Chapter One
It happened after the colic finally stopped. I heaved such a sigh of relief, thrilled that I could now get to know my baby. We’d all been on a crazy merry-go-round for the four months since Ewan’s birth. Day upon day of relentless crying jags, a few hours’ rest and then screams again.
Sometimes Ewan shrieked nearly all night long. His scrunched up, sobbing face reddened almost into purple so often, that I secretly, guiltily, nicknamed him “Beet Face Mahoney”. But I never left him alone in distress and would rock him hour after hour, losing myself in an endless cycle of scream, eat and sleep. After four months of this, I was disoriented and exhausted.
Ewan probably was, too. Maybe that’s partly why he caught a cold during a trip to England to see his paternal grandmother. Afterwards, I wondered if the virus’ origins went deeper than that, an issue coming down the generations. He wasn’t very sick so at first, I wasn’t worried. But when the cold lingered, maternal alarm bells started ringing. Several weeks later, Ewan remained ill and I had a terrible nightmare. I dreamt my baby would die before he was 13 months old.
Finally mobilized by terror, I braved the snowy weather and the -20 temperatures of Edmonton, Alberta, to make appointments to see a pediatrician. Pegging me an over-anxious mother, the first two doctors brushed off my concerns. But the third one, Dr. Tedeschini, a warm Italian guy, palpated Ewan’s stomach and discovered an enlarged spleen and liver.
“Leukemia?” I asked, recalling this Readers Digest article I had read at age 12, entitled ‘The Triumph of Janice Babson’, the story of a child with terminal leukemia. My young self-had struggled to see exactly how Janice had triumphed. (She had died, hadn’t she?)
But I had been so deeply moved by her story, that I still remembered the symptoms of leukemia.
“Are you a nurse?” the doctor asked, surprised I knew an enlarged spleen and liver was associated with this cancer.
I explained about the article.
“I wouldn’t think it is leukemia, because his colour is so good,” the doctor said, reassuringly.
But obviously he had concerns because we were sent down a floor to the laboratory where we waited a very long time for Ewan to have blood drawn. They had to prick his finger. I understood the reasons for it, but it is a terrible thing to watch your baby being hurt for any reason, especially when it looks as if the pain was just beginning.
I got home and waited 48 hours or so. I was not a happy camper but I kept trying to persuade myself that the tests would find nothing much wrong. Finally the phone rang.
“Ewan’s blood count is 35,000.” The speaker failed to introduce himself.
“Is it leukemia?”
“I have never seen a count that high without it being cancer.”
That disembodied, nameless voice at the other end of the phone sounded very pissed-off. Maybe he was cranky that it was his turn to make one of these bad news phone calls. All I knew was I got the devastating test results from an angry doctor.
Hearing it that way, just made everything a bit harder.
I must have told Peter. I can’t remember his response but I am sure it was stoical. What I do remember is awaking the next morning feeling lighthearted and happy, then being troubled by a vague sense that something really, really bad had happened that I just couldn’t remember. This muddle sat there a while, like a word stuck on the tip of the tongue. Finally my organism registered reality. Emotionally, a ton of bricks crashed into my body and psyche.
Like clockwork, every morning for ages after that, came the feeling of there being something bad to remember. Next, I’d get lost in a deep foreboding and an inner resistance to what was coming.
What followed, every time, was the overwhelmingly horrible black avalanche of grief, despair and profound helplessness, as I remembered my son was dying. Ten tons of dark heaviness would spill over me and into me, immersing me in anti-life, taking me to a place too deep to scream. Drowning in it, I would get up and face the day.
Me dying seemed way easier than this……
Chapter Two
Each one of us has a lot of power. We might not feel that we have it, or know how to identify or use that power, but it’s there because it’s intrinsic to each one of us.
That’s the priceless gem that remains with me, 30 years after life – specifically my son’s terminal illness – cracked open my perspective and my world. Despite our pediatrician’s optimism, my son turned out to be seriously ill after all.
Yet I am the one who died helpless, on some experiential rack that turned my life upside down and inside out, before crushing it all into tiny, sharp-edged pieces. The old me, smashed into the dirt, broken and in pain beyond any intellectual understanding, never got up again.
But the new me arose from the ashes like a phoenix, gifted now with a strength, an intelligence, a power and a resilience that I had yearned for my whole life. I felt far more ancient in perspective, almost like a new human being, the union of cavewoman and modern journalist. My old self now seemed incredibly small minded and linear. I just had more inner space somehow, more peace. I had lost that terrible feeling of urgency that used to push me through my days.
I knew I had discovered something – a magical treasure that words can’t describe. My love for my son made me touch into that eternal, phoenix nature inside each one of us. Without the catalyst of his illness, I doubt I ever would have gone so deep.
As a Westerner, I had no true knowledge of meditation and no understanding that its practice can deepen us until we discover within, the silence of Being and the peace that passes all understanding. Even children in the India know about meditation, but for many of us in the West, if life doesn’t free up our true Nature for us, how would we ever realize that we are far more than we think?
How could I have ever discovered my life’s deeper meaning and purpose without this terrible experience of my son falling so ill? But still, bad things happen to people all the time and not all people get through it. Some turn to drugs, or booze, or sex or even suicide. How is it that this experience transformed me so completely?
I think part of the key was I was female and still nursing. The wisdom of ancient humanity rises up in a woman at this time and frankly, I was not going to let go of this baby without a fight.
Also, I had touched into true reality as a child with the birth of my younger brother, which had imprinted divine love on my young psyche. At seven, an experience of oceanic transcendence blew open my heart and mind. It was a case of unconditional love at first sight. He was the Christ child to me, the babe in the manager.
I had raced down the stairs to see this new infant, cradled in an old fashioned English carriage placed in the living room for the occasion. I was so deeply touched and thrilled to meet him, that I experienced a full blown maternal response to this baby who was really my first love. Indeed, after about 6 months or so, I was the one who took over making him bottles in the middle of the night because my exhausted mom slept through his crying. I didn’t mind. I loved doing it.
Even as he grew, I’d refuse invitations from my childhood playmates to come home to take him for a walk in his carriage. I played with him endlessly, all day if I could.
Perhaps experiencing this eternal love and bonding as a child made it easier for me to play into transcendence as an adulthood. Underneath my deep maternal concern for Ewan, I felt something other than my limited self – an internal presence beyond just “me” – more eternal than the stars, more evocative than a mountain in twilight.
