Do You Want to Be Well? A Memoir of Spiritual Healing

PROLOGUE

“The hope is that we can be a bell which rings out absolutely clearly without a flaw in it. Perhaps flaws have been carefully placed in us; almost like the flaws in marble that give it its beauty.” David Whyte

On the wintry cold morning of March 18, 2016, I was hit with a blow that knocked the very breath out of me. I found my husband Roy unconscious and barely breathing on our bathroom floor. Neither my efforts at CPR, coached through my phone by a 911 dispatcher, nor the herculean attempts of the EMT team who worked on him in our bedroom would result in recovery from that sudden, fatal, heart attack. Grief invaded my world, unbidden and unwelcome. The scaffold of physical and spiritual healing I had created over the past 25 years didn’t just crumble. It detonated. Desperation drove me beyond my old coping skills, found sadly wanting.

In the early months of grief, I awoke each day between 3:30 and 4:00 am to a panic attack, my heart pounding, my legs twitching to get up and run. I experienced a tumult of symptoms, from fatigue to loss of appetite, to depression to severe anxiety. I couldn’t sort out what caused what. Grief, while an acceptable diagnosis to my insurance provider, didn’t satisfy me. I didn’t like any of the answers I received from the stream of well-meaning and highly skilled health-practitioners I consulted.

In the middle of that spiritual chaos, the wholistic physician I had come to trust stopped taking my insurance. I was terrified. That doctor’s unconventional approach had provided the map for my journey through chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia. Where would I find someone who understood my complex issues? I searched the list of physicians in my insurer’s guide and found a primary care physician recommended by a friend.

Well, I thought. This is probably the best I’ll do in the western medicine complex. Armed with a file of medical history and diagnostic tests, I met with him. By that point the anxiety had gotten so bad my entire body trembled. Friends and family would take my shaking hands and say with empathy, are you okay? I am sure, in that first appointment, the doctor felt desperation oozing from my pores.

As we reviewed my bloodwork, I kept prodding, asking him about different kinds of tests or tools to identify the problem.

“You seem to be looking for something definite here,” he said, looking up at me over his glasses in that lovely country-doctor kind of way. “I don’t think you’re going to find it.”

Disillusioned. And yet, his comment contributed, more than any medication, to my ability to be well. My symptoms, regardless of label, weren’t going to fit the diagnose and treat model of western medicine. Maybe it was okay not to know. Maybe it was okay not to have a definitive diagnosis for my cluster of psychological, physical, and emotional symptoms, the cure for which I could chase for the rest of my life.

In a simple comment he gave me permission to accept my inadequacy. I received permission to see and explore my driving need for perfection in my health, my work, my family, every aspect of my life. Perhaps, as Whyte suggested, my imperfections were not flaws to be corrected. Perhaps in my newly emerging grief, allowing myself to be flawed, vulnerable, disillusioned, accepted, forgiven and loved was where my quest for healing began to transform into a practice of well-being.

If you, too, have found your world turned upside down by unexpected trauma, I wish I could sit down with you over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine and share with you my experience of sustenance. But the written word will have to do. You’ll find here not only a story of healing from grief. You’ll also see how grief opened me to a more vast and profound healing from accepted interpretations of Christianity which oppressed and wounded me. I hope my story is a reaching out toward your suffering, a holding of your trembling hand, a dim light coaxing you forward. Or, perhaps, simply another perspective to illuminate your own…