Ivan in the Garden

            “When I was lying there and started to feel the rain coming down on my face, I just felt like Mother Nature was taking me.”  Pause.  “It was wonderful.”

              As has happened before, when he told me this story, he was right back there in that moment, reliving it.  The surrender and peace of his recollection registered clearly on his face.

            Ivan loves to be outdoors in the summer heat, loves to be active and productive, and loves to tinker with his rider mower (“the tractor”).  Last Friday was no different.  He had been “cooped up inside all day” and had noticed that the cover on his tractor had blown off in yesterday’s winds.  He decided that his project du jour was to replace it on the tractor and enjoy the semi-cloudy weather.  Having come off of his walker and seated on the edge of the planter in front of the mower, he leaned down to free up a corner of the cover that was trapped under a tire.  A sturdy tug didn’t release the cover, but sent him reeling backward into the planter.  Large enough to cushion his body from the waist up, the planter allowed Ivan to fall into soil and avoid cracking his head or any bones on the surrounding blocks.  At first, he didn’t panic - just gained his composure and began the (futile) effort to sit up and regain his balance.  But after squirming around and trying to right himself, he lay back down, frustrated that there was nothing he could get a hold of to help pull himself up.  His legs are the weakest part of his body, and were what he needed to roll over and/or to move himself back to the edge of the planter to sit up.  He struggled, then stopped.  Struggled some more, stopped again.  Finally, in utter exhaustion, he lay back and just decided to stop and think about what to do next, to see what happened, or to “let nature take its course.”  Then he felt a raindrop.  And another.  Then the deluge began.  The rain was pelting his face and arms and his body was getting colder by the second.  It was just all more than he could believe. 

            It was at this time that he knew that it was ‘his time’ to return back to Nature, and so just lay there and surrendered to that.  “It was wonderful.”

            He felt someone touching his shoulder and rousing him from his trance.  How long he had been there, he wasn’t sure, but in retrospect, figured about twenty or thirty minutes. 

            “It took me a bit to realize what was happening and were I was.  It was the mailman trying to help me sit up, but it was too much for him by himself.  He couldn’t do it.  So he called an ambulance and we waited.”

            The ambulance arrived, then a fire truck, and the crews instantly pulled Ivan into his storeroom, the closest enclosure they could find, to begin drying him off and to check his vital signs.  By then, he was alert (as usual), and answered as many questions as he could. 

            “When they asked me my age and I told them ninety six, you should’ve seen them jump!  They snapped to attention and went to working on me in earnest like you wouldn’t believe!”

            He repeated this part of the story more in the next couple of days in recounting the event that any other.  I think it let him realize that not only is he in really good shape for his age, but that once again, he beat the odds in a situation that would’ve taken out someone younger than himself.  This time, though, I wondered if he wished, maybe, that he hadn’t.