Yet, there was also something incredibly human and ordinary about it, perhaps because I was living the experience. Something in my heart whispered that I had half known this was going to happen even as I felt that something beyond me was helping me through it.
This wordless knowledge was in my refusal to swallow and digest this terminal diagnosis. But I wasn’t certain, either. It was more that I half knew and half hoped that everything was not as it seemed, and vaguely intuited that something inside me knew something I didn’t.
All this was so incredibly subtle, that honestly, I was barely aware of it at the time. But looking back, I see the weave of these different levels of realities. I remember feeling that life had my back against the wall but yet some inner sense recognized that all would be well finally. It’s clear to me now that this was part of my gig this lifetime – even if it shattered my heart into a thousand jagged pieces and introduced me to an internal chaos and disillusionment that knew no bounds.
Who knew this chaos and disillusionment is the mark of an ego death which occurs when we decide to step forward and grow? I sure didn’t. But we ourselves are seeds of our own future in a way, and the shell of our conditioned ego must sometimes be crushed, to force us to grow, just as the new sprout destroys the beauty and symmetry of the seed pod.
The demands of ‘transformation’ mean there isn’t much peace after this ‘catastrophe’ for either human beings or the seeds. We both have then to dig down deep to find the sustenance to keep going and root into the bigger identity, the oak tree for an acorn and for human beings, our awakened self
The process can be exhausting. But it’s life with a capital ‘L’ so it’s also captivating, meaningful, exquisite and ecstatic at times!
To risk and grow or remain the same is the question life places before us all. Bluntly, when our lives don’t work out as we planned, we have the choice to shrivel into bitterness and rot ….Or to sprout and become the amazing person we were born to be.
Just as an acorn carries the oak tree inside it, we ourselves carry the seed of the most illuminated version of ourselves. It’s there in our hearts; in our earliest, most innocent memories of childhood; in the subjects or activities that fascinate us; in every person or animal we have loved and who has loved us; and within the subtle blueprint of consciousness carried in the cells of our bodies.
But many of us haven’t a clue how to activate our possibilities, to live them out and enjoy the extraordinary life we all feel is possible, even if this sense of there being something more, stays with us, as if just a millimeter beneath our everyday consciousness….
It’s so easy to blame others if we feel stuck or trapped. Perhaps the whole prospect of a bigger life is just too challenging to even think about…..
It’s not surprising that we feel so powerless if we haven’t learned how to engage our own consciousness to solve difficulties. If we think the universe is just random, devoid of a higher, compassionate intelligence, we might feel ourself to be a happy fluke; a mere accident; a tiny bit of meaningless flotsam or jetsam, not a divine Being in human form with infinite capacities.
Even if we think God exists, we might picture a white bearded, judgmental sort of fellow. There he sits, hovering above us in the sky, ready to rain down trouble and disasters on us, if we don’t tow some line of action and behavior that is inevitably impossible to follow or can’t even be perceived clearly. This Kafkaesque worldview doesn’t make us feel particularly powerful or of great value, let alone beloved.
Who knew we had access to a bigger understanding and power that exists (even if dormant) somewhere within us? Even if our families attended church, who told us about the power of the individual to access infinite love power?
Maybe we watched our parents slaving away at their jobs, to pay the mortgage and other costs of raising a family. Maybe they were too busy to even glimpse the possibility of inner freedom or psychological blossoming. Or maybe they were dumbing themselves down with alcohol, dope and pharmaceuticals.
The thing is, if adults didn’t model conscious, powerful living to us, we grow up without a roadmap for it. We feel it’s not possible because we have no idea how to do it.
But even so, no matter what happened to us in childhood, at any time, in any instant, we can tap into and harness an infinite force. (i.e. we can awaken to the true reality.) Still, human nature being what it is, we might stay happily asleep to our true potential unless something comes along to make us feel helpless, alone and very afraid.
I felt all of that, as a very desperate young woman of 31 hearing my first born infant son was seriously ill. Little did I realize that this terrible time would bring me a lightness, a happiness, and a priceless knowledge that perhaps ancient humankind understood better than we modern ones, do.
The truth is miracles can and do happen. If you tap into the deepest layer or substratum within yourself, you tap into unconditional, universal love or the Energy that forms this Universe. (Scientists have proved everything is energy…….it is just not understood that this Energy is universal love.)
But at this intrinsic or substratum level of existence, anything is possible. This is what I keep coming back to – because I tapped into this level somehow, instinctively, desperately, blunderingly, somehow touching into an infinite power.
Faced with a doctor I couldn’t trust, and who offered little medically, I reached into something sacrosanct and inviolate beneath both the atomic level and human thought that changed our lives.
Hence, on a cold blizzardy day in late November, I sat in the doctor’s office in the Edmonton Cross Institute, Edmonton’s cancer center. The doctor, stern and forbidding, remained behind his enormous desk. His manner was so removed and clinical that I felt cold, physically. Or maybe the news chilled me to the bone. I think both.
“Your son has acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). It’s a leukemia found in older people. About one child in North America contracts it each year. (Many more do now, apparently.) It is terminal, I am afraid,” he said
The doctor leaned back in his heavy chair behind an enormous desk of richly coloured, expensive wood.
I was speechless. Perhaps at heart, the doctor meant well but he seemed so devoid of any human warmth, that my strongest feeling was that we were being hexed! To give him his due, maybe he had learned to become self-protective after watching many children die. But perhaps he didn’t need to armor up as much as he did.
I knew that doctors didn’t like to give people a timeline in terminal cases but I insisted anyway. He felt Ewan had a year at most.
Now I really felt hexed but I was the one who had forced the issue. At least, I knew what I was up against.
There was no hope at all and no treatment, he told us. The whole thing was just so weird, that realistically, I had probably gone into shock and that is why I felt so cold. But the doctor, although obviously doing his best, smelled of evil to me, and I have often wondered about it.
The simple answer, I suspect, is that in the long trek from his country of origin to become a specialist in Canada, he had given up too much of himself to fit into the Western mold and experienced a loss of soul. Whatever the reason, something about him really felt amiss.
Beyond my discomfiture with our doctor, I was facing a picture of reality in which all evidence pointed to leukemia and my child’s death. I felt sick, exhausted, despairing and sad. At the nadir of my existence, everything was blacker than black. I don’t even remember my husband being in the room with me but he must have been. I also don’t remember anything else that was spoken about, before Peter and I headed back to the car and for the wordless, funereal ride home.
