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Click here to download the The Healing Tree in its entirety. Excerpts from The Healing Tree by Joe Tye In which our story begins… The money ball rolled to a dead stop in front of the pool table’s corner pocket and perched there, like a fresh egg waiting for a short order cook to crack it open. Sammy DiMarco took a swig from his longneck Corona, set it down on the counter, and chalked up his custom pool cue. He walked slowly around the table, kissing the St. Pauli Girl poster for luck on the way, and positioned himself on the opposite end of the table from the nine ball. Yes indeed, this was his night. “Deadeye.” He repeated the affirmation to the rhythm of his breathing: Deadeye in, Deadeye out, Deadeye in, Deadeye out. “Words have power,” his father had always told him, “so be careful what you call yourself.” Sammy set the chalk down on the edge of the table and sprinkled baby powder on his left hand. Closing his eyes and taking a slow deep breath, he pushed out of his mind the memory of all the missed shots, of the many times he’d capped a brilliant run by choking on the money ball. Deadeye in, Deadeye out. Sammy leaned over the table and peered across the seven feet of green felt that separated him from an easy two hundred bucks. He pumped his cue back and forth, slow and deliberate, and in his mind’s eye visualized a taut black thread connecting the white cue ball with the yellow nine ball. The money ball. Slowly, Sammy pulled back the stick one last time, until his hand was parallel to the tobacco tin in his jeans pocket. The jukebox and the chatter of The Blue Room Bar faded into the distance as he zeroed in. The instant the chalked tip of his stick punched into the cue ball, Sammy knew he’d won the game. The nine ball slammed into the back of the corner pocket and disappeared down the rabbit hole. After buying a round of drinks and giving the waitress an overgenerous tip, Sammy walked across the parking lot, oblivious to the cool night air and the full moon above. His classic Dodge Charger sparkled under the parking lot lights. He eased himself into the bucket seat and slid the key into the ignition. Sammy pressed down on the accelerator pedal and the Charger’s fuel-injected hemi roared in response. “Life is good,” Sammy crooned as he rammed the chrome stick shift into second gear and gunned it out of the parking lot. Saturday night traffic was backed up all along Howard Street. As the Charger crawled in second gear past the First Guardian Bank building, Sammy looked at the clock and cursed. He was an hour late, and Sheila was not a patient woman. “Time for a shortcut, Deadeye,” he said aloud. Sammy cut through the shopping mall parking lot and came out on Benson Boulevard. “ No lights, no law, no loitering.” As last words go, that pretty well captured all that Sammy DiMarco had ever wanted out of life. He put the Charger through the gears, pressing himself back against the leather seat. Just past the Galapagos Restaurant, Sammy had to slam on the brakes to avoid rear-ending an 18-wheeler wheezing up the hill. He downshifted and jammed the gas pedal to the floor as he yanked the Charger into the opposing lane to pass. The last thing Sammy DiMarco saw on this earth was the horrified faces of Mark and Carrie Anne Murphy the split second before they disappeared behind the airbags of their Chevy Cavalier.
This should hurt. That was the first thought I had when I woke up. Somehow, even then, at the first dawning of my new existence, I knew that the absence of pain was not a good thing. The sky above was filled with fluffy white clouds, but the clouds were not moving. Neither were the birds silhouetted against the unnaturally blue sky. Something else amiss here. Where am I? A surge of panic started in my belly and worked its way up toward my lungs. It stuck in my throat when I tried to scream. I closed my eyes and a chaotic montage of memories flashed through my consciousness. Robbie standing at the front door waving goodbye. That sudden blinding light. Trying to put my hands in front of my face, yet instinctively knowing it would be too late. Flashing red lights. Shouting voices. Screaming sirens. The broken lady and the wingless angels. Then, nothing. I think a long time must have passed before I opened my eyes again. The clouds had not moved, and the birds were still frozen in place. The room gradually came into focus. My first realization was that the clouds and the birds weren’t moving because they were painted on the ceiling. Off to my right side, I heard the soft beeping of some sort of machine. Where am I? I tried to turn my head toward the noise and discovered that I could still feel pain. It felt like someone had run a hot iron from my neck down to my waist. My throat finally released its death grip on my vocal chords and something came out, but it hardly sounded human. More like the croak of a starving raven. I tried to sit up, but was rewarded only by a spastic flailing of one arm in front of my face. To my left, I heard a loud crash. Without thinking, I twisted my head in that direction and suffered another jolt of searing pain. I closed my eyes and croaked again, the noise rubbing against the sandpaper dryness of my throat. I squinted my eyes open. Someone was standing there. One of the angels without wings. Her hand was over her mouth, her eyes wide. Another wingless angel hurried into the room. She looked down at the spilled tray on the floor, then at the one with her hand over her mouth, then over at me. Now the second angel covered her mouth. “Oh my God. She’s awake.” I closed my eyes and drifted back into the velvet darkness. When I woke up again, I was surrounded by wingless angels. They were all busy, fussing over me. The broken lady. Oh No! “Mark?” I couldn’t make his name come out past the sandpaper in my throat. I tried again. “Mark?” Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at the tall man in the long white lab coat standing next to my shoulder. The tall man pinched his chin with this thumb and forefinger and stared at me for a very long minute. Then he looked at the others and said, “give us a few minutes here.” Everyone else filed quietly out of the room and I sensed the door whispering shut behind them. The man in the long white coat turned off the beeping of the machine, then sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand on my forearm. He looked vaguely familiar. “Mrs. Murphy?” I blinked, and that seemed to be sufficient acknowledgment for him to proceed. “I’m Dr. Paulson, the chief trauma surgeon here at Memorial Hospital.” Now I remembered where I’d seen him before. We’re losing her! I closed my eyes, wishing that I’d stayed up in that corner and allowed the wingless angels to lose the broken lady. “Mark?” I mouthed his name again. Dr. Paulson didn’t answer at once. He looked out the window, then back at me. His hand was still on my forearm. “When people ask what keeps me in medicine, with all the long hours and hard work,” he finally said, “I say that I get strength from my patients, from people who bear the unbearable and still go on. People who make the choice to go on, when it would be easy for them to quit. If I’m not mistaken, you’ve already made that choice once.” Closing my eyes again, my thoughts drifted back to that moment when I first looked down upon the broken lady. Yes, I knew even then – the pain was going to be unbearable. And still, I had made the choice to go back. “You know that you’re in the hospital?” I nodded – very slightly, for fear of bringing back that awful pain. Dr. Paulson looked at me like he was trying to see what was on the inside of my skin. “You’ve been here for almost five weeks.” He let that sink in, and I knew that worse was still to come. He shifted his weight on the bed, picked up my hand and held it in both of his, gently rubbing my palm with his thumbs. How do they teach this in medical school? Breaking the News 101. “You were in an accident... Both your legs were severely fractured.” His eyes never left mine. “Your back was also broken. When you’ve regained your strength, the orthopedic docs will have to do more surgery, put in some pins and rods.” A picture of the broken lady came back to me, and in the image I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. She had a big foam collar around her neck, and was strapped onto a long wooden board. Dr. Paulson nodded, as if to say, Yes, Carrie Anne, you are the broken lady, and I’m afraid that you’re broken beyond repair. Then he simply said, “it will be a while before we can know for certain, but I’m afraid that right now it looks like you might not walk again.” We-we-we (bop!) loo-loo-loo (Oh No!). “Mark?” I again mouthed my husband’s name. I already knew the answer. And I knew that Dr. Paulson had been wrong about me. I would not have the strength to bear this pain. “It was a head-on collision. It probably happened so fast that Mark never even saw the other car coming. I’m sorry.” At that moment I needed to be hugged more than I needed my next breath of air, but Dr. Paulson couldn’t have made it past all the tubes and wires even if he’d tried. He set down my hand, stood up from the bed, and used a washcloth on my cheeks. “You need to cry, Carrie Anne, but I need to keep your stitches dry,” he said with a gentle smile. It was only later that I learned my nose had been broken and my facial lacerations had required more than 100 stitches, something he had considered hardly worth mentioning after all I’d just learned. “Robbie?” Once more, no sound came out, but thankfully Dr. Paulson was adept at lip-reading. “He’s been here every day. He’s at school right now. Maggie will pick him up and bring him by this afternoon. Robbie is quite a young man, very mature for a 14-year-old. Told me he’s thinking about medical school. I hope you don’t mind, but I encouraged him. He’d make a fine doctor.” Dr. Paulson looked at the clock on the wall, then back at me. “It’s not quite noon, and Maggie will be bringing Robbie in at about four, so why don’t you close your eyes for a while. We’re pumping some high-powered painkillers into you, and you’ve had a pretty rough morning.” I wanted desperately to lose myself behind a veil of sleep, but even more desperately wanted for it to already be afternoon so I could see my son, who evidently had made a new friend. “Maggie?” Dr. Paulson smiled almost all the way into a laugh. “Maggie is the hospital’s poetry therapist. She’s sort of taken Robbie under her wing, appointed herself his official chauffer. You’ll meet her before long. If you’re a patient at Memorial Hospital, you can’t escape meeting Maggie.” I closed my eyes and drifted back into the void, into a dream I was to have many times in the months to come. I was back up in my corner, looking down on all the wingless angels as they scurried around the broken lady. The room grew suddenly very quiet, and Mark walked in. Everyone stepped aside to clear a path for him. He walked over to the broken lady, leaned over and wrapped his arms around her, lifting her up from the gurney. And just like that, the foam collar fell from her neck, and all the tubes and wires dropped onto the floor. No longer broken, she got up and walked out of the room, hand-in-hand with Mark. The wingless angels were astonished. All the broken lady had really needed was a hug.
