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I know a man who soars above the city every night.

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In his dreams, he twirls and swirls

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with his toes kissing the Earth.

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Everything has motion, he claims,

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even a body as paralyzed as his own.

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This man is my father.

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Three years ago, when I found out

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that my father had suffered a severe stroke

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in his brain stem,

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I walked into his room in the ICU

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at the Montreal Neurological Institute

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and found him lying deathly still,

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tethered to a breathing machine.

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Paralysis had closed over his body slowly,

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beginning in his toes, then legs,

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torso, fingers and arms.

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It made its way up his neck,

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cutting off his ability to breathe,

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and stopped just beneath the eyes.

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He never lost consciousness.

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Rather, he watched from within

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as his body shut down,

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limb by limb,

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muscle by muscle.

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In that ICU room, I walked up to my father's body,

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and with a quivering voice and through tears,

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I began reciting the alphabet.

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A, B, C, D, E, F, G,

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H, I, J, K.

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At K, he blinked his eyes.

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I began again.

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A, B, C, D, E, F, G,

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H, I.

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He blinked again at the letter I,

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then at T, then at R, and A:

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Kitra.

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He said "Kitra, my beauty, don't cry.

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This is a blessing."

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There was no audible voice, but my father

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called out my name powerfully.

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Just 72 hours after his stroke,

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he had already embraced

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the totality of his condition.

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Despite his extreme physical state,

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he was completely present with me,

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guiding, nurturing,

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and being my father as much

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if not more than ever before.

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Locked-in syndrome

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is many people's worst nightmare.

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In French, it's sometimes called

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"maladie de l'emmuré vivant."

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Literally, "walled-in-alive disease."

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For many people, perhaps most,

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paralysis is an unspeakable horror,

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but my father's experience

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losing every system of his body

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was not an experience of feeling trapped,

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but rather of turning the psyche inwards,

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dimming down the external chatter,

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facing the recesses of his own mind,

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and in that place,

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falling in love with life and body anew.

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As a rabbi and spiritual man

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dangling between mind and body, life and death,

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the paralysis opened up a new awareness for him.

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He realized he no longer needed to look

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beyond the corporeal world

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in order to find the divine.

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"Paradise is in this body.

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It's in this world," he said.

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I slept by my father's side for the first four months,

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tending as much as I could

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to his every discomfort,

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understanding the deep 
human psychological fear

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of not being able to call out for help.

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My mother, sisters, brother and I,

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we surrounded him in a cocoon of healing.

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We became his mouthpiece,

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spending hours each day reciting the alphabet

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as he whispered back sermons

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and poetry with blinks of his eye.

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His room, it became our temple of healing.

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His bedside became a site for those

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seeking advice and spiritual counsel, and through us,

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my father was able to speak

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and uplift,

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letter by letter,

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blink by blink.

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Everything in our world became slow and tender

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as the din, drama and death of the hospital ward

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faded into the background.

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I want to read to you one of the first things

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that we transcribed in the week following the stroke.

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He composed a letter,

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addressing his synagogue congregation,

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and ended it with the following lines:

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"When my nape exploded,

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I entered another dimension:

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inchoate, sub-planetary, protozoan.

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Universes are opened and closed continually.

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There are many when low,

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who stop growing.

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Last week, I was brought so low,

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but I felt the hand of my father around me,

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and my father brought me back."

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When we weren't his voice,

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we were his legs and arms.

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I moved them like I know I would have wanted

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my own arms and legs to be moved

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were they still for all the hours of the day.

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I remember I'd hold his fingers near my face,

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bending each joint to keep it soft and limber.

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I'd ask him again and again

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to visualize the motion,

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to watch from within as the finger curled

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and extended, and to move along with it

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in his mind.

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Then, one day, from the corner of my eye,

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I saw his body slither like a snake,

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an involuntary spasm passing through the course

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of his limbs.

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At first, I thought it was my own hallucination,

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having spent so much time tending to this one body,

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so desperate to see anything react on its own.

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But he told me he felt tingles,

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sparks of electricity flickering on and off

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just beneath the surface of the skin.

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The following week, he began ever so slightly

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to show muscle resistance.

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Connections were being made.

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Body was slowly and gently reawakening,

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limb by limb, muscle by muscle,

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twitch by twitch.

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As a documentary photographer,

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I felt the need to photograph

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each of his first movements

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like a mother with her newborn.

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I photographed him taking his first unaided breath,

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the celebratory moment after he showed

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muscle resistance for the very first time,

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the new adapted technologies that allowed him

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to gain more and more independence.

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I photographed the care and the love

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that surrounded him.

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But my photographs only told the outside story

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of a man lying in a hospital bed

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attached to a breathing machine.

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I wasn't able to portray his story from within,

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and so I began to search for a new visual language,

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one which strived to express the ephemeral quality

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of his spiritual experience.

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Finally, I want to share with you

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a video from a series that I've been working on

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that tries to express the slow, in-between existence

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that my father has experienced.

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As he began to regain his ability to breathe,

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I started recording his thoughts,

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and so the voice that you hear in this video

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is his voice.

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(Video) Ronnie Cahana: You have to believe

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you're paralyzed

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to play the part

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of a quadriplegic.

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I don't.

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In my mind,

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and in my dreams

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every night

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I Chagall-man float

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over the city

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twirl and swirl

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with my toes kissing the floor.

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I know nothing about the statement

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of man without motion.

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Everything has motion.

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The heart pumps.

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The body heaves.

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The mouth moves.

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We never stagnate.

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Life triumphs up and down.

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Kitra Cahana: For most of us,

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our muscles begin to twitch and move

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long before we are conscious,

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but my father tells me his privilege

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is living on the far periphery

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of the human experience.

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Like an astronaut who sees a perspective

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that very few of us will ever get to share,

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he wonders and watches as he takes

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his first breaths

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and dreams about crawling back home.

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So begins life at 57, he says.

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A toddler has no attitude in its being,

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but a man insists on his world every day.

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Few of us will ever have to face physical limitations

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to the degree that my father has,

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but we will all have moments of paralysis

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in our lives.

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I know I frequently confront walls

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that feel completely unscalable,

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but my father insists

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that there are no dead ends.

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Instead, he invites me into his space of co-healing

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to give the very best of myself, and for him

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to give the very best of himself to me.

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Paralysis was an opening for him.

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It was an opportunity to emerge,

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to rekindle life force,

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to sit still long enough with himself

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so as to fall in love with the full continuum

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of creation.

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Today, my father is no longer locked in.

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He moves his neck with ease,

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has had his feeding peg removed,

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breathes with his own lungs,

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speaks slowly with his own quiet voice,

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and works every day

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to gain more movement in his paralyzed body.

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But the work will never be finished.

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As he says, "I'm living in a broken world,

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and there is holy work to do."

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Thank you.

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(Applause)