I wish I were more patient.

I can sit and work for hours, but that’s because I have a persistent personality, but I’m able to admit that I’m just not a patient person.

Patience requires submission, a submission to the reality that not everything is in our control. One of my favorite seventeenth-century English devotional poets, George Herbert, captures so well in his lyric poems this difficulty. So many of his poems express his struggle to submit to God, but they are also more generally about the struggle to accept disappointments and things that are beyond our control. I love the deceptive simplicity of Herbert’s beautiful poems, the way he poetically articulates the struggle for patience. “The Collar,” for example, features a speaker who rages against not being rewarded by his “Lord,“ as does the speaker in “Affliction IV,” who suffers so many losses, yet is expected to be patient. At the end of “The Collar,” as the speaker grows, “more fierce and wild,” he thinks he hears, “one calling,” and replies, “…my Lord.” This acceptance of the situation, a recognition of a higher power, provides a peaceful resolution to the poem, at least for a moment. 

If only life were so easy.

Patience is at odds with the belief you have (or have the right to) “absolute authority,” that you can control everything. When suddenly you are faced with a challenge to that ability, you can explode. There is, of course, a range of impatience which, at its extremity can lead to violence, which we see every day in the news in its various forms. Elder abuse; the frustrated angry teenage father who kills his infant son; the angry president frustrated over the delay in his wall, who suggests that border guards shoot migrants in the legs (to slow them down), or that we should have a trench with water (like a moat?) filled with snakes or alligators and more. It terrifies me, thinking someone (let alone an American president) could even imagine such things, and needs to be talked out of them by staff who explained they were illegal, not to mention, potential crimes against humanity.

Compared to that, my impatience is nothing. Still, impatience is the sin I have to confess. It’s that time of year - the ten days between Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur - when as a Jew I’m supposed to take an accounting of myself, think of where I’ve fallen short of what I should be, where I miss the mark, like an arrow going wide from its path. The Hebrew word, Hata, which is translated as “sin,” means to go astray, as if one has taken the wrong course, strayed from the right path, and thus not reached the goal. Teshuvah, a return to the path, is what we try to do during those Ten Days of accounting, which culminate in Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). But it’s not work that’s over in one day. We are to commit ourselves to continue working during the coming year.

For years, I’ve tried to do my best, tried to do the right thing. I’m honest, compassionate, empathetic, perhaps to an extreme. I try to do kindnesses to others in my daily encounters.  I’ve been told I make the world a better place through my teaching and writing. I’m not one to feel riddled by guilt. In fact, “sin” is not a word I use often or feel is helpful. I feel pretty good about how I live my life.  But admittedly, the last two years have been very hard, and now, on Yom Kippur, I must confess to God, my impatience, my deviation from how I would like to be.  Yes, I get annoyed with being put on hold for an hour, or with problems with my computer or technology. Who doesn’t? But patience has become so difficult in one particular part of my life—dealing with my husband’s progressive neurological disease.

When the doctors first diagnosed him four and a half years ago with what they thought was Parkinson’s, my rabbi said, “may God bless you with patience.” I did not realize how much I would be called on to exercise it.  As the disease has progressed, the demand for my patience has increased in ways I’d never imagined.  First, there was my need for patience when my husband moved and ate slowly, then even more slowly; patience when I wanted to be at work rather than going with him to see multiple doctors; patience when he needs help eating and drinking, when I spend time every day running out for his food or supplies, and when everything takes longer than expected. As more things are taken away from my husband, as he loses his independence, a similar thing happens to me. I’ve lost my independence. As he suffers, I suffer. This is the bond of love. I feel frantic, anxious, and, yes, impatient. A little sedative in the morning or early evening makes me more patient for a couple of hours. Alternatively, I try taking deep breaths, but they don’t work. I pray for patience, or at least endurance.

Monks are patient. I know people who spend long periods meditating, or even go to Buddhist retreats and seem to be more patient as a result. Maybe it’s just a matter of practice. But when would I have such time?

 I think I was born impatient. My father always praised my mother for being “cool, calm and collected.” Those qualities enabled her to survive a lot in our home, even to accept her decline into Alzheimer’s in old age.  I didn’t inherit these qualities. My mother called me jokingly, “the white tornado” (after the popular commercial for Ajax Liquid Cleaner in the 60s). My mother never raised her voice, but I’ve been known to shout, as well as curse liberally.  Even my blood pressure is “volatile”—meaning that medication can’t fully control it.  “A hot reactor,” my cardiologist once called me. In the early ‘90s there was a country song by Alabama that I’d listen and sing along to, with its refrain, “I’m in a hurry to get things done. I rush and rush until life’s no fun. All I really gotta do is live and die, but I’m in a hurry, I don’t know why.”  I remember my teenage son once saying, “Happy Mother’s day, even though you really need to calm down!”

I can be exuberant and joyous—that’s the upside of my nature--but aren’t those very things at odds with calm and patience?