I felt all alone in a hostile universe, like some godforsaken worm who had been half-crushed by the heavy shoe of some random person who had carelessly decided to walk my way. Feelings of fear, dread and helplessness, arising in a background climate of absolute loneliness and abandonment, was beyond all words, and any emotional pain I had previously experienced.
Who was I going to call? No one wanted to hear this news and what could they do anyway? What comfort could they offer, beyond platitudes? Really, WHO WAS going to save us? No one, I thought.
The truth was I had no real faith in God and besides, if He or She existed, I had noticed that God did what God wanted. If this transcendent force truly existed, who said He/She/It would save Ewan?
As the future version of myself, I look back on that distraught young mother with great compassion.
This is what she didn’t know….
People have capabilities far beyond what is usually considered humanly possible. There are so many accounts of the power of prayer, healings and other miracles that as a society, to dismiss them out of hand, is irrational.
For tens of thousands of years prior to industrialization, this is all that we had, plus herbs and TLC (tender loving care), to heal people.
It’s as if a very reductionist version of scientific knowledge has become the new religious doctrine. Maybe it’s a case of the more things change, the more they stay the same. Has much changed since the medieval times with its belief in sin? If you scratch the surface of many people today, no matter how successful, underneath they may still feel small, guilty and unworthy. Miserable sinners, almost.
But here’s the thing.
If we don’t believe in our own value and power, we don’t trust our guts, hearts or instincts and we remain half-alive, even though we might say we are happy, half trying to persuade ourselves, aware of something very wrong underneath. If we don’t trust ourselves, that means that the still small voice within gets treated badly as we beat ourselves up for not being smarter, better, exercising more, thinner, younger looking, sweeter, more loving, and beautiful.
This is like beating up a genius for not being a great Walmart employee! We try to shove our infinite Being into the small boxes of consciousness, full of our very narrow ideas of perfection. We disown the fact that that we, along with everyone in the world, plus the earth and the stars, are created out of Energy which is really universal love.
As stated earlier, science knows everything is made out of Energy. The problem is we just haven’t made the perceptual leap into understanding this Energy is universal love or the Eternal Source.
Stuck then even as adults, in a limited playpen of perceived reality, unable to accept ourselves, our gifts might be shelved for whole lifetimes as we merrily go along seeing ourselves, as rather flawed and limited, members of some cosmic “not terribly good club”, stuck in 2nd gear, or even 3rd, sometimes unsure that even the smallest of dreams can come true.
So where is our power? It’s there. It’s inside. We overlook it because it is in our ordinariness that we find it. It’s us, just as we are. We can’t find our power as long as we think we’re too flawed, too bad or just not worth very much, refusing to forgive ourselves for the tiniest of mistakes or failings.
This is the way many of us run from our true selves our whole lives!
Access to our own power only comes as we embrace ourselves in all our aspects, the good, the bad and the ugly. We don’t have to act on every negative impulse but overly harsh self-judgment cripples us. If we only see our darkness and not our light, how can we love ourselves enough to realize that when we light our small candle of consciousness, we help illuminate the world?
(Think of the difference even a small candle makes in a darkened room….it gives both the light for others to see their own candle and the fire/flame to light them.)
The lotus rises out of the mud. Without the mud, there is no lotus. That’s why, in the bigger picture, darkness is necessary, even if only to bring out the light. Who would Christ have been without Judas? We all need challenges to rise to. Frequently, it’s only when the going gets tough that the tough get going! Without acknowledging our fears and anger and unresolved conflicts, how could all our dark side possibly transform into wisdom?
It is not news to the world of psychology or psychiatry that everyone (until self-realized), has a dark aspect or shadow side. It’s human but the point is for darkness to heal into light during a lifetime, not to take over the personality. Greatness came to Carl Jung as he devoted his life to achieving wholeness, demonstrating through example how this shadow material can be transformed into wisdom and awareness over time.
We may have a death grip on our belief in humanity’s powerlessness, but if everything is Energy, then we are all Eternal. Energy can never be destroyed but can change form, just as steam cools into water. That’s what happened here. Energy slowed down Its vibration and became matter – the universe and all of us. And our pets. Flowers. Insects. The works.
Can we learn to digest this knowledge, that the Energy of eternity is looking through our own eyes and experiencing Itself through our own individual lives? When humanity understands this, life here on earth will become more like heaven.
Our egos may fool us into feeling flawed and powerless but this Energy is not only eternal, it’s universal love!
We may have become so alienated from the truth, so fooled by the hardness of the cement sidewalk or the content of our newspapers, that we miss the warmth and devotion inside all things. Despite our lack of awareness, we and all life, the earth and the stars are made out of compassionate, universal love.
When we tap deeply into our hearts, we can learn to embody it, as spiritual masters have done for eons. But we don’t have to become self-realized to harness it. I remember as a youngster, reading about a mom lifting a car off her child. People pull out incredible strength and resolve because they love others.
You can point to the adrenal gland and say its chemical secretions catalyzed the body’s superhuman strength. But what catapulted the adrenals into action? Love. Desire to help. The adrenal gland just followed along, creating the chemical changes in the body to make possible the action. The secret behind these kind of physiological changes is love.
Tapping into truth of things cannot be forced. Or faked. But it can happen spontaneously, an awakening to a primal power within. It changes everything and not just for the short time it takes an adrenal gland to function. Touching into the power of universal love can awaken you to the sacred underpinnings of everything.
Perhaps it’s easier to awaken to this infinite power when you are nursing your first born son and your doctor tells you he will be dead within a year. Why wouldn’t you just wake up and deal? If you possibly could?
Chapter Three
Ewan’s high white cell count didn’t mean the leukemia diagnosis was a slam dunk so I’d met with the doctor a few times to discuss the several batteries of tests needed for a final answer. In the meantime, I had fallen even more madly in love with my infant son. It was an elemental love that I knew instinctively, could move mountains.
When I first saw the doctor, Ewan was about 8 months, still a very young child. I was nursing him and he loved it. Mother Nature is so smart because nursing helps open the mom’s heart chakra, the energy zone round our physical heart that connects us to All That Is.
I know some women read but Ewan captivated me. All I wanted to do was to look at him and marvel as his whole aura expanded in peace and happiness during his feedings.
