To Kali's House and Back

I stepped down to 5 mg. prednisone today, an accomplishment given what I have been through this month. I have lost an entire month of my life. I have memory loss of most of it except for small spots here and there--a medication so powerful that it wiped my "hard drive" fairly clean for an entire month also saved my life. For now, I believe that I will live.

I did not believe this earlier in the month. One day--I cannot remember which day now, but I was very ill and believed that if I lay down and shut my eyes, I would not open them to this world. So afraid was I that I nearly emailed a friend to chant the Heart Sutra for me because I felt in a deeply intuitive way that I would not live through the afternoon. There are no words to describe my emotional state that day: emptiness, giving-over, a sense of light. I would have died alone, the way my mother and sister died. This day I remember, a white pearl in an ocean of forgetting

I managed to get outside onto my deck at some point--afraid to lie down, I just walked out and sat in a chair. I felt more ill than I have ever been in my life. Everything looked incredibly bright and detailed. Suddenly something amazing happened: it seemed I was surrounded with dragonflies! There might have been just a few, but in my state of mind, there seemed to be dozens, green and electric blue and bright red. My sister's sign to me that she is with me is a dragonfly--something we agreed to send each other long ago, when she was still alive, as a sign that life goes on beyond this one. Her other sign to me is a feather, and at the same time the dragonflies came, several small feathers started to drift down out of the afternoon sky, slowly, as if someone gently shook out a down comforter.

I lived through that day and feel that my sister, as she did in life so many times, nudged me back from the brink of something. And I am still here. And it is good.