Heal Thyself

Susan says: Greetings Readers and sorry for my absence. Gratitude to Jennifer for keeping our wee blog up to date with her usual wit and insight and with no help from me at all. Thank you!

I was in Indiana with my parents and sister. I went because my sister Karen was not feeling well. She has been in Zambia the last ten years, so we see each other infrequently. When I heard she was coming over for her health, I could not pass the opportunity for a visit. (The picture is my mom and my sister and her new friend "Oscar") When I stepped off the plane, my father informed me that Karen had been diagnosed with cancer. “What? No! No! No! No! No! Not the beautiful, sweet, tall and friendly, wise one! Not the selfless servant to humanity that is devoting her life to a noble cause in a faraway land…” Denial, denial, tears, tears, more denial, more tears. Then a bit of calm.

You always start out imagining the worst. It’s an hour’s drive from the airport to my parents’ house, where she is staying. So my dad and I had an hour to digest together the prospects of facing a future as an only child. What would it mean for my parents? What would it mean for her husband and two young sons? What would it mean for me? Well, we didn’t want to dwell on that too much. As we drove along, covering the miles between Indianapolis and Bloomington we settled our resolve to both go in there with smiling faces and lots of love and encouragement.

I went to Indiana, because I was going to "fix her - make her better". I just knew in my mind that I could help facilitate some kind of healing. I did not know at that time she had cancer. I was reading a book by Barbara Brennen, Hands of Light and in it she talks about the kinds of things that can bring cancer and disease onto a person like forgetting who you are, forgetting to center on the essentials of love, life and joy. I thought “yeah, yeah, this is good stuff.” Of course, I knew I couldn’t make her better in that outside influence sort of way or by magic or any such thing, or even that any kind of healing would come from me. But I did really feel like I could help her make herself better by guiding her to think about things in a certain way and maybe by channeling healing energy and helping the angels to find her. I hoped I could help to get her energy flowing back through those shut down parts of herself and better balanced through her body and fields. One time, right in the beginning, I woke up in the middle of the night and since we were sharing a room, I just woke up with these images of myself shooting fireballs with great tails of light into her errant and ailing lymph nodes. I'm sure you can imagine there are many lessons in this for us, the family, and detachment is certainly one. Not knowing the outcome - for us of course the most logical is that she gets better and goes on to raise her two little sons and be the wonderful person she is, loving and growing and having her beautiful effect on the world. But we don't know what will happen; maybe that is not part of the plan. Still I cannot shake this absolute positivity that she can make herself completely healthy again if she believes that she can. On the other hand, I don't want to believe that if she does not recover, it is somehow her fault - she did not believe strongly enough. So I was just there helping to facilitate unity with all the personalities and be supportive and do mundane things and cook and try to laugh a lot. I know it's her journey (well, it is all our journey, but the sick part is hers) but I really wanted to help her get over a hump that I could see.

We worked a lot with mental imaging, posting signs all over the house reminding us to give thanks for her perfect health. We asked important and difficult questions and talked and talked and thought about it all a lot. We did projects and sang songs and a lot of massaging and some guided meditations. And we tried to laugh as much as we could. It was an interesting time for the family since it was just Karen and I and our parents – just as it was when we were growing up, some old feelings and issues came up, stuff we hadn’t thought about in years; sibling rivalry stuff and parent/child stuff. We had some good talks about that and we prayed and prayed and prayed. (If there was ever a miracle prayer it is that Long Healing Prayer from the Baha’i Writings.) We got news from friends and family all over the globe of their prayers and well wishes. It was a comfort to know that so many people were in on the “battle” with us. We dealt with all the technical and medical aspects of this illness “to do chemo or not to do chemo, that is the question” with the aid of some wondrous physicians. Her husband and sons joined us from Zambia in the last days of my visit and we had snow fights and Scooby Doo.

It has been about a month now that we have known this news and what an odyssey it has been. It really does change the way you look at things. I think we have all run the full gamut of emotions about ten times over in the last month. But there is good news. Karen is feeling very good and responding well to the treatments she is taking. She is still not out of the woods, still undergoing diagnostics but it is all looking…encouraging. We do find ourselves wondering, marveling even at the power of prayer and love and solidarity and positivity. I’m so happy I have Karen for my sister. I’m so happy I have my mom and my dad. We are a good bunch and I love them all so much, lucky me.

So that has been my month. The next phase of the New Year. Whew. I gotta wonder what is coming next. I will keep you posted.