Survivor

One day the daughter of the people whose house I was hiding in rushed down to me in the basement to warn me that the Gestapo had just pulled up in front to round up any hidden Jews. I quickly stashed my mattress and things behind other furniture, and ran for the back exit before I could even put my shoes on.

I peeked around the corner of the building and saw the soldiers getting out of the vehicles with their German Shepherd Dogs. I panicked! I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I wasn’t ready to give up. Then I saw the dog house. The older couple who were sheltering me had a big dog who lived in their back yard.

I crawled into the dog house to hide — with the dog! As the Gestapo came around to where I was, through the small doorway of the dog house, I could see the boots of the soldiers go by, as well as their dogs.

Thank God, the dog I was with just huddled in the house with me, and camouflaged my scent! Then the Gestapo left. I survived! As I heard them driving off, I felt so alive!”

Although my mother’s sense of innocence and care-free living was eroded, and although she felt vulnerable and even fragile, her survival instinct took over, and something inside grew irrationally and recklessly stronger. On the outside, her life contracted. On the inside it expanded.

Survive

Years ago, archeologists found some wheat seeds which had slept in the dark for over five thousand years, inside one of the great pyramids in Egypt. On a lark, to see how intact these seeds were, the scientists who had discovered them, watered them, and lo and behold, they sprouted! To survive the dark barren time, the seeds withdrew their life force and went dormant to conserve it.

The Alaskan wood frog actually freezes solid in the Winter season, and then thaws out come Spring. Their bodies go into complete stasis, including no heartbeat, for months

at a time, for the sake of greater survival. Sometimes life will go dormant to survive.

For someone facing a major medical diagnosis, it seems like the world collapses into a narrow survival focus. We put many “normal” life activities on hold either because we can no longer do them, or we zero in on what we need to do to get well. When that includes an extended lifestyle change, we might feel deprived and reduced, not only in our involvement with life, but even in our sense of self. Is survival then worth it?

One patient I took care of as an ICU nurse years ago had suffered a severe heart attack. He became so debilitated that he lay in bed day after day, week after week, kept alive by all sorts of IV drugs and support machines. His only hope was a heart transplant.

“What’s become of me?” he said forlornly one afternoon months later. “I lay around doing nothing, and I’m even looking forward to Memorial Day weekend because the odds are better of someone dying in a car accident and providing a donor heart. That’s just not me.

I can’t live like this anymore. It’s not worth it.” He said goodbye to his wife, and that night, suffered a fatal heart attack.

The will to live has been sparked into our bodies by Nature herself, but it too can flicker and be extinguished. We often need to endure hardships to survive, and those include not only environmental or circumstantial obstacles but internal ones as well. Hard times challenge our sense of worth and deservedness, and often trigger inner states of discouragement, limitation,

apathy, and even despair. We either meet these with focus, determination, and resilience like never before, or we go down.

Thrive

On the other hand, crisis and survival modes often bring out the best in people. For all its tragedy, 9/11 also punctuated our humanity and our willingness to volunteer and help others. In medical crisis we often get to feel the love and support of our family, friends, and community like never before.

“I didn’t know just how many people loved me,” said a surprised guest at Hippocrates Wellness upon receiving an outpouring of support from her church who had raised the money for her visit.

Survival mode also unlocks a deep primal permission to live. The healing journey beckons us to open up and fully express, create, explore and self-reveal. “I realize now that in my life I’ve been driving with one foot on the brake pedal,” reflected a Hippocrates guest in the Healing Circle, “And now I’m going for it. I’ve got nothing to lose and everything to live for.”

Anotolye Broyard, author of Intoxicated by My Illness, put it this way: “When my friends heard I had cancer, they found me surprisingly cheerful and talked about my courage. But it has nothing to do with courage, at least not for me. As far as I can tell, it’s a question of desire. I’m filled with desire — to live, to write, to do everything. Desire itself is a kind of immortality. While I’ve always had trouble concentrating, I now feel as concentrated as a diamond or a microchip.”

Thriving is the goal of surviving, and our desire for it emerges out of the ashes of hard times. Survival mode kicks in with an immediacy that nourishes our lust for living. Suddenly our priorities become clear. What to do and what not to do rise out of the realm of rules, and soar into the realm of feeling.

Survival mode sharpens us, fine tunes our sensibilities of what is life-affirming and what isn’t. Suddenly we know, and we know it is worth it.

Survival mode may reduce us in unwanted ways, as it did the isolated wheat seeds and frozen frogs, but it also helps us unclutter, simplify, appreciate and get real. My mother’s fortitude, values and even sense of gratitude may have been incubated in her happy-go-lucky youth, but they were challenged and made real through her Holocaust ordeal.

I say: even in the midst of survival mode, focus on living; focus on the simple, the beautiful, the clear. I say: dig deep to find the inner resources and outer support you need to navigate the hard times with courage, and emerge from them intact and victorious, ready and willing to thrive.

Dig deep, get real and get well!