The Healing I Took Birth For by Ondrea Levine

Author:Ondrea Levine
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609259570
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser

The Holy Pizza of Infinite Compassion

After a few months of teaching a weekly class about conscious living and conscious dying at St. Vincent's Hospital in Santa Fe, we were invited to be pastoral care counselors.

It was there that we met a nurse in her fifties, Joanne, who was facing the same cancer as many of the patients she had served. She was a reserved, long-divorced, woman with breast cancer and the additional wound of an eighteen-year-old daughter who had turned away from her. Perhaps acting out against an imagined abandonment, her daughter began to live the low life, which included drugs and alcohol, stolen clothes hanging in her closet, and a man older than her mother waiting for her by the curb. The daughter's anger and verbal abuse stung and profoundly confused Joanne. Most assuredly, the daughter did not want to hear anything about her mother's needs from us.

None of Joanne's coworkers came to visit. She felt they might have an irrational fear of making contact with her breast cancer, but actually she had been so cold toward others that she had made no friends. So there we were, standing where her family and friends might have been, if she had any, which is not an unusual situation for hospice workers to find themselves in.

Indeed, where we live, in an area of large families, often clans, who live in close proximity to each other, we have found that fewer counselors such as ourselves are required, since multiple family members are there to help.

Joanne said she wanted to get out of the hospital and go home, but she had no support group waiting for her; so we told her we would put together a team to help her through what promised to be her final weeks. Ironically, the group we gathered was largely composed of community members of our weekly hospital Conscious Living/Conscious Dying gatherings, many whom discovered that this would become their life's work, as their heart swung toward deep-hearted service.

The group did all the shopping, cooking, laundry, organization of medications, and doctors' visits. Stephen and I were part of her care schedule, and one of us would sleep over at her house when no one else was available.

She had a difficult time with seizures, some physical movements, and verbal confusion, which were the effect of a metastasis in the brain. We gave her a picture of her beloved Jesus (the Self-Realization Fellowship image, being one of our favorites) to look at if she felt a seizure coming on. It seemed to give her comfort until one night, unable to sleep, she took her walker into the living room, and something very odd happened. Light poured from the image of Jesus on the shelf, a light so bright she could read the titles of the books nearby.

When we saw her the next day, after telling us about her experience the previous night, Joanne stood up; she didn't need a walker, her speech was clear, her eyes shone. She had, by her own estimation, been blessed.

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