My friend came to visit me, rather unexpectedly. And instead of staying for two days, as was originally planned, she stayed for eleven days. A week later, she returned and stayed for another ten days, totally 21 days If she had called first to discuss this, I probably would have discouraged her from such a lengthy visit. I would have said that I hadn't been feeling well (which was 100% true) and that perhaps another month would be more suitable. But somewhere in the cosmos, she was scheduled to visit me on that particular day during that particular time when I felt so sick and utterly unprepared for a visitor. And she was meant to stay for exactly 21 days. You see, what I was experiencing was no ordinary flu, but rather, a sickness of the heart. I was facing most days with complete emotional and physical exhaustion. I was also waking up at night with heart palpations; not to mention a sense of weight pressing down on my chest. Eating almonds in the middle of the night helped a bit. Hanging my head forward and shaking the tension out of my shoulders helped a bit. Calling Tele-health at regular intervals to put my mind at ease that I wasn't having a heart attack helped. Sort of. But nothing, absolutely nothing came close to the benefits of that 21-day conversation with my dear friend.
Our visit began with a pot of rose-petaled tea from Turkey and a conversation about our lives.
It continued day after day, cup of tea after cup of tea. In the beginning, I used pre-packaged tea bags. But as time evolved, I began concocting my own tea mixtures, almost as if the tea had to be as unique as the conversation. Long, lingering thoughts. Silences following bursts of conversation. Ideas floating in the air around us, like silent chimes. And then, a thread of an idea would be picked up from the previous day and explored once again. We covered it all; the big issues like death and religion and our vocations and beauty and what beauty is and why it's seems so out of fashion in the art world. We talked about our propensity to spend endless hours in creating art, but not always taking that final step of sending it out into the bigger, wider world. (This part of my artist's life is something I prefer to avoid entirely.) As we talked endlessly, Alanna and I scribbled out our ideas as they came to us, grabbing the closest scrap of paper to write out our new code of life.
Slowly, in between the days and evenings and mornings of conversation, my life came back to me. One evening, I made squash pie. That night, we whipped up some heavy cream and ate pie, warm from the oven. Before Alanna's visit, I had felt too busy to cook; too overwhelmed with absolutely everything in my life. I began to realize that the sickness I had been experiencing has a name. And the name is 'empty nest'. 'Empty nest', I now realize, can knock a person for a loop, clean around the block. The condition, I feel, needs stronger words to describe it. 'Empty nest' sounds almost sweet. But after spending 27 years, where a huge part of my identity revolved around mothering, this was and is a massive life change. And it felt good to say it out loud.
When Alanna first arrived, I thought I perhaps I might need heart surgery or some sort of heavy-duty medication to snap me out of my anxiety and my un-wellness. What I actually needed was 63 pots of tea (three pots per day), a conversation that never ended with a trusted and dear friend, an abundance of fresh garden produce from the market, phone calls with my three children who all live far from home, easy walks at a slow pace, and my big box of collage papers to make cards. That's what I needed. That was my healing.
Since Alanna's departure yesterday, I continue to marvel at the gift of her serendipitous visit. It was heaven-sent. How often, I ask myself, are other gifts placed at my feet, yet for whatever reason, I am unwilling to reach down and pick up them up. Sometimes a bout of sickness, even heartsickness, is the perfect per-curser to open my eyes to the gifts of grace.
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