You know the feeling you get when you’re sitting in your car at a stoplight, eyes straight ahead, minding your own business, and you can somehow tell that the person in the adjacent car is staring at you? That’s what it was like the first time I met Maggie. I’d been lying in my hospital bed staring at the clouds that never moved and the birds that didn’t fly, wondering if Mark was really up there somewhere beyond that fake sky, waiting for me to join him. Her voice came to me as a whisper in the woods. “Would you like to hear your poem?” Who knows how long she’d been standing there at my bedside waiting for the right moment to ask me that question. Gingerly turning my head to the left, I tried to make my eyes refocus. She was thin as a darning needle and had the wildest mane of red hair I’d seen outside of the zoo or a Dr. Seuss book. A redheaded dandelion with mint green eyes and the smile of a two-year-old who’s just been given an ice cream cone. I squinted to see what was written on her T-shirt. When was the last time you did something for the first time? Looking at Maggie, I got the impression it was a struggle for her to stand in one place without vibrating, and that the last time she’d done something for the first time was about five minutes ago. “My poem?” “Yeah. It’s one of the benefits of being a patient at Memorial Hospital. Room service poetry readings.” She opened the pink journal that had been tucked under her arm and held it in front of her, like one of those carolers you see in the Christmas pictures. “So, you must be Maggie.” I stated the obvious. Maggie flushed crimson and put her hand over her mouth, then touched my arm. “Oh, I’m sorry! I should have introduced myself. I’ve been here so many times – but you were always asleep.” She laughed and her eyes sparkled and the room must have warmed up by ten degrees. “Yeah, I’m Maggie. I’m one of the volunteers here. I specialize in writing poems for patients.” She gave me a conspiratorial wink. “That’s why I can get away without wearing one of those stuffy volunteer uniforms – they expect poets to be weird, you know.” I shrugged. “I’ve never met a real poet before. So I guess I wouldn’t know.” Maggie laughed again. “Oh, I’m not a real poet.” She leaned closer and half-whispered, “I’m really a mermaid.” “A mermaid!” I didn’t know whether to laugh or press the nurse call button, since the obvious option of running away was not open to me. “Yes,” she replied, evidently pleased with having elicited the desired reaction. “You know how mermaids rescue drowning sailors?” I nodded, even though it was news to me that mermaids rescued drowning sailors. “Well,” she continued, “I rescue drowning souls.” “You rescue drowning souls?” “Yeah. There are lots of people drowning here. Drowning in pain and despair, drowning in hopelessness and self-pity. My poems are life preservers for drowning souls. Just a little something they can hang onto, something to keep them from sinking. You know, until they can swim on their own again.” Maggie looked down into the pages of her pink journal, then back at me. “Do you want to hear your poem?” She said it as though meeting a real live mermaid in your hospital room was no big deal. I nodded. “Sure, Maggie. Read me my poem.” She smiled, closed her eyes for a second as if composing herself, then said, “It’s called Angels on Earth.” She cleared her throat and tried to look serious. Then she read:
Maggie slowly closed her pink journal, without looking up at me. A memory flashed back, something I had not thought about in years and years. I was standing at the front of the room in my ninth grade English class. I’d just recited the poem we’d all had to compose as a homework assignment. I don’t know what I was expecting when I’d finished. Fireworks and clanging church bells, maybe, or for God to come out of the whirlwind to congratulate me on my brilliance. Instead, it was the voice of Mr. Brightwood. Thank you, Carrie Anne. Who wants to go next? That’s what I got instead of church bells and whirlwinds. I never wrote another poem. I looked at this visiting mermaid poet through tear-filled eyes. At the time, I didn’t know if I was crying for Maggie, who wore her heart on her sleeve, or if I was crying for little Carrie Anne, who had buried her heart underneath the linoleum floor of Mr. Brightwood’s English classroom. It was only much later that I realized what Maggie had foreseen in her poem: losing my legs meant that I had to stop running away from something that had been chasing me since the ninth grade.
