Samwise Health Update, Part 1

With help from Mary Oliver

Our annual winter-spring odysseys are a repeated exercise in life intensified and condensed. We don’t go and settle in one place and wait until New Hampshire thaws; we bounce around and chase forever dreams.

Morgan Sjogren, desert scribe and loved friend, tells us that we never return from an epic adventure the same way we did when we left. That’s always been our experience, but never more so than this year.

I’m late to travel, and there’s much I still long to see and experience. But here’s a secret: the first trip was inspired by a deathbed reckoning. Each that has followed has been spurred on by Death.

While in Maine Med for five weeks, most of it spent slow dancing with the Woman in Black, a priest came into my room while I was in intensive care. Even in my delirious state, I knew he’d been hovering for days and was finally sent in by one of the nurses.

Wires and tubes were either attached to or plunging inside my body. I needed oxygen, and breathing was made possible by a humming mach…