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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 la mure 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 stilled 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 breath
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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)