Lily and her long lashes, a harvest, and heart peels.

My mother is a respite-care night-nurse. Her job is to go to a family's home and look after an ill child so the parents can rest. These are always sad cases. 24-hour-care children, with respirators, tube-feeds, you name it. My mom takes this in stride - actually, it's a very tame gig for her. She used to work in a Hospice for dying children. Before that she worked for 12 years in adult Palliative Care, nursing the terminally ill. Mostly AIDS patients, lots of cancer, cases that often presented in horrific and gruesome ways at the end. She knows what death looks, smells and sounds like, and she knows the intimacy of grief & its bereavement. When I was a kid she used to take me to the wards sometimes. This was good for me. She didn't try to shelter me from those odd-smelling, strange-feeling, quiet rooms, and it was scary. But the patients always seemed happy to see a child, and after my fear subsided, then my pity would turn into sympathy and then, I think, compassion. I was always in awe of my Mom, speaking in her hushed tones and asking about their pain. Could sense that she was just how they needed her to be. She does not lose herself in the face of others' pain or panic or grief, but holds everything calmly in a big wide space, and is loving. Am thinking about all this today, because Mom told me about her new patient last night. Without going into details, let me tell you this is just such a sad, sad story. An exquisite new baby girl, perfect in every way except that she has been born with a rare and cruel disease that will make her life short and full of suffering. How can anyone stand this? Those poor parents... I am glad my Mom will be there to help them.

Of the countless number of physical failings that could cause me true physical pain and discomfort and limit my life, I currently have none. If I have a baby one day, that baby may not be so lucky. What then? Could I live with myself for having rejected my gift of perfect health? This thought makes my heart constrict. But I am not feeling low today. That kind of constriction sloughs off the hard outer peel of my feeling, makes me more soft and receptive. I woke early, left the house quickly, walked through the forest for a long time. I ate well. I swam in the ocean (today so clear!), and slept in sunshine. Spent an hour harvesting fruit and came closer than I ever have to my deer friends. Lily ate a bowl of green beans out of my lap while I stroked and stroked her neck. I am a tiny speck of life, still poised in the air, and that is some kind of miracle. That's about all I know.

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