Illustration Friday - Drifting

Not drifting,
But resilient.
Open,
And not close.
Feel and be real,
But my heart can no longer break...

It has to learn to stretch so I can embrace the corners of the globe to envelope those I love in times of sorrow, in sympathy for the personal losses of my dearest Bella Sinclair in Japan, Diana Evans in Canada and Arija in Australia. This month! It has brought me great joy and sorrow alike.

I am not superstitious. I am used to death and dying. It is to me, no matter how a life ends, a part of the circle of life. I do not judge death as fair or unfair. It is what it is. Life has no guarantees, no templates and no known script. However, I give myself permission to react whether in anger or in sorrow. I have seen death as a child, deaths of my playmates from trauma in front of my own eyes; and of classmates from illnesses, of children ran over by motor vehicles in the city streets and later as a student nurse, I wrapped my first dead patient when I was 16 years old. There were many more deaths to come. One day I performed three post mortem care procedures and filled three death certificates as a trauma nurse. I have also filled birth certificates followed by death certificates with the same birth and death times. It gets heavy and my resilient mind and heart have learned to empathize with the loss while being present for the living and allow me to focus on the tasks at hand.

Death can be beautiful. It was in the case of my beloved Mother. She died while my sister and I held her in our arms and each of us kissing her forehead. We have done all we could. We nursed her day and night for three weeks. She was defiant, refusing to talk to the priest and approving our plans to take her home where she was to settle with twenty-four hour home nursing care. Then one day she agreed to talk and asked me to pray for her. The day before she was scheduled to go home, her physical suffering seemed to have ceased and my sister awakened me from a light nap by our Mother’s bed.

My sister is blessed. As a nurse in the intensive trauma unit she and her fellow nurses have learned to skillfully monitor patients with great clinical skills and as a human being, she is blessed with an enormous capacity for love, generosity and empathy. She is also a spiritual being. She is cognizant of the signs of impending death that are not written in textbooks; the spiritual signs. In the early morning before I clinically declared my Mother’s death, there was a harbinger of news. I did not know then and I was apt to dismiss it as a coincidence. My sister told me to let it be and to focus on facilitating my Mother’s passage with comfort and prayers.

I have learned to be open now. On Saturday when my dearest sister-friend told me of the tragic news, the same messenger came to my bedroom and furiously circled around me and all over my project notes and papers. I was wrapped up in sorrow and pain as I physically felt my heart breaking to pieces, meanwhile the messenger taunted me. It continued to do so for half an hour and then I remembered my sister’s words. It finally stopped and left when I verbally acknowledged it and said “Yes, I know.”

For Bella:

Many of you have expressed interest in supporting Bella through this difficult time. if you would like to contribute a letter, poem or piece of artwork to a care package for Bella (no financial contributions please), contact Aimee at Artsyville (at) gmail (dot) com.

.

I have said all I can. I must now retreat and proceed in silence...