Tanja has not made any phone calls since the accident, largely because she can’t dial or hold the phone, but today she received a call from the admitting nurse at the Rehabilitation Institute of Oregon which call she accepted with enthusiasm.

Apart from some moments up front where she directed how the phone was to be held to her ear, it went as you expect a call to go. Greetings. Pleasantries. A buckling down to business which consisted of pauses followed by statements that were clearly responses to simple, expected questions.

Her full legal name, her age, her address. Her place of birth. Her occupation. These provided no surprises to those who might be listening. Likewise the history of her progress since the fall is familiar to us all.

Then, finally, some unexpected information—unexpected, that is, to anyone unfamiliar with Tanja.

“My goals?” She said, brightly. “My goals are to do absolutely everything I used to do….Uh huh… That’s right.. Would it be better if I broke it down into smaller sub goals? … Mmm hmm.. Okay, I want to feed myself… I want to pet my cats.. I want to hold their little faces in my hands. I want to garden. I want to drive a car… That’s a partial list.”

Long pause.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “My goals for my caretakers? I don’t understand.”

You can imagine someone saying this as the prelude to a withering attack. Tanja listens for a moment.

“Oh! I see. My goal for my caretakers is to have no caretakers. You know? I mean, my goal is probably a lot like your goal for your caretakers…. Exactly!”

They chat a while longer. Much back and forth.

“Okay then… sounds good.. I’ll wait to hear…right..right.. okay… thank you… goodbye.. yes, bye bye… we’re done.. actually done… I’m saying that the call is over now and you can take the phone away from my head.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. How’d it go?”

“Very well,” she said. “Very well indeed.”

I never read The Red Badge of Courage—it came up in high school and I made the determination that I could simply proceed as if I had read it with no discernible degradation of my academic trajectory—and my take-away is that we can imagine ourselves to be heroes or we can fear that we are cowards, but we do not know, truly, how we will behave until we have faced reality and acted.

Tanja told me today, “when I wake up in the middle of the night and I am alone and I can’t move my arms and all I want to do is get out of bed and just do something, but I can’t do anything, I just give myself little pep talks. I say, ‘this is not the time for action. This is the time for rest. This is what I am doing. I am resting this arm. I am resting this shoulder. I am actively resting it.’”

“My arms tingle all the time. From my shoulder down, like if they fell asleep, but the hardest sleep ever. It vibrates. So I just think of it like a telephone call from my brain. The line is ringing. ‘Hello, wrist? Yeah, it’s me, Brain. You ready? Fingers, you ready? Hello elbow, you good to go?’ The line is open, the phone is ringing and eventually someone will pick up.”

I don’t know about you, but I can, with no effort, imagine awaking in a hospital bed with immobile limbs and thinking a number of less progress- oriented thoughts.

Okay, so she’s brave. She’s kind. She’s beautiful. Whatever. This why in our short 20 years together I have, more than once, heard her referred to as “perfect fucking Tanja.” And, hearing it, I understood it was not strictly a compliment, nor did I feel moved to defend her with any vigor.

But, that said, c’mon! Given a job like this—hard work, discomfort, little reward beyond what you find in the effort, no guarantee of reward, the happiness of others in the balance— is there someone else you’d choose?

Michael Jordan? No.

The guy who built the Sphinx?

Heracles?

Well, maybe Heracles. Though if you asked Tanja to clean the Augean stables, she’d use a wheelbarrow not a river and it would get done with a damn sight less drama.

So, to recap: tomorow or Thursday she leaves OHSU and steps into the future!

https://tidal.com/track/112053597