Impatience is natural if not nice. I’m doing the best I can in a difficult situation, where I never know what the next day will bring. My husband knows this and forgives me, because he knows how hard I try to meet so many people’s demands. But my impatience is potentially dangerous, to myself (I could have a heart attack, God forbid!) as well to as my husband. And so this Yom Kippur I promise myself, my husband, and God, to strive for patience, to try to restrain my impatient nature and return to a better way.

But I know I need help and can’t do it alone, for I do not have “absolute power.”

I’ve been weighed down for at least twenty months by the stresses in my life: taking care of my husband; writing and teaching and doing my professional job; feeling that I never have a moment to rest; no time for myself.  When the annual fall Northeast Milton Seminar came up, and a couple of close friends were going, I thought maybe I should try.  I needed “respite care” for my husband and a respite for me. 

In order to attend, I arranged for one of our aides to move in for the weekend. I even hired an extra nighttime aide so she could get some sleep. Then Friday morning, September 6th, I got in my car, and off I went. A five and a half or six hour drive—alone. And it was just what I needed.  

But during the trip, just north of Hartford on 91, the traffic suddnely stopped and was backed up as far as the eye could see. The southbound lane had been cleared and firetrucks streamed by with sirens blaring as they headed north, then came ambulances. Slowly I crawled passed one of the worst multi-car accidents I’d ever seen. I don’t know how many cars were smashed, but there were at least two that were totaled. A baby car seat was hanging out the back window of one and I just started crying. It was horrible and I couldn’t stop thinking of that child, or what happened to the mom, or any of the other people involved. So many ambulances! I prayed, please God, at least may that baby and mother be okay.

I was so shaken, but had to pull it together and drive safely. It made me think of how each time I leave our apartment, my husband always says, “be safe.”

Then I thought, what if I have an accident too? What if I’m killed? Who would know? I had bought grave plots for myself and Tony late last winter, but where were those documents?  Please God, I prayed again, let me live so I can get home and find them and tell my son where they are!

So, I finally get to Dartmouth in time for the meeting. It was good to be with these people, especially to attend a pleasant communal dinner Friday night. Everyone was feeling friendly and I was glad I came.  The next day there were papers to review by two young women, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. Our group of about twenty sat around the long table and discussed them (though I noticed the guys tended to give mini-lectures of their own, and I had to fight a bit to get my two cents in). Still, I thought, it’s a great group.

When it was all over, late afternoon, I walked across the street to window-shop—something I never have time to do anymore. And there was a little store called Simon Pearce with the most beautiful lamp in the window! Pale bluish-green sprinkled with gold in irregular patterns, like flowers or constellations. It gleamed; it reflected the light in ways that made it seem like a living thing. I fell in love, but thought, “no way I can afford this, especially when I’m paying thousands and thousands a month for my husband’s care.” I coveted that lamp but ultimately, stayed away from it until the next day before I left, going back to the store for about twenty minutes just to soak it up, fill my heart with it and then drove home.

Well, of course, I just couldn’t get that lamp out of my mind. I’m obsessive about my husband’s care and diet, about work, and . . . about beauty.  Several days passed, and I thought, “What the hell, I spend all this money on his care and there’s nothing to show for it. Maybe I should splurge, bring some more beauty and light into our apartment which is increasingly filled with medical equipment and supplies.”

So I called the store— they just sold that lamp the day before! I went to the internet, only to find the lamp out of stock, indefinitely. Then I found a Simon Pearce in Greenwich, Connecticut, about thirty-five miles away, called, and a woman named Sandy went to work.  In seven hours, an employee named Kristy called me from Vermont.  They have three of these lamps, “celestial crystaline, in jade.”  Don’t you just love the name?  Heavenly, crystal, jade, the color of happiness and good fortune. All the things I needed, I thought. She sent me three pictures, I pick out the one I like best, paid the small fortune, and she promised to ship it to me right away.  I’m ecstatic, if just for a brief moment, having found solace knowing that my lamp was coming!

Two days later, the concierge calls from downstairs. “You have a large heavy package.” Great! It’s the lamp! Even more beautiful than I imagined. I carefully took it out and put it on the big carved oriental rosewood table of my father’s.  The whole thing looks gorgeous. But as I try to put the shade on, I notice there’s something wrong with the light socket—it’s loose and the whole thing wobbles.  I call the Vermont store. “Oh you just need to tighten it.” Okay, but how? Well, there’s a little screw. No screwdriver I have will fit, so I run down to the hardware store, get a smaller one and the guy tells me it’s really easy, just thread the socket on the metal post that comes up out of the lamp. Well, it doesn’t work. In fact, it’s falling over even worse. I’m getting frantic. My daily life feels like a rollercoaster.

I call the Vermont store again, ask for Kristy, but am told there are three Kristy’s! How can there by three Kristy’s in one little store? I’m told to haul this big lamp to the Greenwich store; they will send it to the special lamp repair guy in Vermont, and probably six weeks later I’ll have my lamp.  God willing.

And all l wanted was a little light in the dark.