“So, what did you do before the accident?” I was back
in the hospital recovering from yet another operation. “Mark was a branch manager for Wells Fargo,” I answered. “I sold real estate part time.” Looking over at the wheelchair parked by the window, I again appreciated just what a Great Divide that accident would be in my life. Even the icebreaker questions would change. Instead of “what do you do?” it would forevermore be “what did you do before you were crippled?” “Think you’ll go back to real estate?” Nurse Higgins had finished checking all the lines and tubes and was entering something into a keyboard. She’d probably started her nursing career when I was still in diapers, but still had to keep up with the computer revolution. I shook my head. “Can you see me driving people around to look at houses in my handicapped van?” I put on my best you’re going to love this cozy little fixer-upper voice and said, “You two go on in and look around – I’ll just park my wheelchair out here at the front steps and wait for you.” Nurse Higgins smiled. “I guess I should have thought of that. Most homes have lots of stairs, don’t they?” I shrugged and made a face. She said, “I guess that also means becoming a flight attendant is out of the question, doesn’t it?” “Probably,” I replied, “but I might be able to get a
job as a redcap. Just put your bags here on my lap and give
me a push.” “Yeah. I was a water aerobics instructor.” The ridiculous image of me bobbling around the pool in a wheelchair with water wings instead of wheels caused me to almost laugh. I closed my eyes for a moment to focus on that mental image of me in my water wheelchair, to see where it would take me. A fine mist began to build over my imagined swimming pool. Almost instantly, the mist turned dense, then corporeal. It was snowing. The water in the pool froze solid. I was trapped in the blue ice of a swimming pool that had transmogrified into a glacier. I shivered and opened my eyes. “I also taught beginner ice-skating lessons, but I don’t think that’s in my future either. Not unless they come up with a new sport – wheelchair ice-skating.” Nurse Higgins took the stethoscope from around her neck and dropped it into the wide pocket of her white dress. I knew she’d been on her feet all day, but if she ever complained, I never heard it (though I myself would have given every worldly possession to be able to complain about aching feet). “Wheelchair ice skating? That sounds like fun. Except it might turn into wheelchair bumper cars on ice!” Bless her heart, Nurse Higgins had a knack for saying just the right thing to stop me from spiraling back into the frigid gloom. Icebreakers of a different sort. She opened my chart, read for a moment, then looked back at me. “I see you’re going to start working with the people from OT. They might even be able to design an ice-chair for you. Some of what they do is just plain magic.” I shrugged and shook my head. “OT? Overtime?” She laughed and said, “sorry, I sometimes forget that we hospital people have our own language. OT is Occupational Therapy. They’re going to help you learn new ways to deal with ADL. That’s hospital-speak for activities of daily living. Their work can end there, or they can push you harder, help you carve out a more productive path for yourself. It’s really up to you.” “What do you mean, it’s up to me?” The way she folded her arms, Nurse Higgins reminded me of an old-world schoolmarm trying to get through to a particularly slow student. “I went to nursing school because I wanted to be a caregiver. But unless my patients take an active role, I end up just a caretaker. You’ve reached the point where you have to decide – do you want to be an active participant in your recovery, even if it can’t be a full recovery, or do you want to be a passive recipient of my care?” Now the schoolmarm was lecturing the naughty girl who’d been caught skipping class. Not knowing what else to do, I started to cry. Nurse Higgins sat on the edge of the bed and brushed the hair off my forehead. “I know this is hard, Carrie Anne. And it’s always going to be hard. Things that you once took for granted, like going to the ladies room or reaching for a box of cereal on the top shelf, are going to take a lot more time and energy than they did before the accident. And that’s going to mean less time and energy for the things that really matter.” I pictured myself sitting in my wheelchair at the bagel shop, unseen by the girl behind the tall counter; the Great Divide loomed larger, casting its dark shadow across every facet of the rest of my life. An ice age without end. Before she left, Nurse Higgins told me a bit more about what I could expect from the folks in Occupational Therapy. She made it clear that the sooner I learned how to cope with the ladies room and the bagel shop, the more time I would have for those things that really matter. “Who knows,” she’d said, “you could even wind up writing poetry like Maggie does. That’s how she got started, after all.” The suspicion that Nurse Higgins and Maggie were somehow in cahoots was confirmed shortly when Maggie, the mermaid poet, waltzed into my room about an hour later. She’d been released from the hospital and was back to her usual bubbly self. Today’s t-shirt read: Poetry – Jazz with Words. I wondered if she meant for “Jazz” to be a verb or a noun, then realized that the one always leads to the other. “Whatchya got there?” Maggie asked, craning her neck in the
attempt to read the words I’d been scribbling on a notepad. “They’re all lousy at first,” she said as she lifted the pad from my lap before I could yank it away, “but they do get better if you keep working on them.” She giggled. “At least some of them do.” Maggie read over my poem, nodded thoughtfully, then read it again, her lips moving in sync with my written words:
“Keep writing,” Maggie said. “For mermaids like you and me, writing poems is the only way to crack the ice. Keep writing, Carrie Anne.” She tore off the page with my poem, folded it in half, and stuck it into the pages of her pink journal. “I’ll bring this back after I make a copy,” she said. “What do you need a copy for?” Maggie ignored my question, and instead exclaimed, “Man, I got busted today!” “Busted? What happened? Is everything okay?” “Oh, yeah, it’s really no big deal. I just got thrown out of Taco Bell.” She pulled off her wig and held it at her waist, the way a man might hold his cap when he’s just learned that he’s been laid off from his job. “Thrown out of Taco Bell! What happened? What did you do?” “Well, they had a sign out front, said ‘Days – $7.50.’ That sounded like a pretty good deal to me, so I went in and tried to buy 365 of them. I even wrote out a check for two-thousand, seven-hundred and thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents. Made it out to Taco Bell and everything.” Maggie twisted the wig in her hands, then made a sad face as she rubbed her bald head. “I told the manager I didn’t have very many days of my own left, so I wanted to buy a year’s worth of his. He threw me out! Can you believe it? I thought he was going to call the cops.” Maggie pulled the wig down over her head again, not quite getting it straight. “Man, some people just really need to lighten up, huh?” “Maybe you should write him a poem.” “I already did,” she replied, “but I don’t think I’ll give it to him. He’d call the cops for sure!” Maggie skipped out of my room swinging her pathetic excuse for hips and belting out her own off-key rendition of La Cucaracha. I doodled a little mermaid on the empty page of my notepad, then scribbled out a poem.
