March 2003 Issue - Essay # 13
Healing
Airs
By Noelle
Pirie
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I had made my way to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, in order to listen to music; music my father had made beautiful, which couldn't come to me but which, instead, invited me warmly to a much-needed maritime escape. My father is a musician, and I never miss his orchestrations. Most of his work is done in Toronto, but this time his stage was set at the Charlottetown Festival, and I was compelled to make my way there. My
then-complicated Toronto living offered plenty from which to escape,
anyway; working in the over-stimulated and under-sexed entertainment
industry, dealing with profit-oriented and uneducated individuals, and
finding love in pockets of forbidden moments, stolen from dishonest
living. This runaway-train
culminated, ultimately, in a wreck of a miscarriage, nearly taking my
life with it. It isn't easy
to go on living when something inside has decided to die.
Winter
is a time of sleeping--and death. Inevitably,
however, it heralds the spring; and in the spring, I bought summer-fare
to Charlottetown and counted down the months to my July-pilgrimage east.
I bought time, as well, in a summer cottage on the northern coast
of the island, at once secluded and welcoming.
I bought the time from electronic pictures I saw--pictures taken
by honest people on an honest day somewhere in time before the wreckage
of my former life. The cottage,
the water, the sky, and even the long dirt roads untravelled all came
together in the pictures, in one great sigh of hope.
Charlottetown would fix things, I believed; movement east would
rejuvenate and restore, and a new life would emerge.
During
my pregnancy, I was trained as an assistant to a woman in labour: a
Doula. I had begun the training in order to educate myself about the
birthing process, and perhaps to become engaged in this alternative
employment to benefit other women. As
a single woman facing the prospect of single motherhood, I realized that
"alternative employment" and quick thinking would be my only
means toward a decent life for the expectations of my growing child.
Becoming a Doula was a fascinating experience, as I was
unexpectedly subject to the all-too-common modern horror stories of
barbaric North American birthing practices.
As
a Doula, my job would be to offer as many choices, and as much education
as possible to a pregnant woman in the months before giving birth,
during the labour, and post-partum; wherever she needed me, I would be
there to help ensure the labour would be as she wanted it, and not as
others convinced her it ought to be.
I wanted to stand guard against the vulnerability of a woman in
labour. I wanted to offer
alternatives to drugs, surgery, and the haemorrhaging and
life-threatening mistakes that characterize the experience of far too
many women. I wanted not to
replace her partner, if she had a partner, but instead to enable her
partner enjoy the sharing of this marvellous, and miraculous, process,
instead of feeling helpless and alienated.
For those women without a partner during labour, I wanted to be
an experienced comfort to them, burdening myself with their loneliness
and desperation in order to chase away my own. I
learned quickly, however, that there is no education or preparation to
be absorbed surrounding a failed pregnancy.
There is nothing. A
woman who has made the decision to keep the life growing inside her, and
who has made dramatic choices and changes surrounding this decision, has
nothing whatsoever to fall back on--except for her own inner voice in
the event the fetus decides to die.
Education is power, the greatest power in existence today. There is not enough education in the world, at the moment, that can prepare a new mother for the prospect of losing her pre-born. A woman is not expecting the blood and head-rush of the sudden realization, "I don't feel pregnant anymore." The blood comes, and the head-rush is damaging; a momentary loss of control, when control is so much needed at this time. Some
women fall to the ground; some women faint.
Some women can merely sigh, and then drive to the hospital.
Some women bleed for an hour, and some for too many depressing
days. Some women cry and sit
on the toilet, afraid of the mess and the remains of the day.
Some women place one of their best towels between their legs,
ceremoniously sacrificing the prized linen for this sacred moment, and
call anxiously for their partner. Some
women lie down and pray that something will intervene. Some women rail
and scream; some go very silent. I
can only imagine these reactions, because most women never talk openly
about it, which is why all women, in these terrible moments, feel alone. One
woman fell to the floor in a shallow pond of blood and did not awake
for many minutes, as blood slowly circulated back to her mind.
Upon awakening, she crawled slowly to the bathtub, and lay within running water to equalize circulation through her body and to
minimize the feeling of trebled gravity pulling her downward.