I used to say about him and to him: “This makes the world right, doesn’t it. It makes the world right…” Because it did. He loved the touch and the closeness of nursing.
So infant Ewan and I had this nursing bond and it grew in strength every day. I had been ecstatic with love when he was first born but that was just a tiny glimmer of the infinitely deep love that arose when I heard he was sick. I remember my mom being very impressed that I would still nurse under the circumstances. But how could I abandon him when he needed me most? Years later, I realized she had just been very afraid of death.
Anyway, after the initial shock of his high white cell count, we were referred to the cancer clinic at Edmonton’s Cross Institute. I remember on that first day as Peter, John and I walked in, a terrible wave of illness and hopelessness and sorrow hit me. It was an avalanche of energy and I took me a minute to recover and adjust to it.
But I had trouble with it, during all our visits.
I once read that it was the Romans who brought all the sick together in the hospital while the Greek approach preferred patients to be grouped in the physician’s home, a maximum of 4 to 6 at a time. This approach seems wise and very sweet, if a little impractical nowadays.
When the concentration of sickness and sorrow got too intense, I’d escape outside to gaze at the green shoots poking up from the ground or signs of new green on the trees.
Bolstered by these small signs of life’s renewal, I’d reluctantly head back in. During our snowbound winter, I’d stare at the sky which was often blue and sunshiny, grasping at its beauty, trying to take it inside, hoping to be helped out of fear’s endless loop.
That first day, after the initial shock of all that sorrow and hopelessness greeting us at the door, we met with our doctor, the oncologist. He responded with his signature abrupt and highhanded manner, perhaps accentuated by his irritation that it wasn’t a clear case of leukemia because it wasn’t.
So the second thought was that Ewan’s problem was storage cell disease, a genetic condition, also terminal. This diagnosis felt stranger than leukemia, since both Peter’s and my family lines showed no trace of this disease.
This fact did not alter the medical consensus though. Perhaps doctors find distraught moms and dads to be unreliable witnesses. Maybe parents unwittingly forget or block out facts such as depressing family histories. I don’t know. I just noticed that what we said did not sway the doctor from the storage cell diagnosis, although it is not particularly associated with high white cell counts either!
I loved my pediatrician, Dr. Tedeschini. An Italian, he listened very carefully to what mothers said to him. I was also fond of my gynecologist/obstetrician, Dr. Still, because despite a busy practice and four children, he never rushed, always listening to my concerns as if he had all the time in the world.
So it isn’t that I am hyper critical of doctors. It was just our oncologist who left me cold. The good news is he was very interested in this case. The bad news was – it was the blood, not the baby that fascinated the doctor.
There were also the medical tests to survive.
At the beginning, Ewan was scheduled for a bone marrow test, to help determine whether it was leukemia or storage cells disease.
Babies cannot have anesthetic because it’s too dangerous. I was also told I couldn’t be with Ewan during the process. At first, I docilely accepted this, with some relief really, at being let off the hook – at least, until Ewan was wheeled back to me, his face a mass of broken blood vessels showing how hard he had cried. The guilt was overwhelming.
‘Never again,’ I promised him, ‘will you face this alone. I will be with you during every test.’
So the next time I was there. The nurses must have sensed the steeliness of my inner decision because they acquiesced without a peep and just told me not to cry because that would just upset the baby. It was terrible but at least he knew I was with him. No baby should have to face that kind of pain alone.
One day, the oncologist pulled me aside and announced he wished to do a liver biopsy on baby Ewan. We discussed it. Again, no anesthetic was possible and the needle was very long. I thought about Ewan’s face of broken blood vessels, then asked the doctor:
“Is it necessary for you to do this? Or will the evidence just become clear in time anyway, with no need of any rush?”
“Yes, the answers will become clear in time, anyway.” He said this with a straight face, no irony and certainly no shame.
With that, he lost me forever because he was prepared to hurt my child for his intellectual curiosity. It sounded like child abuse to me, to subject a baby to unnecessary pain. I was stunned and speechless with the shock of it.
Peter, Ewan and I lived in an upstairs flat of an old duplex not far from where Peter worked at the CBC.
This was during the 80’s and I have a terrible feeling that the living room carpet was a yellow shag, left over from the previous decade. The whole place was a little ratty but we couldn’t afford a house and it was big. Happily, the sun used to dance and gleam through the really large living room windows, warming the whole place and filling it with the yellow burst of good will.
As Ewan grew, he would slide out of his bed after his nap and walk down the hall, holding his arms out to embrace me. He was a strikingly beautiful child with really huge and soulful brown eyes, and cheeks that would have been rosy. But his increasing white blood cell count made his skin gradually paler and finally transparent looking.
As the uncertainty of his diagnosis continued, his white cell count rose until he smiled less and sat more and seemed to be losing his hold on life. It is unbelievable to be the parent watching this. You feel that you are dying too. Every second of your life hurts in an unspeakable way
Then one day, the oncologist asked us to come to his office. He told us, as I have described, that Ewan didn’t have storage cell disease but had acute myelogenous leukemia, a disease mostly old people got, which was also terminal. Perhaps things have changed, but back then, he said there was no treatment plan available.
I thought to myself that probably babies are just too young for chemotherapy or radiotherapy, but such was our communication, I never did ask him. (I found out later that AML is quite unresponsive to traditional chemotherapies.)
Emerging from the appointment shell-shocked, Peter and I bundled Ewan into the car and soundlessly climbed in ourselves. I stared at the starkness of the city’s late winter morning and tried to digest the appointment with its legacy of fear, despair, and the most terrible feeling of being on the edge of an abyss. Worse, I knew I inevitably was going to fall into it. Peter, grateful to escape into his workday, dropped us at home, leaving Ewan and I to face the day together.
I put Ewan on the floor with some blocks and went and sat on the couch just feet from him. Wearing a yellow, furry, all in one sleeper outfit, he just sat there, white faced, not moving, uninterested in blocks. Babies don’t act like that, unless they are very sick.
As I gazed at him heartbroken, outside the cloudy gloom of the day lifted and sunshine poured in through the windows. My heart lifted because I knew it was a sign. The next instant I took a breath and felt the infinite and the earth meet both within and without me. Deep in my heart I heard:
“If you believe them, Ewan will feel it in your breast milk and he will give up and die.”
