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Life is like a bend in the road, each turn challenging our mettle: from learning to suckle at the breast to inhaling our last breath.
It’s arduous work living within the approach of the bend, not fully knowing, but still trudging ahead. Met with welcomes and rejections, with health and sickness, with creative work and drudgery, wounds scrape encrusted barnacles from our dishonesty. We learn about humility, and serving others becomes more important than living within self-imposed limits. We learn that we are not God.
To our amazement, decades of life pass. Resilience orchestrates a lightshow upon these accomplished risk-takers who developed their full birthright. Such live within our midst and fill us with gladness, despite their slow footfalls and vintage clothing from another age.
For them, the bend in the road has become nearly full circle; their joy, deep as they make their life review, embroidered by multiple life-turns. Their transition toward the last turn follows, a cinch.
At 6 A.M., I awoke with this helpful dream:
It is night. I receive a call from a church member who asks my help with a problem. In my brown-and-white cotton shirtwaist dress, I look trim as I make my way to the church. Alone, I figure out the problem. Later, I understand that everyone is relieved.
In my psyche there is a problem-solver who serves me well, though often obscured and seemingly unavailable in daylight. In that realm I continually apply the Twelve Steps to my character defeats as they relate to my terminal illness, with increasing weakness and shortness of breath. Yet I’m still up and about.
I expect the dream’s problem is related to my flim-flam acceptance of what is coming, and the church needs my expertise in resolving it. No one has experienced the spiritual depths to sound its perimeters, unlike Job’s three friends who jabbered on and on from their neatly construed theologies like faucets belching tainted water.
In the dream everyone is relieved with my passing.It’s been a long wait and a source of unease, if not grief, for many. Who likes being reminded of their mortality?
So the dream speaks of the necessity of my aloneness and the steadfast presence of the problem-solver in my psyche. This will work out. I’m certainly not unique in facing the end of this life.
“Hi, Liz! It’s Alice. Come to check on you again—Finish your nebulizer first, though.” Her voice fills my home with morning’s brightness as she settles around my dining room table, its center resplendent with red-fringed yellow tulips. Tapered fingers unzip her case and whip out her computer, notepad, and pen as I finish my breathing treatment and adjust the nasal prongs of my oxygen.
“Good to see you again, Alice,” I say, supporting my steps with my cane and sitting opposite her. On the table was therapy putty for my hands lest my terminal illness further weaken them, and a glass of water to loosen mucus from another lung disease, prior to coughing it up in an emesis basin. “Not much new to report. My weakness, shortness of breath, and speech worsen, but imperceptibly so. Certainly, I’m not where I was one month ago, but I still get by with my helpers—Even take short walks in the sun. Still keep up my deep breathing and stretching exercises.”
Her dark eyes warm me, despite the put-off of her black mask as she takes my vital signs: all normal—they always are.
“Seems like I’m really into my old age. I never dreamed it would look like this. Often atop my bed, I pray, stillness enfolding my body and psyche; at others, grief for my intransigent stuff seeping into global darkness like raw sewerage. Here is where the mantra, ”Mercy!” comes in, cried with vehemence.” She leans toward me and listens, not wanting to miss a word.
“Yet, each day, there’s something new to learn. Yesterday’s was critical: stop seeking answers where there are none, a waste of vital energy.” She nods and with her eyes hugs me before leaving.
Heart Whisperings 