Recently, smack in the middle of a buzzing, bumbling,
jostling crowd of shoppers at a very popular Saturday morning
farmer's market, I met a mother who has been through nearly
losing her daughter four times to leukemia and the blitzkrieg of
attendant crises revolving around the chemicals and drugs used
to fight this disease. The
journey she, her family and their friends shared with this young
girl had been difficult beyond words. “
Alice
” [not her real name] told me her story of how her daughter [“Jessica”]
at 12 years old contracted this illness.
Many times the doctors had required Alice to make snap
yes-or-no, life-death treatment
decisions as a parent in the face of so much that was unknown to
her and even the doctors. Like a tiny boat sliding defenselessly
down the
precipitous troughs of impossible waves in a violent hurricane,
she was forced time and again to endure the punishing slap of
each new overwhelming danger.
In the process Alice, Jessica and their family had
befriended many who had been going through similar
passages, and so an incredible network of friends and familiars
had naturally developed along the way.
Together, this nebulous population of acquaintances has
found kinship, community, and support through their shared suffering and
challenges. They
have together mourned the transitions of some of their loved
ones and celebrated the healings and remissions of others who
continue to hang in here with us.
They have found ways to be there for each other during
the hardest times and to delight in every opportunity to share the
good times and the more ordinary benchmark successes [e.g.,
school graduations, birthdays, new babies, social events,
budding talents].
Alice said she had many times sat with others’
profoundly ill or dying children as well and described one such
moment in the presence of a dying youngster who had struggled to
mime her a kiss during his last few moments.
Who better can understand and truly be there for another
in such straits, if not one who has lived it with hir
own. How, I
marveled, had she managed to find the wherewithal to do this as
well as care for her own family??
Instantly
there was a shift. In her eyes I could see the Farmer's
Market no longer existed for her. Replacing
the physical indicators of her remembered agonies in retelling
much of this, her face now radiated almost a visible light I
could have read by in the dark, and
signs of exhaustion in her once sagging body were replaced by a
joy almost too great to hold in her now animated movements as
she described the following event.
Alice
told me about the latest life-death crisis Jessica had been
through, white cell count bottoming out, running out of time and
hope amid more guess-in-the-dark tests and treatments, in a
critical-care unit at a local hospital . If you want to
learn to be more intuitive or psychically gifted, being a
devoted mother, especially with a desperately unwell child, is
the fast track, intensely so. Having been through so many,
many dire situations with Jessica, and with other children as
well, she could not shake a terrible feeling she might lose her
this time. She watched her youngster's every breath and
slightest movement with a helpless, super vigilance as the girl
quickly lost ground in the latest battle.
She began to realize something unusual was happening. Unlike
anyone else in the room, Jessica was seeing and talking with
someone no one else could see or hear, whom the youngster
described as a man of light. She later described how he
had simply walked in through the door leading to the hall in the
hospital and just started a conversation with her.
Alice
could actually feel his presence but not see him.
He eventually told this little girl she was healed!
He left the same way he came in, walking back out into the
hall. Almost overnight, Jessica began to regain her
strength, and her vital signs improved so startlingly, medical
staff were calling it a miracle. Since that time the
disease has gone solidly into remission.
The mother and perhaps the daughter feel no doubt this
was the Christ who made her well.
Tears stood out in her eyes like crystalline boulders and
she lapsed into wordless awe. She was not asking me to
believe; she was simply reliving what she had experienced, and
was totally overcome anew in the telling.
I knew, being in this woman's presence in this moment, that she
knew she had witnessed a singular event that had given her back her
daughter. To see, feel,
hear her sharing the glory of this confirmation of the reality
of Spirit was indeed to be there with her as this unfolded.
I will never forget her gloriously shining face as she again
stood on Holy Ground witnessing her daughter's thrilling
encounter. Coming back into an awareness of the bustling
and packed Farmer's Market, standing right in the middle of one
of the busiest isles, was a bit of a shock for both of
us!
Dr. Melvin Morse, a pediatrician who has long studied the
near-death experiences of children, has remarked that regardless
of one’s beliefs, when a person listens directly to another who has had such an experience tell it, especially the first few
times, heshe cannot help but be profoundly affected, as if there
is a bedrock shift inside. Many
people have reported that their lives have been changed by
others’ stories like this one, sometimes even by just reading
about them. Sometimes
they appear to impact the secondhand-experiencer as much or more
than the original experiencer.
Such is the power of story.
