Winter Thoughts-Part I

We all have life experiences that pull us into the blizzard of our memories and exorcise our buried life stories from cellular databases of our mind. Winter thoughts are the memories that lay buried in the avalanche of past loses; thoughts closeted in the dark places of our existence; and thoughts that flurry as the driven snow along mountainsides of our subconscious minds.

I have a vivid memory of a winter thought that dredges through my repressed trapdoors and comes calling to my consciousness as the snow continues to fall today. She was dying slowing as the cancer tore rampant through her breasts collecting her life sources into coagulated breathes and chest heaves. Death was closer in the December of her last connection to a life that would be but a memory soon. Six months prior, she had chosen to let go and let the spirit of the Universe that she believed in deal with the cancer and its annihilation. She took to her proverbial bed and let faith begin the healing process. She was a believer in all things in heaven and the miracles she had witnessed in the backwoods of the African jungle and the life manifest in the Sahara desert. She was one of the chosen....chosen to die.

I was a young soon to be graduate of college sitting in the semi-dark confines of my dorm room watching the December snow fall in layers under a streetlight appearing benign from a second story watch place. One light on a desk pierced through the darkness of the room as I struggled to remain focused on my pre-med course finals and the theology "death and dying"final that would start the following Monday. It was a Saturday night when winter thoughts created their own momentum and a frenzy of her, death and dying, loss, heaven, darkness, scrambling of heart desires, embraces forevermore and the finality that I would never see her again.

She had been a consummate presence of nurture and support as I braved the uncertainty of the isolation and cruelty of a college experience, the hope of a future so daunting and maligned, the coldness of next steps, the want of a soul connection in a world, I was too young to understand and embrace. It was her presence that propelled me into an early graduation, an application to medical school, and a need to prove that despite my life circumstances, I could move beyond and soar. She was the Gibraltar of my rock. She created a sense of belonging and frankly, my presence on the planet amused her. But she was dying as I sat figuring out organic chemistry's oxidation and reduction reactions and the meaning of death and is there life beyond the flat line.

She was being reduced into the aftermath of life as her lifeline squiggled into the flatness of physical death. Her time was running out and so was mine. Our life lines intertwined into a ropelike cataclysmic reverberation of systolic and diastolic pressures and heartbeats as I sat in my dorm room and she lay dying in the center of her king sized bed.