The Still Point Of The Turning World (12 page)

Along the high road to Taos from Santa Fe is a village called Chimayó, famous for its “sanctuario” of healing dirt and for the annual Easter pilgrimage when long lines of faithful penitents armed with electric torches and wearing illuminated clothing traipse to the church along I-25. Some of them travel the last few feet on their hands and knees. I’d been to Chimayó at least five times since moving to Santa Fe, but only once in the winter. In a quiet back room of the main church, a small hole in the ground is full of soft, dark dirt that is cool to the touch, like slightly damp sand. A handwritten sign on the wall tells you that if you have a handicap (check) and a broken heart (check), you will find solace there. I didn’t believe this, not really, but I always found myself scooping up a bit of the dirt and rubbing it on Ronan; sometimes I would eat a fingerful of it. I bought a silver vial that I filled with dirt and wore around my neck on a black silk cord. I liked the mystery inherent in magical thinking, the glittering possibility, the earnest vulnerability. And what do we really know? Very little, it seems. Even Saint Paul, the thinker whom few dare to argue with, didn’t believe that we were getting the whole picture of what our lives were about or might be in the future or the afterlife. We were, all of us, peering anxiously through that dark glass, desperate for a glimpse of the other side. And I did find solace in this church, perhaps because those who visit Chimayó for healing seem fueled by ardent, inconvenient beliefs, and this struggle suggested a powerful stubbornness that I appreciated and admired, as much as I could no longer subscribe to those beliefs. And although I no longer identified with the stringency or dogma of organized Christian religion, I remained drawn to the compassion and sense of community that still existed in houses of worship.

The walls of the corridor outside the room that houses the holy dirt are lined with shiny metal crutches, a few worn out, scuffed canes—all apparently abandoned after the healing dirt did its magic. The entirety of one wall is papered with photographs of servicemen and -women who have died in the last ten years in various wars, the bulk of them between nineteen and twenty-three years old. The place is thronged with people during the summer months, but during the late winter and early spring there are fewer pilgrims, no bustle of bodies or rosaries being slipped through the fingers of tourists at the Vigil Store, where I often picked up a medallion or a small painted
retablo
for Ronan’s room. On my last winter visit it seemed that nobody was keeping vigil at all. The churches were bone cold, the pews empty. There was a man sawing a piece of wood in one of the side chapels where an elaborately dressed doll, wearing blue and white fluttery skirts—the Madonna—stood collecting dust behind a pane of recently cleaned glass. A sign advertising espresso drinks in a side street café creaked back and forth in the wind. In the children’s chapel, the back room was stacked wall to wall with baby shoes for Santo Niño de Atocha, the child Jesus, and a woman was singing “The Old Rugged Cross” as she swept the wooden floors. I love the religious folk art, the red and blue wooden birds swinging from the ceilings, the sky-blue birds perched at the baptismal font and the random stray dogs that will wander in and lick a baby’s hand if you sit in the pews long enough. I love the old confessional booth with the place for the penitent to kneel
outside,
where everyone would hear your transgressions and listen as you asked for and were granted forgiveness. Near the door are a few children’s graves that I’d never noticed before. The entrance gate is guarded by a colorful symbol of Santo Niño himself, all cherubic with golden curls and red and yellow robes. I went to Chimayó because a secret but eager part of me wanted to believe in healing as a magic trick, physical salvation at the flick of a sanctified wrist, dirt placed on the affected part accomplishing a stunning, instantaneous change. I wanted someone to say, as Jesus did to a man’s dead daughter in the Gospels, “Child! Get up!” I knew it would not happen. But something else might.

After Ronan was diagnosed I began to question understandings of what healing meant, what it symbolized, how it was done. I reread Simone Weil, a thinker who understands healing as a psychological process, one that demands obedience and waiting. The twisting, labyrinthine world is full of chance, secret places, uncontrollable chaos and unknown roads that, if we wait long enough, might be explained or revealed, or they might never be. As she says in
Forms of the Implicit Love of God:
“The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth.”