I gazed at Ewan, feeling a peace beyond anything I had ever felt in my life. It was the peace beyond all understanding that has been written about throughout the ages.
‘I am not going to believe them,’ I decided. ‘I am going to hold the space for something else to happen.’ But even this isn’t quite accurate. There weren’t any words in this decision. It was entirely made by feeling. I don’t know how to describe it except that it was a little like being sprinkled with fairy dust by some invisible cosmic fairy godmother who knew, without a shadow of a doubt, there was a way out of this.
I didn’t experience any fear at all. I simply made a life-changing decision based on that feeling of the infinite and the earth meeting. Our best future seemed to pivot on an inner decision not to believe this diagnosis. It was in some ways an easy choice.
If there was no treatment possible, why not disbelieve the medical view, since if nothing could be done to help, the diagnosis was basically a hex, as I had felt from the first?
In the days that followed, I felt happier and more at peace but terror still bit into me from time to time. I felt very singular, disconnected from my spouse by grief, and separated from my friends and family because they just didn’t know what to say. I think they were frightened of making things worse by being clumsy with words. People tended to either pretend nothing was amiss or else just steer clear of me.
My family was the most upset, obviously. My mother was a nurse so she had an idea of what we were walking into. But at the same time, I knew she wouldn’t understand that experience of heaven and earth meeting and how I felt it signaled that Ewan would get better.
CHAPTER FOUR
Miraculously, two weeks after making that decision to side with Ewan’s life, someone told me about Olga Worrall, a healer who worked particularly with children.
I didn’t see it then but this event logically followed my deep inner decision to hold the door open to the possibility of Ewan’s healing. If my intellect had accepted the cancer diagnosis, my mind would have snapped shut in deadly certainty and the door to let in Olga would have been locked and bolted.
I figure this is how we are the authors of our own destinies…..We open or close doors.
The avenue for help opened up this way. My mom had organized prayer circles for my son and one woman had a friend, who had a friend, and that friend knew about Olga and passed on her phone number.
Without a thought more, I phoned.
Olga, now in her 80s, had begun her healing ministry 50 years before – after losing her own infant twins to dysentery. She never had any more children but healed her own deep grief by offering healing energy to other sick children.
When she answered her phone, the words tumbled out of me in a desperate torrent she probably had heard many times before.
“Hi Olga, your name was given to me by a friend. I understand that you send healing love from a distance, particularly to children. I was wondering if you could send love to my son Ewan who has been diagnosed with leukemia.”
“He doesn’t seem sick enough to have leukemia,” she said, echoing the pediatrician. I wondered how she could tell that but at that time, I didn’t understand how much information she picked up over the ethers in order to be able to work with people at a distance.
I explained that his blood count had been rising from 35,000 to now 60,000.
“Get a second opinion,” she said.
I got the second opinion. We flew to British Columbia and went through another round of tests before they confirmed it was myelogenous leukemia. But years later, Peter, then my ex-husband, saw one of Ewan’s earlier medical reports, which questioned the cancer diagnosis.
Still, Olga agreed Ewan was in seriously ill, whether the leukemia was an accurate diagnosis or not.
Olga was very abrupt with me that first time and then each time I spoke to her afterward. Inside, I desperately wanted her to nurture me because my heart was so heavy and I knew she knew the territory of what I was going through.
But I just couldn’t begrudge her the abruptness. She was giving us a great gift by working with Ewan, for no charge! Besides, deep inside I knew that Olga was tired, and lacked the energy to do her work and comfort strung out mothers as well.
Still, I phoned her religiously at least once a month to thank her. I was extremely grateful for sure, but my calls were also an insurance policy, to keep Ewan at the forefront of her mind and heart.
I couldn’t risk her forgetting about him.
Olga once confessed that it was hard not to hear back about the effects of her prayers. She said if she was lucky, when people would request prayers for someone, they’d mention casually that the other friend or family member (whom Olga had been sending compassion to) had fully recovered.
This lack of respect for authentic healing gifts is hard on the healer but it’s a tragedy for those involved, because gratitude softens our hearts and makes room to receive more. If we do not recognize the gifts when they come, we block our own receiving and end up struggling for, what the Universe would be happy to give us, if we just relaxed a bit and opened up and helped others.
But I felt for Olga and thought how weird it was that her work was not treated with more respect, despite life changing healings. She did the work for free. There was no pension, or dental plan, together with very few “thankyous”, from the sound of things.
Olga promised to send compassion to Ewan every evening at 7 o’clock for five minutes and invited us to place our hands on him then.
So we did. Every night at 7 o’clock, I would call Peter over and he and I would place our hands on Ewan who always stayed still and quiet. I always assumed Peter was as into it as I was, but later events would prove otherwise.
But we valiantly kept it up, every single day.
I told my parents about it but as I said, my mom was a nurse. My dad though, in an extraordinary turn of events, had come out in strong support of my belief that Ewan would live. Our new bond felt like a miracle to me because we had fought all through my childhood.
Much later, my older brother said it was he who had encouraged my dad with his own deep feeling that Ewan would live. Oddly, he never said this to me, so I did not receive the gift of his support. Still, it really helped me psychologically that my dad so often stated that he felt Ewan would live too, although I had no feeling that he had particular faith in Olga’s work.
{Still, he had a healthy support for the supernatural. This arose after the company he built in Hawaii, perhaps foolishly on an old graveyard, encountered a large number of mechanical problems. In desperation, a Hawaiian medicine man or Kahuna was called in and after his prayers and ceremony (perhaps of forgiveness), all problems disappeared!}
Meanwhile I got an education in life.
I remember being so shocked by what I was discovering. I was dismayed by how much people steered clear of us, but I felt a chasm away from them anyway and doubted they could understand what this excruciating pain felt like.
When speaking about Olga and her healing powers, I used to feel the disconnect. They didn’t really listen; they considered me deluded and were indulging me, that’s all.
(In its way, it was worse than being in the presence of the oncologist because it was all so subtle and unsaid and these people had been close to me…)
Meanwhile, Olga did not ask for any money at all. People in this kind of situation are so very vulnerable. I would have given Olga any amount if she had asked for it, even my house.
Since Ewan’s diagnosis, I felt I had a brand new life, one that was horribly stark and unyielding. I remember looking outside on a cold, grey, winter day and feeling such a strong emotional reaction to the parked cars lining the street. Unloving, stark, rigid, hollow – that was how the steel outlines seemed to me.
