by Kevin Deeny
Will said quietly, “Ok” and studied the board for a few seconds. After a few moments he added “Marcus, could you help me with my colors? I always feel better when you give me a boost.”
Marcus got up and said “Sure thing Will” and he moved to the other side of the table dragging his chair with him. He moved closer and placed one hand on Will’s shoulder and the other on his arm.
“Ok Will. Settle comfortably in your chair”. Will wiggled in his chair and relaxed. Marcus closed his eyes for a brief moment and said, “I see you’re a little grey today.” He began guiding Will, speaking slowly, and paused between each statement to give Will all the time he needed. “Think about your favorite place; I think we both know where that is.” After a pause, he continued, “Now I want you to find your heartbeat and feel it in your fingertips. With every breath, bring energy in deeply and push it throughout your body with every heartbeat. Feel warmth start in your toes and move up through your body until you’re all warm and comfortable. Watch the grey color diminish and be replaced with golden-yellow light every time your heart beats.” Marcus paused again for several moments and watched the pattern of Will’s breathing, “When your body is completely wrapped in golden light, rest for a while and then climb the steps to the observation point and stay for a while at Horseshoe Curve while you watch the trains climb the mountain.”
Rosalind watched Marcus unsure of what was going on. As she listened to him talk with Will, she felt herself following along and became aware of her heartbeat too, felt relaxed and sensed her tiredness slip away. Puzzled, Rosalind looked away and noticed a middle-aged nurse leaning against the doorway watching Marcus and Will. She was smiling affectionately. She caught Rosalind’s eye and smiled at her before turning and moving into the hallway. Rosalind had no idea what to make of this.
After several minutes, Marcus sat back in his chair, and Will stirred from his reverie and said “Thanks, Marcus.”
“Any time Will. Remember, you can do this yourself any time you choose.”
“Yeah, I know, but sometimes I just need a push.”
The morning had turned to afternoon, and Marcus noticed the light changing through the windows. He touched Rosalind’s arm and said: “We should go soon.” They said goodbye to Will and waved as they reluctantly left the room. As they walked down the hallway toward the nursing station, the nurse that Rosalind had seen before stepped forward and gave Marcus a gentle hug. “How are you dear,” she said to him.
“I’m fine Eleanor, how are you?”
“Oh,” she said, “I’m busy enough for six people.” She turned to look at Rosalind and said: “Who do we have here?”
Before Marcus could reply, Rosalind extended her hand and said “I’m Rosalind, a friend from school. I’m happy to meet you.”
She raised an eyebrow toward Marcus and said to Rosalind,” I’m happy to meet you too dear.”
In a softer tone, Marcus asked: “How is he doing?”
Eleanor looked at Marcus, and her demeanor became more serious. “He gets stronger every day. He still gets tired at the end of the day, but he’s a fighter.”
“He sure is,” Marcus said. “He’s a real force of nature. When he finally gets out of here, he’ll have an impact on the world.”
“He loves when you come to visit, Marcus. He’s now teaching everyone else what you taught him.” She reached out and squeezed his shoulder and moved back to the nurse’s station.
Marcus and Rosalind went on to the bank of elevators and down to the lobby. They passed through the front entrance of the hospital and discovered it had turned cooler. Rosalind looked up at the clear sky, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes as if she was trying to etch the input from all of her senses into memory. “You were right,” she said as she reached for his hand, “It is a special place, maybe even one where you can find yourself.” They walked hand-in-hand to the train station and rode home in comfortable silence. Although he offered to take her home, Rosalind asked if he could drop her back off at the deli.
He got out of the car with her when they arrived at the deli parking lot, came around to her side of the car and reached for her hand. He asked, “Are you ok getting home from here.” She looked at him strangely and said, “I noticed this before and didn’t think to mention it, but are your hands always this warm?” He shrugged, “It comes and goes.” She nodded in acceptance and said, “I’ll be fine. I need some time to think.” He paused for a moment and looked at her. What he saw in her eyes was confusion, and he sensed that she found something important that she needed to figure out. He let go of her hand and returned to his car. As he pulled away and drove toward home, he thought to himself “This was a good day.”
Chapter 13
Acceptance
Acceptance is the beginning of the journey.
Rosalind took her time. Although they crossed paths several times in the hallways during the week, Marcus didn’t get the sense that she wanted to talk. He was encouraged that she no longer had her head down; she moved with purpose again through the halls. He had never let anyone from school into that part of his life, and he was pretty sure that Rosalind found the experience intriguing. He was content to give it time to find out what she was thinking.