She did not know that her uterus was wide open, opening the
closed-circuit sealed mechanism of her circulation, and it was a running
faucet of lifeblood itself. The
fetus kept her open, half in and half out of its lifepool.
The woman drifted in and out of her awareness, listening to
water. The woman didn't want
to cry, but rather just listened, feeling life seep from her, knowing
this couldn't last forever. She
lay in the tub for nine hours, unable to lift her head lest she faint
again; able, though, to remember the passage of time, the hours that
slipped from her and passed through the drain.
The
woman heard her inner voice of life, finally, mobilizing her to action.
She crawled to the phone, though it took thirty minutes to reach
it, and summoned emergency help, and they came, and they were mostly
kind. Firemen in boots, with
axes in hand and tanks on their back, and very gentle eyes; eyes that
did not understand, but eyes that were gentle anyway.
A police officer took her keys from her outstretched hand and
examined her apartment to try to locate evidence of foul play, and that
is when the woman cried. The
hospital kept her for days because her fever was high.
Her body was feverishly trying to expel a foreign intruder, it
seemed, though the scrapes and probes had cruelly tried to finish the
job. Back home, the cleaning
was done and the stains removed, on the outside of everything.
It was still very difficult for the woman to move as she used to;
she had lost half of her body's blood, and it would take another four
months to regain her former strength.
That
is who I once was, and am no longer. My
father's music summoned me to Charlottetown, and to Charlottetown I
journeyed in the summer. I
flew away from the worst heatwave recorded in decades, a stifling
blanket of oppression, vanishing miles below.
I landed in a cold-snap, full of damp air and wind filling my
lungs involuntarily, and the cleansing began as if I had been ready.
The air knew I was ready--like an old woman with the right soup
and the momentum of a thousand traditions behind her, knowing what was
right. The air filled me,
and the goosebumps were welcome. I
dined on chowders and wines in town, refreshed daily by the best ice
cream in creation. At home,
in the cottage, I made mostly tea and tea-things.
There was television, but there was also my writing and books
everywhere to devour. There
were flies the size of my fist, and an empty beach stretching out for
miles, where daily I found footprints of one heron only.
I finally saw a glimpse of the heron, in flight, at a distance.
At the shallow shoreline, I waded past jellyfish, green leafy
bits, and sea-stuffs clustered against enormous rocks and spread over
long sand. A lighthouse
stood guard. Life
was no easier in Charlottetown, or in Cavanagh where my cottage resided,
than it was anywhere else in the world.
The difference, however, screams for attention in these pages:
life was allowed its moment of life, in the east.
Life lived, there; and I felt it all around.
My father's music brought life to the actors on stage, and had
given me wings to journey east to the place where soft airs would find
places in me, ready for mending. There was healing air, there.
The playful sky was wholly alive, as alive as a heart beating and
an embrace with which to feel it. The
air was alive and enabling of other life; I was allowed to live there,
as life had to unfold, with life things to admire and life things to
learn. The air was memory
without painful nostalgia; it was peace-giving. The
air also brought gifts of simultaneity, of the everything-at-once, of
the moment where all lives through all time converged and whispered en
masse, "I, too, live on, and me, and you."
I
lived alone in the cottage for my holiday, but toward the end of my stay
a dog kept me company. He
found me at the beach, and escorted me back to my home, where he could
be fed. He liked
hamburger buns, and he didn't leave for two days.
He had the run of the place as he wished, was free to come and go
any time, but he chose to stay with me for the short time we had
together. When his master
came to collect him, finally, I learned the dog's name was Luke--the
intended name for my baby. Luke said goodbye beautifully, this time, and
it was under a rainbow in the sky that he kissed me.
I have pictures of that rainbow, but its smell in the air is more
wonderful than the sight of it: it
smells like a dog named Luke, gorged on hamburger buns, and to this day,
I can conjure it instantly. |
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Author's Biography Noelle is a full-time University of Toronto student, studying classics, philosophy and history. She is surrounded by the warmth of dear friends and family always, as well as by two ubiquitous, comical cats. E-mail
Noelle at wbktf@yahoo.com
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