I had no idea that I was just seeing and feeling own inner hollow rigidity and alienation. How far from my heart I was back then! Much later, it dawned on me later that Ewan’s illness was not random and was to awaken me (and perhaps others), I am so very sure of it. Back then, I didn’t realize how big and demanding this awakening was going to be.
Ewan gradually stopped moving, stopped growing, stopped gaining weight and just sat, his skin so white and transparent, I could almost see through it. He seemed to be almost fading into a hologram figure except for his smile and the way he put his arms out to me when he wanted a hug. But now, even the sparkle in his brown eyes, seemed to be shrinking and fading away, along with his body.
But once Olga began her work, Ewan’s white cell blood count began to fall. The process was very slow, a reduction of about 1,500 cells a month but at least it was heading in the right direction!
About 10 months after the initial trouble, I noticed Ewan’s eyes shifting back and forth. Deep in my mother’s heart, I knew he was deciding whether to live or die. For some reason, I didn’t panic and found a way to just be with what I knew was going on. After five days, the beginning of the old rose blush hinted its return to his cheeks. I knew he was deciding to live. Again, I just accepted his decision and kept going.
What else could I do? Besides, I wasn’t 100 per cent sure my reading of Ewan was accurate. All I could point to was the new rose in his cheeks and his gradually falling blood count but the doctors didn’t seem overly impressed.
We continued.
Despite the falling cell count, the doctors remained certain that the condition was terminal. With this, my reality became to feel a little psychotic because I was unable to normalize our work with Olga by telling the oncologist about her. I knew that he’d treat me like a heretic or a moron.
The whole experience was spooky in a way, starting in the way I felt hexed by the doctor. I realize he was consciously well-intentioned and really could do nothing medically for us, but later I heard something that confirmed that feeling of darkness underneath.
But even then, several occurrences occurred that went far beyond my usual nuts and bolts reality.
For instance, there was the time an old friend and her daughter came over. While we were talking, her 2-year-old daughter picked up a hammer that had been left out, and smashed Ewan’s little Magic Dancer music box. This was serious because I had bought it as a symbol of Ewan’s eventual recovery from the illness.
After that, pictures of him started to fall off the wall. Then his little Peter Rabbit plate fell off his high chair table and broke. I was numb with fear. It looked like signs to me.
But still, we kept sitting every day at 7 pm our hands on Ewan, praying for the 5 minutes that Olga was sending compassion.
Acting as if….. My mom was a great believer in acting as if. If you want a certain outcome, you just acted as if it were already true or coming true. So that is what I did, even though the music box was broken, I still acted as if everything was fine. One day, in this spirt but still deeply worried and full of dread, I headed off to the store to shop for groceries. But an unusual impulse steered me into the gift shop next to the supermarket. What did me find, but an identical Magic Dancer music box and it was listed at half price!
What else could this be, but a sign that Ewan’s going to be all right, I thought. Even my mother was impressed by this twist of fate. For me, it renewed my faith, especially as the original music box was purchased in another country. What were the chances of coming across an identical one? Then it being at half-price was a pure wonder!
My parents had reacted to the diagnosis by inviting Peter, Ewan and I for two weeks in Hawaii, bless their dear hearts. It was there that I had bought the first music box entitled Magic Dancer as a symbol of Ewan’s eventual recovery.
What I remember most about the holiday was that Ewan ate sand, and after a bad case of stomach cramps, had to be watched every second to prevent another round of sand indigestion. But the sunshine and waves helped, and we returned a little stronger and better able to cope with both the diagnosis, and the Albertan winter.
Ewan’s appetite wasn’t great and he had stopped growing. But once during a visit from my mom, he ate 6 beets at one sitting. This only made sense to me after reading that beets are good for the liver.
The other thing I did, was to make a terrible tasting tonic for him. The recipe came from a German herbalist and included hard-to-get ingredients. It was quite bitter. But Ewan did drink bottles of it until I finally gave up on it.
Maybe it helped some. All I know is, despite beets and tonic, Ewan’s white cell count only started to fall after Olga started sending her compassion.
Love is the most important thing for any human being. This whole world is made out of love even if it doesn’t look like it. Or feel like it. It sure didn’t feel made out of love back in those days.
Ewan’s dad and I rubbed along as well as any couple living with this kind of sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. He was stoical and didn’t say much. Because he was suffering too, I seldom turned to him with any of my worries. I felt more support from my parents. Still, my mom, as a nurse, had a harder time believing he would get better but I didn’t let it bother me. I knew she loved him and wanted him to live and that is what counted.
Looking back, I realize I didn’t talked with anyone much about what I thought but just kept my heart set on Ewan living. And he did get better. Slowly.
After one year of a steady fall in Ewan’s blood count, the oncologist stopped attending Ewan and we just spoke to his interns. But one time, he did call us into his office.
I braced myself.
The doctor began, in his alienated, robotic manner, to emphasize the temporary nature of remissions. We were not to get our hopes up, he assured us, because we would be sorely disappointed by the inevitable outcome.
Listening, my whole body started to burn with a primal rage. Truly, deeply, madly, I wanted to cut off the head of this man who had so little heart. The strength of the internal flare up scared me. Maybe I really was going off the deep end.
But despite myself, I was getting good at the drill and I managed to just sit there docilely, gazing at him as if I were listening. He droned on and on from behind the hard expanse of his heavy desk – perhaps partly protection against parents with less self-control than I had, small though my own allotment seemed. It felt as if it was going to give way any second.
But now, shock took over. Made desperate by this verbal onslaught of death talk, I hunkered down, like someone who suddenly found herself caught without shelter, in an arctic winter, and made myself go Teflon so his life-hating words would slide off and not go inside to the area of deep trust in Ewan’s healing that I had built for myself.
How often in life I had felt I had to protect myself from people dissing my perceptions and dreams. In this case, with my son’s life at stake, this cold, cold man was not going to get through to the inner sanctum of my deep heart.
Inside, I knew that Ewan’s healing trajectory had upset the doctor’s dogmatic scientific religion [aka the medical model], upon which his entire mental, emotional and physical worldview was based.
So the drop in Ewan’s white cell blood count created turmoil within the oncologist which he could not escape as long as Ewan was his patient. Neither could he simply embrace it and live with the uncertainty it presented. Hence, here we were, sitting across from that enormous desk, listening to this frightened man, deep in an existential crisis, desperately sonic drill us with the idea that this healing was mere remission.