On Saturday, the stores at the mall opened by 10 am and stayed open until 9 pm. Marcus worked the entire day to get in as many hours as he could. He arrived at the department store at 9 am and helped with the clean-up that didn’t get done from the night before. At 10 am when the store opened, Marcus reported to the stockroom to find out what merchandise had to be taken to the sales floor for the clerks to unpack, sort, and distribute to their shelves and displays. After he made deliveries to various departments, he would backtrack to collect the cartons and packing materials that were ready for disposal. As truck deliveries were received throughout the day, the process would be repeated as many times as required to keep the sales floor stocked. As he was completing his third run of the day he turned right at the furniture department to head to the stockroom for his first break of the day. Rosalind was standing in the aisle. “If you can track me down at the deli, I can return the favor,” she said with a smile and added, “Do you have any time to talk?”
“I get a 30-minute lunch break in a few minutes. Do you want to meet me in the mall at the front of the store?” Marcus replied.
“Sure,” she said and turned and walked toward the front of the store.
“Lower level” he called after her as he pushed his cart to the stockroom.
He met her in the mall a few minutes later, and they walked to the food court together. She got tea, he got coffee, and they sat at a small table by the windows.
“I’ve got to meet my mom at Macy’s in about 20 minutes,” she told him while looking at her watch. “I thought I would take a chance while we were here and see if I could catch you at work” “I’ve been thinking since Sunday and made a few decisions, but I have a few questions, and I’m afraid they will take more time than we have now, but could we talk sometime?”
While she was talking, he noticed that her demeanor was brighter and more direct. There was something else that took a moment for him to realize; she was not dressed in dark clothes. “You look good today,” he said and then replied to her question by adding, “Sure we can talk. How about tomorrow?”
She replied, “I can’t go into the city tomorrow. I have a family thing to go to around noon.”
“I wasn’t planning to go into the city myself. I’ve got to do some chores around the house and find out why my tail lights aren’t working on my car, so I’ll be around. Do you want to try and get together after your family thing?”
“Yeah, that works; the sooner-the-better.”
They agreed to meet at the café in the bookstore the next day. Rosalind took several sips of her tea and hurried off to catch up with her mother. Marcus had a few more minutes before he had to get back; time e
nough to wolf down a soft pretzel and wonder what they had to talk about that couldn’t be done during his lunch break. He was curious.
Sunday church for Marcus was an on-again, off-again thing that depended on how much unfairness and inequity he was arguing with God about. He chose instead to fill the time with doing the chores that piled up during the week. After lunch, he tracked down the problem with his car taillights to a short caused by a frayed wire. He repaired the wiring and replaced the fuse, and everything worked as it was meant to. He considered himself lucky; electrical problems are usually more frustrating and time-consuming, although he was glad to be busy because it kept his mind from speculating about his pending conversation with Rosalind.
He arrived at the café a few minutes early and sipped on a bottle of water while he waited. He was conscious of the fact that he drank too much coffee and tried to cut back. Rosalind was a few minutes late but full of energy and anxious to talk. She started right in. “First - thank you for taking me with you last Sunday. Somehow, you knew that it would be good for me.”
“I didn’t know but hoped it would. Visiting there helps my perspective; my problems are trivial in comparison. When I met you on the stairs, I wondered if you could get something out of it too. I’m glad you did.”
“I got a little more than perspective out of our visit; I think I found what I want to do. I’d never been in a children’s hospital before, and I was a little blown away. I don’t know anything about the diseases or medical problems those kids contend with, and on some level, it didn’t seem to matter to them; they were all just living their lives. This is going to sound Pollyannaish, but I felt that in the face of their problems, they just bubbled over with life. I never really experienced courage before, but that place was filled with it.”
“I decided that this is the work I want to do. I spent all week learning about pre-med programs; I’ve hardly slept. I’ve got the grades for it, but it’s late in the application cycle, and a lot of schools may already be locked in, but I’m going to try. The school counselor suggested a biology track at a school with a pre-med program. She was going to make a few calls to see if I can declare after acceptance.”
All of this gushed out at once; Rosalind had hardly taken a breath. Marcus listened while grinning ear-to-ear. He had hoped that she would feel inspired to break out of her funk, but he had no idea that she had been so moved. He was excited to see her transformation. She had come out of herself and was driven now by a single purpose. “Cool,” he thought to himself.
“Ok,” she continued, “I had to tell you all of that, but that’s not the only reason I wanted to talk with you. I have some questions – about you.”
Marcus wasn’t sure he was comfortable with the direction this conversation was now heading. He tempered his smile and said, “Fire away.”
“I don’t know how to say all of the things or ask all of the questions I’ve been thinking about, so I’ll just put it out there.” She took a deep breath and began. “You’re not like other kids in school, it’s like you’re older. But more than that, it’s like you know who you are already while the rest of us have just started looking. So, I guess I’m just trying to understand that.”
“And another thing, what’s that thing with the ‘colors’ that you did with Will? Why does the nurse know you?
It was now Marcus’ time to take a deep breath. He replied “I thought I could get by with water, but this is going to take a little time, and I’m going to need a cup of coffee. Do you want anything?” She shook her head no, and he returned with a cup of coffee that he held in both hands while he tried to answer her questions.
