad nismo bili njegov glas, bili smo njegove noge i ruke. Micala sam ih kako bih i sama htjela da miču moje ruke i noge da su bile nepokrenute toliko vremena. Sjećam se kako bih držala njegove ruke pored svoga lica, savijajući svaki zglob da bi ostao mekan i gibak. Neprestano sam ga tražila da zamisli taj pokret, da iznutra promatra kako se prst svija i ispravlja i da to isto radi u svom umu.
Then, one day, from the corner of my eye, I saw his body slither like a snake, an involuntary spasm passing through the course of his limbs. At first, I thought it was my own hallucination, having spent so much time tending to this one body, so desperate to see anything react on its own. But he told me he felt tingles, sparks of electricity flickering on and off just beneath the surface of the skin. The following week, he began ever so slightly to show muscle resistance. Connections were being made. Body was slowly and gently reawakening, limb by limb, muscle by muscle, twitch by twitch.
Zatim jednog dana kutkom oka vidjela sam kako mu tijelo klizi poput zmije, nenamjeran grč što je prolazio svim njegovim udovima. Isprva sam pomislila da haluciniram nakon što sam toliko vremena provela uz to jedno tijelo, očajnički se nadajući da će reagirati samo od sebe. No rekao mi je da je osjetio trnce, iskre struje koje su se palile i gasile ispod površine kože. Sljedećeg je tjedna počeo pokazivati gotovo neprimjetnu mišićnu rezistenciju. Stvarale su se veze. Tijelo se ponovno budilo sporo i nježno, ud po ud, mišić po mišić, trzaj po trzaj.
As a documentary photographer, I felt the need to photograph each of his first movements like a mother with her newborn. I photographed him taking his first unaided breath, the celebratory moment after he showed muscle resistance for the very first time, the new adapted technologies that allowed him to gain more and more independence. I photographed the care and the love that surrounded him.
Budući da sam dokumentarni fotograf, imala sam potrebu fotografirati svaki od njegovih prvih pokreta poput majke s novorođenim djetetom. Fotografirala sam njegov prvi nepotpomognuti udisaj, trenutak vrijedan slavlja kad je pokazao mišićnu rezistenciju po prvi put, novorazvijene tehnologije koje su mu omogućile da dobiva sve više neovisnosti. Fotografirala sam njegu i ljubav što ga je okruživala.
But my photographs only told the outside story of a man lying in a hospital bed attached to a breathing machine. I wasn't able to portray his story from within, and so I began to search for a new visual language, one which strived to express the ephemeral quality of his spiritual experience.
No moje fotografije pričaju samo vanjsku priču o čovjeku koji leži u bolničkom krevetu, pričvršćenom za uređaj za disanje. Nisam mogla prenijeti njegovu unutrašnju priču, pa sam počela tražiti novi vizualni jezik, jezik kojemu je cilj bio izraziti prolaznost njegovih duhovnih iskustava.
Finally, I want to share with you a video from a series that I've been working on that tries to express the slow, in-between existence that my father has experienced. As he began to regain his ability to breathe, I started recording his thoughts, and so the voice that you hear in this video is his voice.
Naposljetku, željela bih vam pokazati jedan u nizu videa na kojima sam radila, a koji nastoji prikazati sporu podijeljenu egzistenciju što ju je iskusio moj otac. Kako mu se vraćala sposobnost disanja, tako sam ja počela snimati njegove misli, a glas koji čujete u ovom videu njegov je glas.
(Video) Ronnie Cahana: You have to believe you're paralyzed to play the part of a quadriplegic. I don't. In my mind, and in my dreams every night I Chagall-man float over the city twirl and swirl with my toes kissing the floor. I know nothing about the statement of man without motion. Everything has motion. The heart pumps. The body heaves. The mouth moves. We never stagnate. Life triumphs up and down.
(Video) Ronnie Cahana: Morate vjerovati da ste paralizirani da biste mogli biti tetraplegičar. Ja ne vjerujem. U mom umu, u mojim snovima svake noći poput Chagalla lebdim gradom, lebdim i okrećem se dok mi stopala ljube tlo. Ne znam ništa o nepokretnom čovjeku. Sve je u pokretu. Srce kuca. Tijelo se giba. Usne se kreću. Nikad ne stagniramo. Život trijumfura gore-dolje."
Kitra Cahana: For most of us, our muscles begin to twitch and move long before we are conscious, but my father tells me his privilege is living on the far periphery of the human experience. Like an astronaut who sees a perspective that very few of us will ever get to share, he wonders and watches as he takes his first breaths and dreams about crawling back home. So begins life at 57, he says. A toddler has no attitude in its being, but a man insists on his world every day.
Kitra Cahana: Većini nas mišići se počinju trzati i micati puno prije no što dođemo svijesti, ali otac mi kaže kako je njegova privilegija život na krajnjoj periferiji ljudskog doživljavanja. Poput astronauta koji ima pogled koji će vrlo malo nas ikada vidjeti, pita se i promatra dok udiše prve udisaje i sanja o tome kako puzi natrag kući. Život počinje u 57. godini, kaže. Malo dijete nema nikakvog stava u svome biću, ali čovjek svakog dana inzistira na svome svijetu.
Few of us will ever have to face physical limitations to the degree that my father has, but we will all have moments of paralysis in our lives. I know I frequently confront walls that feel completely unscalable, but my father insists that there are no dead ends. Instead, he invites me into his space of co-healing to give the very best of myself, and for him to give the very best of himself to me. Paralysis was an opening for him. It was an opportunity to emerge, to rekindle life force, to sit still long enough with himself so as to fall in love with the full continuum of creation.
Rijetki će se od nas suočiti s fizičkim ograničenjima s kakvima se suočava moj otac, ali svi ćemo doživjeti trenutke paralize u našim životima. I sama često nailazim na prepreke koje se doimaju sasvim nepremostive, ali moj otac tvrdi kako nema bezizlaznih situacija. Poziva me u svoj prostor međusobnog izlječenja u kojem dajem najbolje od sebe, a on meni daje najbolje od sebe. Paraliza mu je pružila nov početak. Bila je to prilika da oživi svoju životnu silu, da dovoljno dugo bude sam sa sobom kako bi se zaljubio u kontinuum stvaranja.
Today, my father is no longer locked in. He moves his neck with ease, has had his feeding peg removed, breathes with his own lungs, speaks slowly with his own quiet voice, and works every day to gain more movement in his paralyzed body. But the work will never be finished. As he says, "I'm living in a broken world, and there is holy work to do."
Danas više nije "zaključan". S lakoćom miče vratom, više se ne hrani na cjevčicu, diše vlastitim plućima, govori sporo vlastitim tihim glasom i svakodnevno radi na pokretanju svog paraliziranog tijela. Ali taj posao nikad neće biti gotov. Kao što sam kaže: "Živim u svijetu u ruševinama i čeka me nebeski posao."
Thank you.
Hvala vam.
(Applause)
(Pljesak)