I knew there was no point talking about Olga. He would just treat it like the ramblings of a crazy woman although to be truthful, I considered his words the ramblings of a very alienated personality, borderline crazy himself with his denial of humanity.
Getting into the car after that fiasco, Peter and I had a fight as we always did now, on our way back from the cancer institute.
It happened like clockwork. Getting into the car, I would say: “That’s great about Ewan’s blood count falling. He really is getting better.”
Peter, angry at what he described as my Pollyanna attitude, would be silent at first, then would start to rage and berate me for my hopes for Ewan. In trouble for basically siding with our son’s life, I would fall into a black hole of shock.
Again and again, I felt consternation that he wasn’t using his strength to hold out for Ewan’s life. Between caring for Ewan, dealing with oncologist and Peter’s fear of miraculous possibility, I was stretched beyond what I knew I could handle.
I really knew Peter loved his young son which just made his response more perplexing. His trouble even imagining that maybe Ewan could heal seemed as crazy to me, as my faith in Olga and the power of unconditional love to heal Ewan, seemed to him.
It took me many years to understand that those with the most broken hearts have the biggest trouble trusting the heart’s access to unconditional love power. Male conditioning doesn’t help, with its contempt (read: fear!) of emotions.
The trouble is repressing emotions makes them go dark and darker. That leads to a very negative world view and it means there is always a pile of negative emotions ready to erupt at any moment.
Dealing with it all took what reserves of strength I had. It was already a stretch to side with Ewan’s healing in face of a high white cell count and transparent skin. His protruding belly, expanded by an enlarged spleen and liver, made him seem not quite of this world; I used to think he looked like one of Snow White’s dwarfs. It broke my heart just to see him sometimes. It took a lot of energy to even imagine that he would heal and live.
Understandably, none of my friends could imagine what I was going through. People thought I was just in denial. Everyone sort of stepped away.
What was felt the hardest was not being able to unite with my husband (or the oncologist for that matter) in the wild leap of faith that Ewan might survive. It required I draw on reserves of strength I did not know I had.
But I did have them and so I continued.
Life was lived intensely. Every minute counted. We never missed a 7 pm time with Olga although much later I realized that I never asked her if she meant 7 pm my time in Alberta or her time in Baltimore. Still, even if we were doing it at the wrong time, the intent was still there and intents are enormously powerful.
My response to fear and my increasingly remote relationship with Peter was to seek more and more comfort in my deepening bond with Ewan. One of his favourite things was to play in the sink. He would stand in his very sturdy highchair playing with the water, as I baked or cooked next to him. I felt his love for me and knew that he knew that I was deeply siding with him, believing in him.
“Mommy, you are the moon in my night time and the sunshine in my day,” Ewan said, almost as soon as he could speak in sentences.
I felt I really was that for him, because I was standing with him, urging him into health, loving him as much as a human being could possibly love another person.
I had thought I loved Ewan at birth. But the level of love that I dropped into later, was off the charts. It was like the person who thinks they are happy until they find real happiness. Then they see how deluded they were, with their tiny understanding of what happiness was. I felt the same way about how much I loved Ewan.
We continued at the cancer institute. A social worker really wanted to help me accept the terminal diagnosis. She kept requesting a home visit, but I felt – why should I open my doors to a woman, whose professional goal was to promote my acceptance of my child’s death when I was doing everything I could to ensure he didn’t die?
I found her patronizing and her point of view repellant so my policy was to be so brusque with her that she would just leave me alone. But really she was a kind, well-intentioned woman. That became very obvious after all this was over.
By that time, Peter and I had divorced and I had changed so much inside that I knew I would never resume my journalism career. Instead, I began training as a massage therapist before later studying with aboriginal medicine healers all over the world because, really, I wanted to become a healer like Olga.
Back in those days in Alberta, the only training needed to become a massage therapist was a 6 week program, one day a week! Oh and I had to have my fingerprints taken for police files!!
Anyway, I ignored all the connotations of this and just focused on my clientele and transmitting unconditional love through the massage. I felt freer and happier than ever before. Then one day I received a call. It was the social worker wanting to book a healing appointment with me!!!
.
So she visited my house after all and we had a long talk. I expressed my disappointment that we didn’t have a closer relationship with the oncologist.
“He was such a cold man,” I said, going a little numb inside with the memory.
I continued: “It was always the blood, not the baby that captivated the doctor. I never felt he cared about Ewan as a person at all.”
“You’re lucky,” she said.
“Lucky?” I asked.
“Yes, lucky. The children he gets close to die.”
I was shocked. “You’re kidding!”
“No, I’m not. This is what happens. Every time a blonde eight or nine-year-old boy comes in, the doctor bonds deeply with the child. Then, within a few months, even if his initial prognosis is good, the youngster will start getting sicker and will end up dying. It always goes that way.”
Silence. I was speechless.
“Oh,” I finally said.
We both knew the doctor wasn’t overtly murdering these children so what was happening? I thought about it for years. Perhaps the deaths of these blonde boys was a metaphor for the way he was dead to his own spirit.
He was such a cold, alienated man that I wondered if maybe, to try to wake him up to his true Nature, his soul presented him with the deaths of these angelic looking young boys over and over again.
“Every time it happened, he would take a couple of days off, and then return and resume his work,” she said.
I wondered if rather than jolting him awake, these experiences just numbed him more. I think that to order an unnecessary liver biopsy on a sick baby, where there is no anesthetic, suggests at very least, a lack of humanity.
Happily, by the time I met with the social worker, I no longer had to deal with the oncologist and his very weird ways.
But just peeking back to the time when all this was going on…..
After that time when Ewan’s eyes had shifted side to side and I knew he was deciding to live or die, a hint of rose graced his cheeks and he moved more. Still, we weren’t home free yet.
From having been a very large newborn and heavy three month old, Ewan had morphed into a very small child, except for his large tummy. The fact that his enlarged organs made his tummy extend like one of the seven dwarfs, just added to the feeling of magic around him.
Not only was Ewan a beautiful child with huge, brown eyes and very long dark eyelashes, his brush with death had left him with a smattering of gold dust. It wasn’t just I who saw this. Everyone close in, did too.
