Finding Illumination Through the Dark

Review: Yolanda Nava. Through the Dark. The Woodlands TX: Cafe con Leche Press, 2021. isbn 281-465-0119   cafeconlechebooks.com

Michael Sedano

I am the caregiver half of a couple living with Alzheimer’s Dementia, so it’s not unusual that my reading habits now include material on grief, suffering, healing, caregiving, and my life’s single ambition focuses upon outliving my wife, because she can’t make it on her own. I don't need divine intervention to realize that every day.

Another fact of prolonged illness is inescapable: you need help. 

Here’s where books enter the Rx; good ones show you how to help, and illustrate ways to ask for help. Friends and familia read to glean ideas how to help their own afflicted souls. Not every book is useful, in the sense of “literature as equipment for living,” so choosing what to invest a few hours reading focuses on what fits one’s own situation. The more dire it feels, the more you need to read.

 

Yolanda Nava’s Through the Dark shares one woman’s experience with a rare disease that brought her an NDE --near-death experience-- that resulted in her going blind.  NDE fill volumes of investigations, but that's not an element for this story.

Most clearly, Yolanda Nava’s addressing how a person survives life-altering change by letting you watch how crisis after crisis stretched her spirit to desperation. For readers, Nava exemplifies how you are going to make it through your own shit.

 

Books like Nava’s take on the responsibility of “literature as equipment for living.” They all have some usefulness. Not all fit well. The “self-help” genre arrives with one strike against it. Cynics and scoffers will always find something to complain about, a typo on page one, for example, or a tawdry revelation about Nava’s most helpful healing experience on the very last page of Through the Dark. Mostly what threatens some readers’ use of Through the Dark is the book’s religious bent derived from Christian Science philosophies. It’s authorial noise, but the book’s most interesting stance. 

 

The author triangulates illness and healing between medicine, her flesh, and her spirit. Medicine works on flesh, leaving the mind part of illness for personal healing. Succor isn’t enough. What a writer-patient has to cure is Spirit, Soul, Duende, something outside the immediate circumstance. That’s not “God,” but the author’s upbrings in a religious home leads her to find reference points in hieratic poetry. She doesn’t limit herself to Christian avenues, those provide a foundation but her intellect and body lead her to other traditions to heal more than the flesh that went blind. At the end, she writes, “To this day, I maintain that my recovery and my ability to thrive is a result of spiritual mind treatment and damn good medicine.”

I add healing through journaling is wonderful therapy and is responsible for this book.

 

Yolanda Nava gets sick, nearly dies, and emerges profoundly disabled: blind. Getting sick and living with blindness is only part of the story. This is also a story of a crappy marriage and divorce. Through the Dark relates how Nava’s third marriage crumbles in the worst way. Pendejo splits the day his wife’s health totally collapses. In sickness and health all the days of my life, que no?

 

“Leaving me now is not Christian”, Nava tells her Afrikaner louse. That pulls him back into the house, only to launch Nava into a horror story life. As the woman’s health deteriorates, she begins suspecting the man of poisoning her food. Women around her reinforce the paranoia, a warning from her herbalist, a friend finds trip hazards, finds rat poison stored in the pantry next to comestibles. The blind Nava has really wonderful female friend companions. She finds a social agency that finds Nava a paid live-in assistant who causes her own problems, supervision issues, something more to go wrong. A disabled household needs fewer complications, not added crap. But blind people need human prostheses for eyes.

 

Through the Dark is a book the disabled community can use. “The disabled community” consists in a sizeable population of souls who keep to themselves, by dint of condition, ambulatory stress, and other factors. The plague, peor.

 

“The disabled community” consists also in vendors of services, and familia standing by, hearing stories laden with what-if helplessness, wondering how to help? Or wondering why that ungrateful blind woman has sharp words for kindness? It’s in the book.

 

Some people aren’t going to see themselves in this book. Nava has good health insurance and resourcefulness of la primera clase. She has savings and resources, and would have had more if that pig of a husband had not beaten the economic crap out of his blind wife during divorce negotiations. That’s noise. How much money does a woman have? How much is she you willing to spend to be cured?

 

Residential programs like the “boot camp” for blind people to acquire skills to get on the bus and continue living in the economy cost big money. When she goes for a meditation cure in a Zen monastery in the Carmel hills, a close friend pays her own way in order to guide Nava. Caregiving denies the woman her own enjoyment. Helping costs. 

 

Seeking a miracle in 2017, Nava and a friend pilgrimage to a healer in Brazilia where the recuperating blind woman focuses her three life’s goals: Cure her blindness; Eliminate any impediments to her highest purpose; To be able to love a man unconditionally, and to be loved unconditionally in return.

 

Don’t let the authorial noise of money intrude upon the usefulness of the story. Two sides of a person fall ill. Darn good medicine and insurance cure the author’s flesh. She sees her blindness in a metaphorical view. The body grows ill, the Spirit, the Soul, the Mind with it. Through the Dark offers an understanding of what one does to cure the Soul-Mind underneath illness. That man she married, that was a Soul disease not just poor judgment. Did living with him so poison her flesh that it caused her illness?

 

Thing about disease, it doesn’t happen in isolation. Yolanda Nava’s eyes and illness uniquely affected her, it’s a rare condition. You’re not going to get sick like she did. You’ll get your own illness. You’ll have this in common with this book: Life goes on without any consideration for Nava not having time for all that crap. She needs a job. She has to restart her life. That means meetings, interviews, travel, using the training and skills that got her this far. 

 

The rest of the way—however many good years you have left-- doesn’t change one bit because you have a disability. It’s just one more obstacle to being you. In the end, the darkness evaporates and you hear voices. It's not the voice of angels or some diety offering guidance. That voice is yourself experiencing yourself.  

I'm not sure if that's significantly profound or a "in the beginning" kind of tautology. But it gives a reader a lot to grapple with, empathizing with Yolanda Nava, and dealing with their own stuff.