Friday afternoon my wife Mary Lu, who is recovering from a serious stroke, fell.
She was sitting on the edge of her bed in the barn (our house is known as ‘the barn’). I was standing just a few feet away. She leaned forward — just a little too far — reaching for her toes. And then she went straight down. Face and shoulder first.
There is that split second when you see it happening and know you cannot stop it. Her body folded in on itself. No arm came out to break the fall. It was like watching a ragdoll tipped from a shelf. It shocked me!
The sound of shoulder on wood is a sound I won’t soon forget.
We have been so careful about this. Falling is the one thing we have tried obsessively to prevent.
The Sara-Steady (Mary Lu’s ‘stand-up’ wheels) was parked beside the bed. She hit her knee and her head against it on the way down. But it was the collarbone. When her shoulder struck the floor, something gave.
Later, holding ice against the swelling, I kept replaying the angle of impact, my own useless half-step forward.
And while I was doing that, my phone keep lighting up. Missiles. Counter-strikes. Iran. Retaliation. Escalation. Text threads flaring to life.
Friends in Israel write that they are, so far, all right — staying close to shelters, sleeping lightly, listening for sirens. “We’re okay for now,” one wrote. Another saying “I’ve been waiting for this moment for 20 years. I’m happy to sit in a shelter for days or even weeks if it means bringing down the regime.” A third, who lives in Bet Shemesh, called and said “We’re fine but nine of our neighbors died in the missile attack…”
Those phrases — ‘for now’ & ‘I’m happy’ & ‘neighbors died’— carry more weight than the words themselves.
My friends in Iran are silent.
Not silent by choice. Silent because their government shuts down communication when things begin to shake. They cannot reach out. I cannot reach in. I do not know if they are safe. And neither, I suspect, do they.
That is its own kind of violence — enforced not-knowing.
A cracked collarbone in a quiet barn in Big Sur is not comparable to bombs falling on cities. The scale is entirely different. The stakes are entirely different. History is not pivoting on our bedroom floor. Duh!
And yet both are happening.
I was holding an ice pack to Mary Lu’s shoulder while reading about ICBMs.
This is strange. The intimate and the catastrophic arrive in the same palm of your hand.
How do you metabolize that without becoming either sentimental about your own drama or numb to the larger one?
It is easy to blame the internet. Too much information.
I sometimes imagine a past in which one only knew what was happening within a hundred miles. (Blissful ignorance!) But that’s romantic nonsense. There has always been rumor, fear, distant wars carried by word of mouth.
The deeper issue, at least for me, is not information. It is formation.
I tell myself that if I read enough, understand enough, track enough history, I will find steadiness. If I can connect the geopolitical dots — if I can explain the arc from Tehran to Jerusalem to Washington — something inside me will settle.
It doesn’t.
Information is not wisdom. Information could not tell me how to lift Mary Lu without causing more damage. It cannot tell a frightened father in Tehran how to steady his child. It cannot tell me what is mine to carry and what is not.
C.S. Lewis, writing during war, once said that Beethoven and a charwoman sweeping a floor could be equal in spiritual weight if they were faithful to their callings. “A mole must dig to the glory of God.”
I have always loved that line. You are a creature with a radius.
Yesterday my radius was about six feet wide — the space between the bed and the wooden floor. I was not a commentator. I was not a man with strong opinions about global realignment. I was a husband checking for concussion. Looking for displacement along the clavicle. Deciding whether to immobilize or ice first.
It does not solve Iran. It does not protect my friends in Israel. It does not reopen communication lines in Tehran.
I exhaust myself because I confuse awareness with responsibility. Because I can see so much, I begin to believe I am accountable for everything.
I am not.
Some people truly do stand on larger stages — diplomats, soldiers, journalists, negotiators. Their radius is wide. And God help them.
Most of us are entrusted with something closer.
There is mercy in admitting that.
It keeps us from pretending our private hardship is epic. It keeps us from imagining we are cowardly for tending to a broken bone while nations rattle sabers. It keeps us from the opposite illusion — that outrage online is the same thing as action.
A cracked collarbone does not negate war. War does not negate tenderness.
They exist on different scales.
Yesterday reminded me of that in the most physical way possible.
Bone is fragile. Governments are opaque. And love, inconveniently, is always specific.
Today/tomorrow I will make phone calls. I will monitor swelling. I will help her dress. I will check my phone again and hope for a message from Iran. I will answer texts from Israel. I will feel the familiar ache of distance.
And then I will return to the barn.
Magnus Toren has been Executive Director of the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, California, since 1993. A native of Sweden, he circumnavigated the globe delivering yachts across five oceans before settling in Big Sur. Under his leadership, the Library has evolved into a vibrant cultural hub for literature, music, and community, dedicated to preserving and celebrating Henry Miller’s legacy. In addition to hosting A Big Sur Podcast, Toren writes and speaks widely on Big Sur’s cultural history, Henry Miller, and the arts. He lives in Big Sur with his wife Mary Lu.
The views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent those of the Henry Miller Memorial Library.