“When I was about the same age as Will is now, I drowned in the Delaware River; not technically, because I’m still here, but pretty close. A bunch of us went swimming in the river, and one guy turned out to be a lousy swimmer. My brother and I were trying to help him, but he panicked and was too strong for us and pulled us under. We were exhausted from struggling to stay afloat as we were pulled downstream. I couldn’t fight any longer and accepted that I would die. At that moment, I was at peace and no longer afraid. At the last possible moment, we were pulled from the water by a patrol boat crew. We all survived; even the guy who couldn’t swim.”
“That’s the official version. What I haven’t spoken about with anyone else except my brother, even with others in my family, is that something happened when I finally gave up and was prepared to die. In an instant, I was enveloped by this overwhelming sense of peace without any care or concern. I found myself standing in a valley with hillsides that were covered by the most beautiful plants, flowers, and trees I had ever seen or could ever imagine. Their colors were vibrant and luminous, and I was aware even then, that the things I was seeing didn’t appear together on earth – warm and cold climate species were all mixed up and growing together. I looked down the valley and wanted to go further, but my brother’s voice called me back, and I found myself in the water again about to be pulled into the patrol boat.”
“I have done some reading and found that many people have had similar experiences associated with events where their lives were in the balance. They are called Near Death Experiences or NDEs for short. Some who have looked into these accounts believe they are nothing more than the result of the mind under stress; a fantasy of sorts. Others believe that these are glimpses of the afterlife. I’ve accepted the latter explanation. The profound sense of peace didn’t come from me; it existed in that place, and I was immersed in it. I also didn’t have the knowledge or experience to construct the elaborate detail and complexity of the valley I was in although it felt very familiar. It felt like home.”
“The practical result of all of that is I no longer have a fear of death. To me, death is nothing more than going home again. And I’ve come to realize that a person who doesn’t fear death doesn’t fear a lot of lesser things. I do have one fear though, and that is to live a life without meaning. This life has to mean something to me, and I’m kind of anxious to get on with it. Maybe that’s why I seem ‘old’ to you.”
Rosalind was silent throughout his discussion, and he watched her eyes grow wide when he described the valley. “That’s really amazing, I didn’t have any idea that you went through something like that. It must have been frightening to almost drown. I don’t know what I would have done.” After a pause, she asked pensively, “Do you think you were in heaven?”
“I don’t think so, at least not fully; maybe I was just peeking in the windows. It was the feeling that was amazing. I’ve never felt that completely at peace before or since.” Before she could ask more questions, he continued.
“I have also since learned that it doesn’t take a near death experience to live without fear. I learned that lesson from the kids at the hospital. Few of them concern themselves with the prospect of death; they are focused on life. It’s their parents who fear.”
She was nodding her head now, and Marcus asked: “Did you see that too?”
She replied, “I did, you can see it when they played; you could even hear it. Like I said, it blew me away”. She looked deeply into his brown eyes trying to sense the depth of this soon-to-be-a-man and wondered. She voiced her wonderment and asked, “How did you learn this stuff; you’re no older than I am.”
“I don’t really know; I read a lot, I ask a lot of questions, and I argue with God a lot. Maybe it’s because I have so many questions that God hasn’t answered that I have to look for answers myself. Maybe that’s an answer after all. I’m still bumbling around, and there is so much I want to understand, but some things are becoming clearer. I am patient.”
Rosalind broke her silence and said “This is not the conversation I expected. She turned both hands palms up and said to him, “This will be hard for me to process; it is hard to believe and wonderful at the same time.” Almost as an afterthought, she remembered her other question, “What about the color thing with Will that you did last Su
nday?”
“Well, that’s something different altogether. I have to go back to when I was about 12 years old to explain this. I had asthma pretty bad then. It was more than just the runny nose, sneezy, wheezy stuff; it was kind of serious. I often had to try and sleep propped up with a pillow because I couldn’t lay down in bed without my lungs closing up on me. Even so, there were some nights that I didn’t know if I would make it through the night because I simply couldn’t breathe. It got so bad that I would begin to panic because I literally didn’t know if I could take the next breath. The panic would make things worse. My heart would beat faster than I thought possible and it felt like I was suffocating.”
“Sometime after my near drowning I had another nighttime attack, and it was the worst yet. I slipped into panic and just couldn’t breathe. I thought for sure that I would die and then I remembered my drowning and the peace I felt when I decided to give up fighting. So, I gave up again, just like I did in the river, and stopped fighting to breathe. I was surprised when another breath came and then another. I began to pay attention to my heart and focused my attention on feeling my heartbeat in my fingertips. Once I could feel it, I worked slowly on changing my heart rate; to stretch out the interval between beats and slow it down. In a few minutes, I had brought my heart rate and my breathing back to normal.”