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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 with his toes kissing the Earth.
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Everything has motion, he claims, 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 that my father had suffered a severe stroke in his brain stem,
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I walked into his room in the ICU at the Montreal Neurological Institute 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, torso, fingers and arms.
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It made its way up his neck, cutting off his ability to breathe, and stopped just beneath the eyes.
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He never lost consciousness.
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Rather, he watched from within as his body shut down, limb by limb, 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, I began reciting the alphabet.
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A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K. At K, he blinked his eyes.
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I began again. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I.
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He blinked again at the letter I, then at T, then at R, and A: Kitra.
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He said "Kitra, my beauty, don't cry. This is a blessing."
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There was no audible voice, but my father called out my name powerfully.
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Just 72 hours after his stroke, he had already embraced the totality of his condition.
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Despite his extreme physical state,
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he was completely present with me, guiding, nurturing,
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and being my father as much if not more than ever before.
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Locked-in syndrome is many people's worst nightmare.
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In French, it's sometimes called "maladie de l'emmuré vivant.
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Literally, "walled-in-alive disease."
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For many people, perhaps most, paralysis is an unspeakable horror,
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but my father's experience losing every system of his body was not an experience of feeling trapped,
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but rather of turning the psyche inwards, dimming down the external chatter, facing the recesses of his own mind,
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and in that place, falling in love with life and body anew.
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As a rabbi and spiritual man dangling between mind and body,
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life and death, the paralysis opened up a new awareness for him.
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He realized he no longer needed to look beyond the corporeal world in order to find the Divine.
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"Paradise is in this body. It's in this world," he said.
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I slept by my father's side for the first four months, tending as much as I could to his every discomfort,
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understanding the deep human psychological fear of not being able to call out for help.
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My mother, sisters, brother and I, 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 as he whispered back sermons 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 seeking advice and spiritual counsel, and through us,
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my father was able to speak and uplift, letter by letter, blink by blink.
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Everything in our world became slow and tender as the din,
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drama and death of the hospital ward faded into the background.
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I want to read to you one of the first things that we transcribed in the week following the stroke.
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He composed a letter, addressing his synagogue congregation, and ended it with the following lines:
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"When my nape exploded, I entered another dimension: inchoate, sub-planetary, protozoan.
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Universes are opened and closed continually.
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There are many when low, who stop growing.
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Last week, I was brought so low, but I felt the hand of my father around me, and my father brought me back."
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When we weren't his voice, we were his legs and arms.
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I moved them like I know I would have wanted my own arms and legs to be moved were they still for all the hours of the day.
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I remember I'd hold his fingers near my face, bending each joint to keep it soft and limber.
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I'd ask him again and again to visualize the motion,
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to watch from within as the finger curled and extended, and to move along with it in his mind.
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Then, one day, from the corner of my eye, I saw his body slither like a snake,
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an involuntary spasm passing through the course 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, so desperate to see anything react on its own.
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But he told me he felt tingles, sparks of electricity flickering on and off just beneath the surface of the skin.
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The following week, he began ever so slightly to show muscle resistance.
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Connections were being made.
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Body was slowly and gently reawakening, limb by limb, muscle by muscle, twitch by twitch.
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As a documentary photographer, I felt the need to photograph each of his first movements 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 muscle resistance for the very first time,
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the new adapted technologies that allowed him to gain more and more independence.
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I photographed the care and the love that surrounded him.
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But my photographs only told the outside story of a man lying in a hospital bed attached to a breathing machine.
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I wasn't able to portray his story from within, and so I began to search for a new visual language,
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one which strived to express the ephemeral quality of his spiritual experience.
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Finally, I want to share with you a video from a series that I've been working on that tries to express the slow,
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in-between existence 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, and so the voice that you hear in this video is his voice.
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You have to believe you're paralyzed to play the part of a quadriplegic.
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I don't. In my mind, and in my dreams every night I Chagall-man float over the city twirl and swirl with my toes kissing the floor.
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I know nothing about the statement of man without motion.
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Everything has motion. The heart pumps. The body heaves. The mouth moves. We never stagnate. Life triumphs up and down.
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For most of us, our muscles begin to twitch and move long before we are conscious,
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but my father tells me his privilege is living on the far periphery of the human experience.
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Like an astronaut who sees a perspective that very few of us will ever get to share,
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he wonders and watches as he takes his first breaths and dreams about crawling back home.
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So begins life at 57, he says. A toddler has no attitude in its being, but a man insists on his world every day.
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Few of us will ever have to face physical limitations to the degree that my father has,
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but we will all have moments of paralysis in our lives.
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I know I frequently confront walls that feel completely unscalable,
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but my father insists that there are no dead ends.
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Instead, he invites me into his space of co-healing to give the very best of myself, and for him 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, to rekindle life force, to sit still long enough with himself so as to fall in love with the full continuum of creation.
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Today, my father is no longer locked in.
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He moves his neck with ease, has had his feeding peg removed, breathes with his own lungs, speaks slowly with his own quiet voice,
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and works every day to gain more movement in his paralyzed body.
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But the work will never be finished. As he says, "I'm living in a broken world, and there is holy work to do."
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Thank you.