Season of Healing
I explore my beadwork with my fingers and all my senses.
I feel my doll's creative aura -- "One hundred years from now," I say,
"when someone picks up and holds you, they, too, will be at one with the
Season of Healing." This figure arose from a shattered place inside of
me. It carries the message that creativity holds both hope and healing.
On July
7, 2004, I received an email from my younger brother, my only sibling.
In it he wrote that by the time I received it he would
no longer be alive. A brilliant computer systems administrator and musician,
at 50 he had come to the conclusion he had Asperger's disorder, a form
of autism that makes it impossible for those who have it to empathize
or connect
with others. "Without connection, life is not worth living," he
had written. Immediately I called the police in Austin where he had moved
and waited,
hoping for the best.
As I sat by the phone in Denver, I opened two big packages
of assorted glass beads I'd purchased the week before, dumped them into
a cake pan and sorted them by color to calm myself. Three hours later,
I learned that my brother was dead. The grief that filled me felt like
I had swallowed broken glass.
The next three days were crammed with call after call to
police detectives, the medical examiner, a victim assistance counselor,
my brother's landlord, his former friends, and a funeral home I found in
the Yellow Pages. With one hand I held the phone and with the other I fingered
the beads in my cake pan. I made a separate pile for the black beads, all
the while taking comfort in their cool firmness against my fingers.
The following week a friend offered to accompany me to Texas
to clean my brother's apartment. During the entire journey I felt and acted
like a robot. When I returned home, however, I wandered from room to room
unable to focus on anything but the overwhelming sense of loss that had
begun to settle into my bones.
I knew
that I had to do something besides wander, so I scooped up the pile of
black beads, picked up a needle and began working on a doll
that would express my feelings. The fact that the dark glass beads were
rough and uneven felt right to me. I began randomly sewing them onto a
hastily shaped fabric leg that I had stuffed. Before long, I would see
that I didn't have enough to cover more than one leg, if that.
Since
it was late at night and I didn't want to stop beading, I decided to
use red and purple beads to make a wound on the black leg.
As I shaped the wound, I realized it looked like a little mouth and I understood
that our wounds speak to us, that healing springs from attending to the
wisdom they share. For that reason, I filled the wound/mouth with gold
beads, and I as I beaded I consciously began to listen to my loss.
Black leg, wound, gold beads
I "heard" that the figure needed more colorful beads to balance
the mournful part of her. As I started the second leg, I used more red
and purple beads as well as gold and a luminous blue. When I finished,
she had one leg covered with crude black beads that represented the rawness
and weight of sorrow of life's inevitable scrapes and bruises. Her other
leg, the one covered with swirling seed bead embroidery represented creativity.
When I attached her torso, the creative leg supported the leg that was
leaden with grief. Together in their meditative pose, they kept the figure
from falling over.
Black leg supported by second leg
When I was ready to glue the hands to the body, I saw that
they looked too short to be realistic, but they accurately reflected how
ineffectual I'd felt to do anything to stop my brother from ending his
life. He had attempted suicide months before, and when I had tried to offer
support then, he had pulled away, isolating completely. For months I had
felt as if my hands were tied.
The doll's hands seemed to need something to hold close to
her heart. I rummaged through my button box and found a golden heart that
felt right. As I held it in my hand and felt it warm, I remembered how
as a child my brother had wanted to play Wizard of Oz over and over again.
He would always insist on being the tin man and he would make me be the
scarecrow. "Cut, cut, cut, put in brain, sew, sew, sew," he would say.
Then it was my turn to give him heart. Now I cried as I outlined the golden
heart for my brother, with red beads.
Closeup of heart w/ hands
After I finished this doll over a four day beading marathon,
I found the strength and will to begin picking up the pieces of my own
life that I had set aside three weeks earlier. Like my Season of Healing
doll, I now often have a sad face and a gaze that turns inward. Like my
doll I set with grief, feeling it and meditating on it and waiting for
this season to pass as all seasons do. While I wait, I am supported and
sustained by my creativity, which enables me to transcend it by transforming
my wounds into gifts that will touch others who hurt and seek to heal.
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