I found comfort in Weil’s notion of waiting for God, not as a passive action but as a patient practice, one that required concentration as well as stillness and a hope that refused to fixate on a particular predetermined outcome. I thought about the biblical narratives where Jesus heals the sick with a brush of his cloak, makes the unclean clean, casts out demons, and makes the lame walk, the blind see, the barren fertile, and so forth. In any case, the body is a problem to be solved and Jesus can solve it.

Healing, for Ronan, would not mean the radical healing of his physical form. It might mean instead his full acceptance into community, into family, not the fixing of his physical body. Healing might mean no prayers for a miracle but prayers for his peaceful, albeit short, life. Healing might mean waiting, as Simone Weil did, for God to
arrive,
to fall into the person, and she offered no predetermined notions of what that might look or be like or feel like. Healing for Ronan might simply mean people meeting him and experiencing his uniqueness without thinking
He’s blind, he’s paralyzed, he’s deaf, he’s retarded
when he was all of these things. As Becky, another dragon mom, pointed out to me, our minds are littered with these classifications that block us from seeing the beauty of individual souls housed in particular bodies.

After my level-one Reiki training there was a kind of initiation that can only be described as a benediction, but instead of the pastor’s hands rising at the end of the service to send us out in the world, my eyes were closed. I felt the master’s hands sweeping and swooping through the air above my head, commanding me to use this energy for good alone. She asked me to heal others and myself (all Reiki practitioners can heal themselves). I would not be resurrected or reawakened into glossy, rosy-cheeked perfection, galloping through heaven on two flesh-and-blood legs. I was right to view that visualization of healing or wholeness as misguided. The potential of Ronan to heal and be healed had little to do with his body and more to do with how he was accepted in the larger world. That, perhaps, was the healing task, and if it happened universally, everywhere we went, it would indeed feel like a miracle.

Until I encountered Reiki and acupuncture, I had understood healing in a narrow, prescriptive way, as an end point predicated on the assumption that there is something deeply wrong with the person being healed, otherwise why bother? But the philosophies that undergird Reiki and acupuncture understand the body as an inherently wise vessel having a unique and valuable experience that can be made more comfortable and wonderful through the treatments these systems of thought have generated and provide. My son’s body would not be healed. Tay-Sachs disease, described accurately, I believe, as a demon, would not be “cast out.” His healing experiences would never add up to “healing” the way I had previously understood it. If Jesus were alive and I jostled up to him in a crowd with Ronan in my arms and touched his cloak, I would not suddenly grow a new leg, and Ronan would not start walking and talking and holding his head up without assistance. But as a result of the teachings of Jesus, people might regard Ronan and me differently, and with respect: the outcasts, the outsiders, brought into the communal fold. Having answered the question “What’s wrong with you?” for much of my life, I could scarcely imagine such acceptance, but I wished it for my son, and although I could not heal him, I could insist that he be accepted for who and how he was.

Ronan lived in the world held by people who loved him and fed him and talked with him and met him on his own terms. When he died, he will have been fully loved from his first breath to his last and then after. That full uncompromising love, powerful and sometimes painful, was perhaps the only miracle worth believing in.

14

S
pring arrived, although little felt new or promising to me. I found myself uninterested in all the warm weather anticipation, although I couldn’t help but notice a few trees beginning to bloom, flashes of green and white and pink appearing along the arroyo path. I wanted to spirit Ronan away to a cave on some windswept cliff with a view of the ocean where we could live with only the sounds of sea animals and unpredictable waves to keep us company. Ronan and I living on the coast of Donegal in the north of Ireland. Cold, damp Irish weather that smelled of wet wool and hot milk tea. A gray, complicated sky. It sounded like heaven, or at the very least a different place to be, which was why the concept of heaven appears to have been invented in the first place.

I distrusted all the supposed thrill of newness, the sunshine and bright light of spring, all the old certainties promised by the season (renewal, resurrection, salvation). I was simply waiting for and anticipating an end; I grieved a little bit at a time, each day a little bit more, and then this and then that, day after day after day. Where was the relief in all that dread? As usual, in unexpected places.

