"I Am More"

This morning, I’m thinking about the downside to surprise—the sudden stroke that leaves you fatherless, the burst in the dot-com bubble that evaporates wealth you realize was only ever imaginary, the rollover that leaves your twin brother paralyzed from the neck down. . . . During the summer of 1988, my mother went into an operating room for a routine hysterectomy and woke to a diagnosis of ovarian cancer.

This kind of surprise has a profound effect on character. Often, during the seven years of my mother’s intermittent treatment, I thought about how hardship turns some of us bitter while others become better versions of themselves. Once during those years, I visited the family farm after my parents had gone dancing. During that season, chemotherapy was having its way with Mother. “Well,” she said to me, “I could stay home on a Saturday night. And be alone with the side effects. Or I can be among friends. I can dance with your father. The music, the company will take my mind off how I feel.”

During the years I lived in Austin, my husband Scott and I became friends with the Houston poet Erica Lehrer. I well remember the time I saw Erica get out of her car for a reading and walk toward us with a cane. A decade younger than I, Erica was a vital, healthy presence in the poetry community. She’s turned an ankle, I thought. Soon she’ll be tossing that cane. Erica’s need for a cane, I soon learned, was far more serious than a sprain. She’d been diagnosed with ataxia, one of three in every hundred-thousand. Also known as Multiple System Atrophy, ataxia is progressive, affecting coordination, affecting speech, affecting everything.

Once on a visit to Houston, Scott and I stayed with Erica and her husband. By then, Erica was using a wheeled walker. She spoke haltingly, her tongue uncooperative. Still, Erica entertained us. She made us laugh. She found humor in carrying a medical document about her diagnosis—to save her from being arrested for public drunkenness.

Yesterday, I pulled Erica’s poetry collection from my shelves. The title says so much about this remarkable woman: Dancing with Ataxia. The poems are sometimes bluntly honest about the grueling losses exacted by ataxia. But never self-pitying, always alive with the resilience that defined Erica Lehrer. The poet Tony Hoagland, himself a testament to strength and humility in the midst of suffering, had this to say about Dancing with Ataxia:

  Of the many skills and charms in this collection, most moving 
  of all is the steady open-heartedness behind her work. These
  poems are a rich and lively pleasure. 

Consider this lovely little poem:

  Affirmation

  When my husband is sleeping
  and my three cats are sleeping
  and the night chirpers are finally silent
  and the moon set in an orange city sky
  peers through a chink in the curtains,
  I step from my room naked in the night
  singing to myself: “I am more, I am more,
  I am more than the sum of my symptoms.”
  I breathe in the jasmine, stretch
  my arms, roll my shoulders, shake my limbs
  and know the sandstone under my feet.

    Erica Lehrer
    Dancing with Ataxia (2011)

This poem is grounded in a moment the poet clearly celebrates. She knows something the reality of ataxia cannot take from her: “I am more.” Erica Lehrer breathed her last on October 30, 2019. But she lives in the last three lines of “Affirmation”—breathing, stretching, standing on solid sandstone.

A Note:

Dancing with Ataxia is out of print, but copies are available. Avoid the Big A when you search for yours:

Available here ⇒