I read over the new poem again and realized that another blue teardrop had just floated out to sea.
After Maggie’s chemotherapy was finished, someone from the cancer center took me back to my room so Robbie could wheel Maggie down to the cafeteria; banana milkshakes had been added to wintergreen Lifesavers on the list of things she could hold down after her treatments. I asked to be parked in front of the window by The Healing Tree, where I could enjoy the warmth of the summer sun and the birds singing in her branches (at least they were there in my imagination). What was before the beginning of time? God only knows. Before she wrote her last rhyme, I had choices to make. But first, there was a demon to defeat. In my ninth grade English class, we’d been assigned to write a villanelle. I couldn’t do it. It was too overwhelming, trying to write a poem in which specific lines and rhymes had to be repeated in a prescribed structure. The thought of getting an F on the assignment was far less terrifying than the prospect of humiliating myself by reading childish claptrap in front of the class. The day before, I’d gone to Mr. Brightwood in tears, apologizing and asking to be excused from the homework. He told me not to worry, that I could still find a job as a clerk or a waitress without knowing anything about poetry. Sitting in the warmth of the afternoon sun, I closed my eyes and watched old memories as they randomly popped up to demand my attention. I saw myself at the state swim meet, where I’d placed second in the distance freestyle event, and even now was not sure why I was crying when I received my medal. I saw myself on the lifeguard stand at the city swimming pool when Mark Murphy, one of the popular boys at school, did a cannonball right in front of me, provoking my wrath to get my attention. I recalled those two awful years when Mark was away at business school while I finished up my degree. The day he came home to stay. The day he proposed. Then, a memory
long frozen in the farthest reaches of mental Siberia crept out,
an orphan child begging to finally be recognized. It
was April of my senior year at the University, and I still didn’t
have a clue what should come next. So I’d made an appointment
with the career counselor. At the end of our session, she’d
asked me what I would do if every job paid the same and had the
same social status. “I’d be a poet,” I answered
without thinking. She thought I was kidding. So did I. As a real estate agent, my greatest joy had never been making the sale; it was visiting the new owners a month after the close and seeing how happy they were in their new homes. What would I do if every job paid the same? Be a poet? No, there was something missing in that answer. Be a poetry therapist? Outside my window the sun was putting on a dazzling display for the end of the day. Red sky at night, mermaid’s delight. In the aquamarine afterglow, I wheeled myself over to the bedside table and pulled out my pad and a pen. I knew I could never be a poet, or a poetry therapist, until I confronted the fears that had blocked me since the ninth grade. Until I put to rest the ghost of Mr. Brightwood. Until I composed my villanelle. The nurse came by to give me my evening medications. I kept writing. My dinner sat untouched on the overbed table. I kept writing. The nurse’s aide came in to check my water pitcher and close the shades. I kept writing. As the drafts progressed from hideous to awful to merely mediocre, I kept writing. What had started as a brand new pad of paper had been whittled down to its last few leaves when I finally stopped writing. I read over the final draft one more time. Es freut mich. One of the few phrases I’d remembered from German class. It pleases me. Didn’t matter if it didn’t please anyone else. Rest in Peace, ghost of Mr. Brightwood. I pulled the last page off the pad and read my villanelle aloud to the empty room.
When the evening nurses came in to move me from the wheelchair to my bed, I was crying. Crying real, visible, human tears. They were the tears of a dream that, having spent too many years sharing a tomb with Lazarus, was now ready for a rebirth of its own. After the accident, some well-meaning people told me that everything happens for a reason, as if Mark’s death and my paralysis were just part of God’s master plan. I don’t believe that for one second. Such things do not happen for a reason, and certainly not because God has willed them to happen. The meaning and purpose (the reason, if you will) only emerge long after the fact, and then only after you’ve chosen to follow your dreams, even if it means acting in the face of your fears.