On a blustery April afternoon, Ronan, Rick and I visited the Kindred Spirits Animal Sanctuary, a hospice care facility for animals. This haven, a wide swath of ranch land in the middle of a wind-swept desert, is owned and operated by Ulla Pedersen, a Danish native who has been providing end-of-life care for dogs, horses and poultry for more than two decades. We parked near the white ranch gate at the end of a gravel road south of Santa Fe. It was, as Ulla noted, a “blowy” day, and the dry hills in the distance seemed covered in a veil of sand. Ulla, short and strong and with flashing blue eyes, explained that because she grew up on a farm in Denmark, animals were always an essential part of her life. I wanted to bring Ronan to the sanctuary because we had no household pets, and I’d always considered my own experiences with animals, particularly with dogs, to be some of the most profound of my life.

First we met Bo, a thirty-year-old horse who had been severely abused and suffered from Cushing’s disease. With his dark head and a white diamond on his nose, a swayed back and blurry eyes, he looked like an unfortunate creature in a children’s story. Ulla fed him part of a carrot from her palm. Bo sniffed Ronan’s head and seemed uninterested. In the corral behind the two stalls spread with fresh straw another horse wandered, Bo’s friend Toki, also thirty. “Horses attract abusers,” Ulla explained. “It’s about power.” I didn’t push for additional details. Both horses had been with her for more than two decades.

A pack of four dogs approached us—a few blind, some with gray-sprinkled muzzles and all with arthritic back legs, others with bits of gray on their noses that looked like accidents of paint, or flags of age waiting to flutter farther up their faces. They followed us, limping and sniffing us and then trotting along beside us as we walked to the poultry area. These were just four of the twenty-two dogs currently living at Kindred Spirits, all of them previously abandoned or abused, some of them, according to Ulla, “because they got a little bit old and the owners couldn’t deal with it.” Others had been kicked or burned or left on the side of the road. The sanctuary received “Can you take my old dog?” calls every day.

During their first days on the ranch the dogs were often skittish and fearful and terribly sleepy, but eventually, Ulla noted, they felt safe and at home, and their personalities bloomed. “Some are only with us a short time,” she said, “but we know that those final days are good ones.”

Dogs were treated to acupuncture, “brush and cuddle” treatments from volunteers and organic food. Very few drugs were used, although the dogs suffered ailments ranging from a hanging jaw, blindness, severe arthritis, back and leg issues, and other complications of old age. Each dog “tells” Ulla his or her name, and so Lil Bit Buddha and Anna-Lisa and Oscar and Abuelita and many others wandered a yard full of communal dog beds, ragged hairy blankets and saggy old mattresses: a dog’s paradise, full of dirt and stink and color. Buddhist prayer flags waved from posts and clotheslines. Just outside the entrance to the chicken coop was the memorial shrine for Salvador. A photograph of his golden, smiling face was propped up against a tree, his collar swinging from one of the sturdier branches. Someone had left a few bones for him. I thought of my own various shrines to my dead St. Bernard, Bandit. A framed sketch of him hung on the wall over Ronan’s changing table; another hung on the kitchen wall. An enormous photograph of him looking regal and serene on a beach in Provincetown was placed just above my writing desk; his collar and paw prints were preserved in a glass-covered box, also mounted on the wall of the study.

From each dog’s collar hung a silver medallion with Saint Francis on one side and Saint Anthony on the other. In the “big dog” room there were bunk beds and dog beds, while the smaller dogs shared recliners and small love seats. Statues of Buddha or Saint Francis peeked out from beneath scraggly bushes. The ranch was peaceful, if windblown, with barks, whinnies and a riot of quacks ringing through the air at intervals as regular as church bells marking time. Ronan whined a little, and cooed a bit when Rick bent down with him and let the dogs lick his fingers.

