Radical Acts of Love by Janie Brown

Author:Janie Brown [Brown, Janie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2020-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

11

ANNELIESE: Released

Anneliese wasn’t sure why she’d grabbed the small glass bottle of soil off her dresser minutes before she left for the retreat. On her most recent visit to Würzburg, she had gathered a handful of soil from her mother’s grave to take home. Her mother died in 1971, at the age of thirty-four, when Anneliese was six years old.

‘After a while the grave gets used for someone else,’ she told me. ‘Another body goes in on top, unless you keep paying for the lease. I’m not sure my mom would have liked a stranger, some Karl Schmidt, being thrown in on top of her.’ She paused. ‘But then again, knowing Mom, she might have?’ Anneliese’s throaty chuckle was infectious.

The rain held off under thin grey November clouds and a sliver of blue had opened up in the distance over Black Tusk mountain. Anneliese’s fellow retreat participants gathered on the grass beside a wide curve of the creek to witness a funeral that Anneliese hadn’t been allowed to attend forty-three years earlier. Anneliese was looking her own death squarely in the face. She had metastatic breast cancer, the same disease that her mom had died from.

I looked around the circle of retreat participants and staff members who mingled on the creekside on that cool winter morning, willing to support Anneliese to close a chapter of her life. I always feel hopeful when I witness how relative strangers have a natural willingness to support healing in others. Perhaps we can’t heal ourselves on our own and it is our very interdependence that is the essential medicine for healing.

On the first day of the retreat, she had whizzed into the parking lot in an ancient Pontiac Sunrunner emitting blue smoke from its muffler. The front passenger seat had been removed to make space for her companions in life: Murphy, her thirteen-year-old Lab, and Edie, her Lab/pit bull cross. Her biggest concern before the retreat had been to find someone to mind her dogs and her thoroughbred horse, Mexxy, for a whole week. Anneliese tugged her red knitted toque down over her ears as she hopped out of the car. Not having hair in winter was bitter.

‘That was quite the journey!’ she said. ‘Nine hours’ drive! My oncologist told me I should come on retreat, and I trust her, so here I am! By the way, call me Ahnna-Leece. It’s the German way.’

I wheeled her well-worn suitcase across the wooden bridge, pointing out the hot tub to the right of us, and the art cabin on our left.

We had used the Brew Creek Centre every season for twelve years by then, a mountain lodge set in the midst of twelve acres of old-growth Douglas firs, large-leaf maples and cedars, on land that five thousand years before had been the home of the Squamish Nation before colonisation. Maureen, our Cree friend, who joins our staff team from time to time, feels the presence of the ancestors on the land there and says prayers each

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