Peter and Rufus had left, but Maggie (I’m sure this was all Maggie’s doing) wasn’t done yet. I was sitting up in the bed with the journal open on my lap, trying (not very hard) to not fall back into the self-pity I’d been wallowing around in before their visit. I wanted to write a poem about Maggie and Rufus, pretty birds up in a tree – but this is what came out:
“May I come in?” I recognized the man at the door as being one of the hospital chaplains, though I did not know his name. I shrugged in a way intended to say “go away,” but that evidently conveyed “sure, why not.” And in he came. “Hi, Carrie Anne, I’m Andy Brennan, one of the volunteer chaplains here at the hospital. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to come up, but your request somehow ended up under a pile of papers on my desk, and I just saw it this afternoon.” “My request?” “Yes. It’s our policy, that we only visit patients who’ve requested it.” I shook my head. “I didn’t request any visits.” Andy was visibly confused. “Carrie Anne Murphy?” I couldn’t very well deny that, not even to get rid of a pesky priest, so I nodded. He rifled through some papers on his clipboard, and when he found what he was looking for, put it on top and showed it to me. Sure enough, my name was on the visitation request. As was a squiggly little mermaid swimming across the top of the page. I could just picture Maggie up there in heaven, those green eyes all a-twinkle, quite pleased with herself for having this keep Carrie Anne from getting depressed club of hers carrying on the effort. I handed the clipboard back. “Well, my brain’s been in a fog since the surgery. I guess I forgot about making this request. But thanks for coming up.” He set the clipboard down on the bedside table and put his hands in his pockets. “It’s my pleasure. That’s what I’m here for.” We endured the awkward silence for a moment, then he said, “here’s what I mean by that. I’m here because it’s not just the body that needs care in times of trouble; we also need to tend to our spiritual beings. That’s where, hopefully, I might be able to help.” “You’re not going to give me that ‘patience of Job’ speech, are you?” Andy didn’t laugh. He did pull up a chair and sat where I could see him without having to twist my neck. “No, I’m not going to give you that speech. For one thing, anyone who’s actually read the book of Job appreciates that Job was not a patient man. Faithful, yes. But Job was angry and anguished and anything but patient. If you’re interested, I will tell you something about the book of Job I think you’ll find helpful. After all, like you, Job lost both his health and members of his family.” “Yeah, but unlike me, Job got it all back.” I started thumbing through the pink journal, hoping that Andy would take the hint and excuse himself. He didn’t. “You say that as if the final chapter of your story has been written, Carrie Anne.” I didn’t reply, and Andy let the silence hang in the air. At last, he said, “You know, I’m pretty certain that in the months after he lost both his family and his health, Job didn’t see any path leading to a bright future either. How could he? How could anyone? But he kept walking, and eventually the path made itself visible. That path brought Job to a new place, but it could not bring him back what he had lost. In time, God blessed Job with a new family, but God could not erase the grief that Job would always carry from the loss of his first family.” “So what’s that got to do with me?” Andy shrugged. “As with most stories, it pretty much means what you want it to mean. But here’s what I think. While God cannot replace what you’ve lost, God can show you a new path, a path that will lead you to a wonderful place, perhaps a place you didn’t even know you wanted to go to.” “Yeah, well, it’s been several thousand years since anyone’s seen God come out of a whirlwind. I think he must have lost interest or something. I’m certainly not banking on any such thing.” Andy laughed. “Neither am I. I’d probably have a heart attack, to see God up close and angry! Frankly, I think God is more subtle than that. And there is a very subtle message buried in the book of Job, a message that’s often overlooked. It’s a message that just might help make your path visible.” He leaned back in his chair and just sat there. Finally, I said, “well, are you going to tell me what the message is?” “I will, but I’m not sure you’re ready to hear it.” “You let me be the judge of that.” “Okay. As you’ve just alluded, God came to Job out of the whirlwind and confronted him with his ignorance. But he did something else as well. God instructed Job to pray for the three friends who had accused him falsely. And the Bible is very specific in saying that it was after Job prayed for his friends that his wealth was restored and his family replaced. That’s the punch line, if you will.” I shook my head. “I don’t get it.” “If you consider the story of Job to be a metaphor, which I do, then that’s the most important lesson. Job was made whole when he stopped obsessing over his own problems and instead prayed for someone else. I don’t believe that God made a bet with the devil, using Job’s family, his health, and his possessions as chips on a celestial gambling table to be sacrificed in a test of Job’s faith. What kind of a god would do that? But I do believe that God was there for Job in his hour of darkest need. And God will be there for you, giving you strength when you are in need.” Andy stood up and placed his clipboard under his arm. “I spend a lot of time working with support groups, Carrie Anne. And I always find that whatever problems people are faced with – addictions, cancer, whatever – the ones who can at least for a moment set their own problems aside and pray for others, in whatever way they pray, find the greatest measure of healing for themselves. That is the message of Job, I believe. Something to think about, isn’t it?” Andy left, but the questions remained. And they multiplied. The notion of making a bet with the devil struck my fancy. Would God really have made a bet with the devil to test Job’s faith? Would Job still have passed that test had he known the whole truth – that it was God who gave Satan the go-ahead to slaughter his family and his servants? Where was God before he showed up in the whirlwind? Did Mark and I unwittingly make, and lose, a bet with the devil the night we thought we were going out to dinner but instead ran smack into a drunk driver who at that very moment might also have been losing his own bet with the devil? I opened the pink journal to the next blank page and started to write.
