Visions

Sarah Rose Petersen

1/18/21

It was she who had taught me to visualize, all those years ago. Back when I would spend days, weeks even, propped up in bed or upright in a chair, grasping for each breath. The affliction of severe lung disease is a desperate one. It is a brutal and forced form of meditation. There is no option but to focus on the breath. The here. The now. Each breath is carefully orchestrated by muscles whose job it is to do things other than aid inhale or exhalation. The shoulders, the upper back, the neck. During these agonizingly long days of attack, she taught me to visualize.

The scenes in my mind were that of bubblegum pink lungs infiltrated by light. Of constricted balloons, freeing themselves from tension and expanding into the available space. Of brightly painted ponies, carrying me swiftly through wide open fields of fresh air. I was a young girl; my imagination was ripe. She had me convinced, at a young age, that I could heal myself. So, when the inhalers would stop providing relief, and the nebulizer had made me jittery with drugs, I would sit and convince myself that panic made it worse and I could provide myself the relief I so craved, the breath I so desperately needed.

I remember getting the call that evening. My father sullenly relayed that she was now very sick. He said whatever it was had moved to her lungs and she was struggling to breathe. My heart broke for her as only an experienced heart can. To know another’s suffering because you have suffered the same, is a knowing beyond.

I bundled in October appropriate coating and wrapped my scarf around my neck with intention. Even a brisk fall breeze here can penetrate our warm muscle layers and leave a lingering chill. I walked the acres that separated their farm house from ours. The dry arroyo sand scrunching under my feet. I could hear the coyotes celebrating in the not-to-far-off distance, as they always did in the evenings.

“What did they catch?”, I wondered. A rabbit, someone’s house cat? Small, precious lives taken in the quiet of the night. For such loud and clamorous canines, they are stealthy hunters. Nearly silent as they scan the fence lines and stroll the arroyos. I imagined the quiet before the cunning that fed the coyotes.

The parched run-off bed was lined with Piñon, stunted Ponderosa and Juniper trees.

The lungs of this arid steppe climate.

Their spindly branches tufted with desert adapted needles. Their earthen grey and brown bark offering perfect camouflage for the nocturnal birds that hunted in healthy competition with the coyotes. The slender Barn owls of this region had been prolific this year. In my many evenings walks I had seen them swoop and fly overhead. Their downy soft feathers make them silent hunters. Were it not for the white splatter they left on the sand below them, I would never know to look up and see them at all. Poised silently on the branching bronchi of a pine. This is in stark contrast to the ravens who boisterously judge by day, from the tops of telephone poles. Who push the air as they fly with such audible resoluteness that the air itself seems tangible and thick.

The difference between hunter and scavenger.

Perhaps the harbinger of death is silent.

Perhaps death is silent.

I arrived at my parent’s home. Soft and warm, practical and welcoming. She was propped in bed in that familiar way that alleviates strain on the airways but is just uncomfortable enough that one is always adjusting. She smiled but there was a gentle desperation in her eyes. In severe diseases of the breath, there is a thin line between panic and acceptance. I have walked that line nearly my whole life. I recognized the concentration required for that acrobatic feat in her, now.

I spoke to her, mostly because I found it was too painful to hear her struggle to speak to me. I reminded her of years ago when our roles were reversed. When she would guide me through an imaginative world of self healing. I asked if she wanted to try it with me as the guide this time. She nodded yes.

I rearranged the pillows in a way I had come up with for myself all those years ago. In doing so she was able to lay down more, giving her back and shoulders an opportunity to relax and allow the diaphragm, the abdomen and the neck to pull air in and push the air out. I lead her into her lungs. Pink, spongy and delicate organs that live in the vacuum of our chest. We envisioned them bathed in a bright, full spectrum light. Repairing and remaking themselves. Loosening the constriction that now prevented oxygenation. We visualized the disease as thin, scratchy ropes that had wrapped around her alveoli. In our mind’s eyes we cut the ropes and freed her from their bondage.

For six hours we visualized as she vacillated in and out of sleep. Her eyes closed, no longer projecting a quiet desperation. Seeing from behind them, the stories I told her of deep breath. I remembered the ponies from my own visualizations that swiftly carried me through the fields, filling my lungs with fresh air. She was allergic to horses however so I chose instead, the owl. I asked her to visualize a tawny brown Barn owl. White faced and speckled wings. To envision being carried away on the owl’s quilted soft back and filling her lungs with the cool, soothing air of the night.

When I had finished talking her through the visualizations, I focused my attention back to the bed, back to the waking reality that was my Mom. She lay there silently. There was no more struggle in her breath.

There was no more breath at all.

A small, precious life, taken in the night.

The owl had come, in silence, as the hunter always does, and carried her away.