In the first poultry room, old ducks splashed in the mud and roosters and hens gathered in various “neighborhoods”: cozy spaces and nests under boxes and other wooden structures. Some of the birds had been found along the side of New Mexico roads in various states of distress; some were found in trash cans. Their sleeping room was lined with photos of chickens, as if birds, too, longed for pinups on their bedroom walls. In the second poultry room, protected from birds of prey by a wire “ceiling” over the area, an eighteen-year-old turkey, like something out of a Thanksgiving pageant, strutted around in his black-and-white speckled glory. “If people are going to eat them, they should see them first,” Ulla said. Two regal peacocks were swanning around the volunteer-made wetlands (“Mud is good for birds,” Ulla explained), leaving behind a trail of delicate, tendrillike green feathers, each with a blue center that reminded me of the “evil eye” medallions I’d once seen for sale in the shops of Greece, talismans meant to ward off bad luck. “When they are molting, the yard is covered in feathers,” Ulla told us, and I imagined the ground swarming with inky blue eyes, ground that was thick with good fortune. The peacock made a sharp, shrill sound—part cat, part bird—his pointed beak opening only slightly. I rescued a stray feather and stroked Ronan’s face with it. The day before I had taken him for a hike on the Borrego Trail, waved a pine needle underneath his nose and brushed his bare chubby feet over the dirt.

Inside the house, volunteers cooked meals and cleaned beds. A small Chihuahua with deformed feet—she was saved from a puppy mill—let us know with a few sharp barks that this was her territory. Ulla led us to the back room, which, in addition to housing the sanctuary’s newest addition, was lined with memorials and remembrances of each and every animal that had ever lived at the sanctuary. Tiny paw print frames, photos, favorite toys, poems, paintings. “It’s very, very important that each animal be remembered,” Ulla said, and her gentle voice and unassuming manner—this grand but unsentimental acceptance of the good and the bad together—made me believe that she’d been an excellent bereavement counselor, work she had done for many years.

So much has been written about the connections between animals and humans, but before I had Ronan, even though I loved my old dog Bandit fiercely through his various unknown ailments, bladder infections, tumors, incontinence, worms (hook and heart), eye infections and expensive, late-night vet appointments, I never fully understood this deep connection. In some ways, much of Ronan’s experience was at the animal level: immediate touch, taste, sight, sound with no cognitive recall; there was no storing of memories, joyful or fearful or terrifying or liberating or otherwise. Just bald experience that ended as quickly as it began: a feather brushed against a cheek, a startling sound, the surprise of a new sensation, and then it’s forgotten. Ronan sat on the mattress with Anna-Lisa; Abuelita, trembling with fear, was still brave enough to lick his hand with her tiny red poodle tongue. A rooster fluttered past Ronan’s face, his comb a band of color briefly crossing Ronan’s vision. And then? Forgotten. Only I remembered, a necessary if sometimes arduous task.

My friend Tara, years after losing her dog, her apricot beauty Theda, wrote to me when we were discussing the impossibility of loss and the mind’s stubborn refusal to accept what was so terrible: “Isn’t she just in the next room, right next door?” I thought of this as I looked at the tributes to all these creatures, many of them with unknown histories, but all of them with known ends. All of them loved. We don’t forget after we let go. Tara was right, and both moves—the knowing of the loss and the refusal to fully know it, both of which are different from intellectual acceptance—are essential parts of love.

I asked Ulla if we could come back as Ronan’s condition progressed, perhaps just to sit on the lawn and let the dogs surround him, explore, interact, and then, at night, we would leave them to sleep their animal dreams under the black dome of sky, in their eclectic pack, safe, without at all remembering Ronan, who would be in his own room, safe for the moment even as he was dying, dreaming his own unknown dreams. My baby, mine. Pablo Neruda, “Rest with your dream in my dream.”

I pulled away from the sanctuary brimming with a strange, electrified feeling. A feeling of fullness, a kind of swarm in the belly, my heart beating quickly, my cheeks flushed. Driving back home I burst into tears. Looking at those shrines, touching those animal bodies, I realized that I’d been thinking, all that time, that Ronan would always be, in some way, right in the other room, in the next room, in every room. Wouldn’t he?