"There are enough destroyers and criticizers. The world needs a healer." Todd Rundgren

I tried to heal my friend today. In the parking lot in front of her office. At 9:00 pm. In the dark. 

Cold, too.

Now, don't think for a second that I don't know how fucked up that sounds. In fact, if it were anybody but you, I wouldn't let these words get out of my head at all, much less onto paper. (Well, "paper.") But I can trust you...right?

Right.

And there's some background which might make this make a little more sense.

A long time ago, in 1991, my wife and I had a miscarriage. Angela would have been our second baby. And we were both pretty profoundly affected by this. One of the things I did in my attempt to deal with the loss was rather out of the ordinary for me: I joined a New Age-y group. I had seen an invitation on the message board at Hawley-Cooke Books, and for some reason I decided to have a go at it. I had never been in any group before. Not even in high school. (Except for the wrestling team.) And after going to a few meetings, I thought that the people in the group were pretty weird, but I liked them, and I felt at ease with them. I was particularly close to the group's leader and host, a woman named Lynnie. And I tend to be an early bird, so I would often get to the group meetings early, which gave Lynnie and I some time for just us talk. (I seem to remember telling you about The Toe Incident in a prior post.) ANYway, one time I was telling Lynnie that my hands would sometimes get really hot, as if they were generating heat. And she immediately said, "That means you're a healer." Well, I didn't take it seriously. Or at least not seriously seriously. But whenever a kid came up to me before or after class and talked about how shitty they were feeling, I would also shake their hand...just in case. I mean...who knows, right?

Fast forward to one month ago.

When I pulled up in front of my friend's office, which is where she led Edgar Cayce: Search for God meetings (yes, I joined another group--my first since the Course in Miracles group, as a matter of fact) I saw a woman getting some things out of the trunk of her car. She looked very frail and old. I went over to see if she wanted some help. And even after she turned around it took me a second to realize that it was my friend, R. I immediately knew that it was cancer, of course. Later on she confirmed it. I had missed a couple of meetings, so it had been a few months since I had last seen her and thus hadn't heard that anything was going on.

Fast forward to one hour ago. R. has had surgery and just finished a chemo regimen. And she is about to start radiation therapy every day for a month, and then she has another round of chemo. And when I came into her office, she was talking to another woman about faith healing, trying to decide if it was something she wanted to have a look at.

On top of that, I had a dream about R. last night. Nothing I could remember, but...well, let's just put it this way: I would have felt really shitty if I hadn't at least tried to help her. Weird as that probably sounds.

On top of that, since the first time I've met her I've felt that R. and I had some kind of weird connection. I can't really tell what it is. It's not any of the things you would normally think of with respect to man / woman bonding: not lover, not sister, not mother. Something else. I am pretty sure (not shitting you here) that she can read my mind on occasion. And I am positive that R. has powers. I wish that I were kidding, because it spooks me a little bit.

So I spent most of the two hour meeting tonight wondering if I had the guts to ask R. if she wanted to give this healing touch a try. 

The meeting ended and another woman was still there, so I started slow by asking R. if she'd ever been to a healer before. She hadn't been. I asked her if she'd ever seen a healer work, and she said she had and described something she had seen video of. We all walked outside, and the other woman got into her car and pulled away, and I decided to go for it. I did the short version, told R. that someone had told me that I was a healer and that I had no evidence that this was true, but that just in case I wanted to try it on her. She took off her glove and I held her hand and talked to her. She said that she thought she could feel energy coming into her body from me, but it was probably just because I was shaking with the cold...and because my body shakes most of the time anyway (familial trait)...and because I was pretty embarrassed by the fact that I was doing this. 

But it meant something to R. 

And it meant something to me.

And fuck it...I tried.

So I'm still embarrassed, and I know this whole thing is pretty fucked up...but I'm not sorry that I gave it a shot. At worst, I'm a silly old man. Well, hell...I was heading in that general direction anyway.

At best....