No, I decided as I reread my poem, Andy was right. God wasn’t responsible for Job’s tragedy, or mine. But God was standing there beside Job as he struggled to cope with it. And though God might not appear out of a windstorm for me, I knew that Andy had been right in saying that God would help me to bear that which otherwise would have been unbearable, and might help me find a new path, since the old path was forever closed to me. But first I had to pray for my friends. I’d spent the morning in my wheelchair in the sunroom reading the poems in Maggie’s pink journal, sipping coffee that grew colder page by page. With every line that had been crossed out, rewritten, and crossed out again, I felt her frustration. With every squiggled smiley mermaid signifying that a poem had finally passed the test, I heard her jubilant giggle and smiled along with her. In these pages I saw the hope and the courage that Maggie had shared with so many others whose own hope and courage had deserted them. And I saw the fears she’d kept to herself in poems of hopeless desperation, poems that were written in the depths of endless nights, words written from the eye of the nightmare storm that passes for slumber in the dark hours of one who is facing death. Unlike poems of hope and courage that were drafted, revised, and painstakingly rewritten for others, those she wrote for herself met the page on first draft, as if she wanted to get them out of her head and onto the paper, then turn the page as quickly as possible. No squiggled mermaids celebrated their completion. Turning another page, I saw the last poem that Maggie wrote in her incarnation as an earth-bound mermaid, a poem that would never be read by anyone but me.
It broke my heart to
think of sweet Maggie, who never hurt a mosquito or a mayfly, facing
those desperate last hours beyond our reach.
Maggie Maggie all alone. On the right hand side, opposite Maggie’s
last poem, a weak hand had scrawled two barely legible words. There’s
more. That was all. There’s more. But there was no more.
The remaining pages were blank. Not wanting to break the spell, I let go of my legs and floated up to the far corner of the window, where the late afternoon sun was warmest. Maggie was perched on the window sill, swinging her legs. She was wearing a t-shirt with the words, If you can read this, you’re close enough for a hug. The broken lady sat motionless in her wheelchair. There was something different about this otherworld Maggie. The nervous energy that had caused her to vibrate like an out-of-balance gyroscope had been replaced by an ethereal calm that suffused the space around her, like the air around The Healing Tree. Maggie was giving the broken lady a poetry lesson. “Writing a poem is a matter of opening your heart and inviting someone else to come in for a visit. Just put yourself in their shoes, then write a poem for the you that’s in those shoes.” The broken lady stared out the window, seemed to be looking for something she knew she would not find out there. “I’m afraid my heart’s not a place anyone else would want to visit. Not anymore.” Maggie leaned forward, resting her forearms across her knees. “Yes. And that is precisely why you must invite them in. For both of you. See, you don’t write the whole poem. You only write half of it. The reader writes the other half. You give the gift, and the gift comes back to you.” The broken lady opened the pink journal to a place past the middle and looked into the blank pages. “You gave so much, Maggie, to me and everyone else. But I really don’t have anything to give.” “You don’t understand, Carrie Anne. Not yet. But you will. Poetry is like healing. Healing is not something you give. It’s something you share. You write a poem to invite someone else to share in your pain, and thus in your healing. Then you share in theirs. The poem isn’t whole until you give it away. It’s a paradox, isn’t it, that you can only freely give that which you don’t possess.” I could see that the broken lady was crying, and it struck me as being another paradox that healing so often begins with tears. “They’re all one, you know,” Maggie said softly. She turned her head and looked up at me, hiding in my corner on the ceiling, then back at the broken lady in her wheelchair. “Sharing means both giving and receiving, both at the same time. Hurting and healing are one, just different points on the journey. Like looking at snowflakes in a silver bowl, you can never tell where the hurting ends and the healing begins.” The broken lady was alone now. Like the transition from hurting to healing, I couldn’t really tell the exact moment when the broken lady and I again became one. I was simply back in my wheelchair, with Maggie’s pink journal in my lap. It was my hand moving the pen, but I knew that I was only the medium through which Maggie was writing her death poem. And when I die What do you write into a poem for a woman who no longer feels like a woman? I wadded up yet another page from my yellow pad and pitched it in the general direction of the wastebasket, missing by a car length. Thus far, I hadn’t scratched out anything worthy of being entered into the pink journal, even as a draft, much less to be presented to Carol Mullins tomorrow afternoon. I’d fallen into a pattern of writing poems for my patients while sitting in Mark’s favorite easy chair in the den (not only was it the most comfortable spot in the house, I could tell Amanda that I got a workout every time I climbed in and out of it from my wheelchair). Chewing on the end of my pen, I contemplated the picture of snow-capped Mount Iliamna, a photograph Mark had taken from a kayak when we’d vacationed in Alaska. It was beautiful, it was forbidding. Like the challenge, and the privilege, of writing a poem for a woman who had lost her breast, and then lost her hair, in the fight to save her life. I scribbled a few lines to the effect that if God covered a volcano with snow, it didn’t make it any the less a volcano, that its volcanoness was held in the fiery rumblings deep inside, not in the decorative smoky plume an artist would have us see coming from out the top. But the more I tried to draw the metaphorical bridge between volcanoness and womanness, the more trite and banal my poem