When pregnant with my second child, Eric, Olga was still bathing us all in her unconditional love and I know it influenced his development and personality. Looking back, I certainly was a different woman by that time as well – wiser, stronger, clearer, tougher and far, far more compassionate.
By then, I knew that life had meaning beyond the mere physical and that even the darkest of medical prognoses had a fluidity to them and that miracles were possible. In the East such as India, it’s felt that the emotional state of the mom during pregnancy affects the child on all levels, including its future.
So Eric, while developing in my womb, received Olga’s balm of unconditional love, which hopefully offset my understandable anxieties about Ewan’s future. Eric once suggested to me that we had him as an insurance policy but that isn’t true. I really wanted another child and Eric was a gift; such a bright, loving, and sturdily healthy child with a heart of gold.
Interestingly, perhaps reflecting the effect of Olga’s transcendent love power, almost as soon as Eric could communicate in sentences, he spoke about a lifetime with his sister.
“My sister! My sister!” He said with a faraway look in his eyes. And then in answer to my direct questioning, he described living in a one room structure which was surrounded by snow-laden evergreens. I had the feeling of Finland but can’t be sure.
“How did you travel?” I asked
“Sleigh,” two year old Eric said.
“How was it drawn?”
“Dogs.”
“How many?”
“Five.”
“What did you do?”
“I cut down trees and walked a lot.” (He may have meant hunting.)
“How many doors in your house?”
“A front door.”
“Did you have a family?”
“My sister! My sister!” Eric commented again, with a far away, devoted look in his eyes.
Gazing at his two-year-old self, not so long out of heaven after all, I could almost feel the mists of time and the half-forgotten pictures playing in his mind’s eye.
“Mom, I want my sister. I want my sister!” Eric commanded.
It was like walking into a very sweet twilight zone where the normal way of thinking and the usual reality didn’t add up. But I was used to thinking this way by now so when Eric announced this other life, it was business as usual for me. Although I was enormously touched by his obviously deep affection for his sister….
Ewan gradually got better and with the joy of having Eric, my life got brighter and brighter. I was so happy to be realizing that life was more miraculous and magical than I had first thought.
Then trouble came again. When Ewan’s blood count was down to about 18,000, Peter and I gathered as usual for our 7 o’clock time. But that familiar warmth and sense of connection was horribly absent. Our ritual of touch just felt empty, devoid of any love power, beamed by Olga. It was just limited to the physical – I no longer had any access to that substratum of love from which the Universe is created.
“Olga’s died!” I thought to myself.
The next day I phoned and heard what I already knew. Olga had died – of heart failure in her sleep.
My world and my faith came crashing down on my head. How was Ewan going to heal with Olga no longer with us? Was he going to get worse now?
I struggled desperately for about 10 days, inside myself. Who was I going to call? Peter was in pain too. Besides, to really empathize with me, a person had to accept that the love coming from Olga was healing my son.
Nobody other than I really thought Olga’s work was key to Ewan’s life. I think even my father wasn’t sure about that.
I found this so weird.
I am forever grateful to Peter who despite being unconvinced, participated in our daily ritual of placing our hands on Ewan for 5 minutes. Still, the empirical evidence was clear. With no other treatment other than Olga’s distance healing work, Ewan’s white cell count started to fall within 2 weeks of her input.
It had risen steadily for several months prior to Olga, from 35,000 to 60,000.
Of course, Olga’s distant healing was having an effect. I wasn’t being flakey – I was just witnessing cause and effect. Isn’t that what the scientific method is all about?
(It is immeasurably lonely to see something that others will not or cannot see.
But it’s even lonelier to lose a child….)
I emerged from my crisis of faith certain that Olga would continue her work from heaven, and indeed over the next few months, Ewan’s white cell count continued to fall until it was normal.
Life went on. It was funny how Ewan’s regained health just became the new normal. Still, many changes occurred inside and outside of me and I had to get to know this new Janet. I couldn’t imagine ever returning to journalism. I wanted to be a woman like Olga. There was no obvious career path or even a roadmap but it never crossed my mind that it wouldn’t be possible because the proof of the pudding was Olga herself. She’d done it.
About a year later, the oncologist called us. He wanted to know what our secret was, why Ewan had lived. He had another child with AML.
Finally I got to tell him about Olga, although I had to say she had died. As soon as I mentioned Olga and her distance healing, I could feel him turn off, dismissing my words silently, even as he listened. All this was obviously going against the grain of his medical training.
But then just before he hung up, he said:
“Well, just keep doing what you are doing. Good!”
I felt it hadn’t been easy for him to phone and was impressed that his desire to help this other child had motivated him. Besides, he did stay on the phone with me, even if it was hard for him to hear about Olga’s ability to transmit universal love through the ethers across thousands of miles. (Really, this sort of thing could put him out of a job!)
He did acknowledge that I knew something he did not, even if at the same time, he couldn’t help dismiss, inside himself, what I was saying. Old habits, old training, old conditioning die hard. I know that from my own spiritual journey.
So finally what I have to say is this: The good news is that Ewan lived and we had Eric and I have finally learned how to love like Olga, although the process was terrifying at times. How truly amazing to receive the help of that profoundly wise and generous woman but I am also grateful for the presence of all the people around me at that time.
Hats off to: Olga for her infinitely compassionate selfless service; Ewan for getting better and waking us all up to a much bigger life; Eric for being born and bringing the energy of a gentle, crystalline babbling brook with him; my dad, for telling me that he believed Ewan would live; my brother for feeling the same way, even if he never told me because of family communication patterns back then; Peter, for even if unconvinced, still putting his hands on Ewan at the healing time; the doctor for trying to be open; and to my younger self for siding with Ewan’s life when it all just seemed impossibly black.
Personally, in my heart of hearts, I consider everyone here on the earth plane to be something of a hero, just for being here at this tumultuous time when there is so much darkness and loss of faith.
But it can take getting lost in real darkness for us to find the light again. It is just the way it is.
But everything really is made out of Energy or eternal unconditional heart so when we call out for help, it responds. Ewan lived when every single doctor we took him to, said he would die.
Miracles happen.
Really the biggest miracle is that we ourselves are made of this stuff. In our lives, we may have felt just a bit of flotsam and jetsam or that we were card carrying members of some cosmic ‘not terrible good’ club. But that isn’t true at all. You are a divinely infinite Being as well as human lives. You are of infinite value, no matter how you feel today.
It really is life changing to realize this.