Day Two: Come Healing
- Jay Berghuis
- Sep 9, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 19, 2024
I’m writing this a week later, but I remember this morning in staggering reality.
It’s 3 am.
It’s been a rough night. Hospital sleep is difficult at best, and the immobility of the weighty monster brace on my left leg has kept me pinned down, sweating through the sheets, into the plastic covering. I never sleep on my back, so I need extra oxygen to breathe. People come and go and adjust this and that and make sure I’m talking. Deep REM sleep evades me. My entire system shakes with traumatic repercussions. I recall over and over the frightful situation and every detail of the emergent hours of angst and unknown. My life has been constricted into a very small space and I feel the panic rising.
Then I’m aware of some other voice calling my name:
Carol - Song of Joy – you have Thunder in your Bones.
I remain wide awake. Thankfully and miraculously, I have little pain and do not need anything but Tylenol. But my body is encased in immobility. The bed becomes a giant carapace around me, suffocating me. I’m here. Now. This is my life. I cannot do anything by myself without physical help. Giant sobs wrack my body. Over and over again – I am consciously aware of this healing gush of trauma as my body lets go of needing to fight. Release.
Eventually morning breaks on the Boulder Foothills I love so much and now call home.
All day family encircles me with everything and more than I need. Laughter is the best medicine. Tears cleanse. We laugh then cry – cry then laugh. Alternating emotions. Together and alone.
Dianne in BC sent me the following video a few days later. It represents my condition these first hours. Stop for a few minutes. Witness the power of an 80-year-old, broken, but not destroyed man, kneeling on stage singing his life out a short while before his last breath.
Come Healing.
Thank you, Saint Leonard.
Listen now to this Healing Song. For me. For you. For all our Earth’s brokenness.
Come Healing
by Leonard Cohen
O, gather up the brokenness
Bring it to me now
The fragrance of those promises
You never dared to vow
The splinters that you carried
The cross you left behind
Come healing of the body
Come healing of the mind
And let the heavens hear it
The penitential hymn
Come healing of the spirit
Come healing of the limb
Behold the gates of mercy
In arbitrary space
And none of us deserving
Of cruelty or the grace
O, solitude of longing
Where love has been confined
Come healing of the body
Come healing of the mind
O, see the darkness yielding
That tore the light apart
Come healing of the reason
Come healing of the heart
O, troubledness concealing
An undivided love
The heart beneath is teaching
To the broken heart above
And let the heavens falter
Let the earth proclaim
Come healing of the altar
Come healing of the name
O, longing of the branches
To lift the little bud
O, longing of the arteries
To purify the blood
And let the heavens hear it
The penitential hymn
Come healing of the spirit
Come healing of the limb
O let the heavens hear it
The penitential hymn
Come healing of the spirit
Come healing of the limb
Beautiful. Thank you Carol for this gift. I will be listening/ reading of your journey, one day at a time as my morning meditation Perhaps it will Starting with day 2. What a prayerful song for my bones, body, spirit and mind.
Listening to St Leonard … thank you. I am with you dear Carol… and will continue to dip into the journey with you … thank you for including us.