became. After an hour of littering the floor with yellow poet droppings, I finally set aside the pen. What would Maggie have written? Maggie could always find words to give hope even if there was no hope. Maggie once told me that, though she regretted not having had more years to live and to write more poems, she was thankful for having had cancer. If it hadn't been for the disease, she’d said, she never would have given herself permission to become a poet. She would never have known what to say without first having been in the shoes, or in the wheelchairs, of the people for whom she was writing. What would Maggie have written? She would have written about how adversity is just part of the journey. That how we choose to deal with that adversity is what makes us become who we are in the process of our journey. She would have said that things which break you down can ultimately make you stronger. That's what Maggie would have told Carol. This is the part of the journey that requires strength. So be strong. I closed my eyes and let myself drift into the wilderness of sleep. I dreamed I was hiking alone in the mountains. Walking through the pinewood forest, squirrels skittered about at my feet and songbirds celebrated the day in the branches, which sheltered us from the furious winds howling down the mountainside. I wanted to stay forever in this arboreal womb, but something impelled me upward. As I climbed, the trail grew steep and rocky; pine trees gave way to stunted shrubs. I had to crawl on hands and knees into the teeth of the relentless gale barreling down the slope. As I continued to climb, the wind pelted me with sleet and snow. The force of the gale tore away my clothing. Wretched and freezing, I pulled myself across the ground, hanging on to each rocky handhold with the desperation of a drowning person. Howling like Satan, the wind ripped out my hair by the roots. The rocks tore into my hands and my knees, and still I crawled on, trying to ignore the pain. In one murderous gust, the wind pried open my mouth and yanked out my teeth, and in the next, gouged out my eyes. Frantic now, I blindly clawed my way onward, hand over hand, having lost my legs to the cleaving of razor sharp stones. My screams for help were sucked out of my lungs before they could even take shape in my mouth. I was at the end of my strength, at the end of the world. I let go my grasp of the last stone anchor and waited for the gale to blow me off the mountain all the way to hell. Instead, a warm and loving hand lifted me from the wreckage of my body. “Welcome home,” said a voice that was neither male nor female, yet somehow both. In that instant I knew that though I’d lost everything in the climb, I’d gained everything in the ascent. The warmth of that loving hand remained with me in those drowsy moments when you can’t tell whether it’s dawn or evening, whether you are asleep or awake, or even which is your real and natural state. I luxuriated in the fuzzy glow until it had completely evaporated. Then it was time to get back to work. I had an appointment to keep. Maggie had been so right. Perhaps I could not give Carol Mullins hope, or healing, but I could share with her my own hope, my own healing. Back in my wheelchair, I lit the spice candles on my desk and turned off the overhead light. I said my prayer, then opened the pink journal. After writing several drafts in the journal, I pulled out my calligraphy pen set and some deluxe parchment paper. It took the better part of the evening to get it right, but I finally got it right.
I’d made a sufficient number of circuits from coma to consciousness, from anesthesia to awareness, to know that there is a huge gray area in between the waking and sleeping worlds. This not-yes and not-no space betwixt these separate realities is the seedbed for miracles; it’s where the impossible dream of today takes root, and becomes hope for the miraculous new world of tomorrow. I sealed this new poem into an envelope and prayed that as Carol Mullins traveled above the tree line, she would discover the meaning in her difficult journey, and that from that frigid bare peak she would, indeed, see the world as through the eyes of God.
If you ain’t scared, you ain’t skiing!” The words were stenciled on the t-shirt of a deeply-tanned young man who didn’t look like much of anything would scare him. I scribbled the phrase down in my journal, grist for a future poem. Nine years ago, Amanda had talked me out of an electric wheelchair. Now she’d talked me into joining her Bum-Legged Ski Bums Club on their annual spring trip to Lake Tahoe. Even better, Robbie and his wife Molly would be joining us. Robbie had just finished his third year of medical school. Molly taught math at the local community college, but – and this was the best part! – she was taking a year off to care for their new baby Margaret Anne (who, we had already decided, would go by Maggie). Before the accident, Mark and I had raced each other down double black diamond ski slopes. But nothing in my previous experience had come close to the terror, and the exhilaration, of having been strapped onto a ski-sled that was custom-designed for paraplegics, and set loose to fly down the bunny hill. By the end of the week, I was skiing with Robbie down some of Tahoe’s milder intermediate slopes. I knew I was skiing, because I was plenty scared! The highlight of each day came in the afternoons, when I got to baby-sit little Maggie so that Molly could ski with Robbie. We sat in front of the lodge fireplace, we two, I with my hot chocolate and Maggie with her pacifier, and I read poems to her. Classic and contemporary, she loved them all – even the ones I’d written. Don’t ask me how I know this, I just do, but her favorite was the one I completed right there, sitting in front of the fireplace with little Maggie on my lap:
One bleak day long ago, seemingly in another lifetime, I looked down from a high corner of a frantic room. I’d almost let the angels without wings lose the broken lady they were trying so hard to save. There were many days afterward that I’d wished I had let them lose her. Sitting in front of the fireplace with little Maggie, I knew why I’d come back. |
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