A dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths: the first, the physical when the powerfully trained body will no longer respond as you would wish. After all, I choreographed for myself. I never choreographed what I could not do. I changed steps in Medea and other ballets to accommodate the change. But I knew. And it haunted me. I only wanted to dance.
It might have been easier to retire, to say my knee couldn't handle it and let that be that. At the same time, the prospect of not being able to compete in gymnastics anymore was heartbreaking.
By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been.
I would worry that one morning I would wake up and be told that I can't compete any more.
The one thing I was really good at was being spontaneous. I was quick-witted. I lost that with my stroke.
When I announced my retirement, that was actually when I was trying to come back and I realized, it just wasn't viable. It passed me by. My shoulder is done. I brush my teeth with my left hand now. That's just the way it goes. I can't shoot a basketball, I can't throw any kind of ball. I was right handed.
It was clear to me that I was never going to be the same kind of player I had been. It was time to quit.
I can't do a million things anymore like I could when I was younger.
I can still chase women, only downhill
I can't drive anymore.
Not being able to dance anymore [was the hardest obstacle]. But, at the same time, I feel like that was one of the very first things that did give me that opportunity to say, "Are you gonna crumble here? Or maybe God has another destiny for your life and it's a different road than what you think it is?"
Every athlete, I think, would like to play forever. They never want to acknowledge that they've lost a step or they can't quite do what they did before.
You can't do some of the things you used to do. I suppose you have to go at a gentler pace. I mean, God help us, you can't sit at home being a Vicar or anything.
I can't run anymore. That's the one thing I loved doing. And I can't play golf hardly at all because of wrist and back pain.
Writing has been so much a part of my life that I'm really quite annoyed that I can't do as much as I used to.
It started off with flu-like symptoms and pain; then, I started feeling really funny. In two weeks, I was paralyzed from the waist down, and it spiraled down from there. Every ability I had was slowly slipping away.
