The Goddess

I found my self reading over some bits of "Menya an end of life story" this morning. I was moved to tears, not for the first time, as I read. I have been thinking a lot about my role as a part of this care team, how this has changed me, how powerful the experience has been. Being on the care team for Mrs K has been the most rewarding and at the same time heart wrenching thing I have ever done.

She was in an old age home this week, To give her husband R some respite from her care. I went to see her for my usual shift on Tuesday. Her first night there was horrible. She had no way of ringing the buzzer to let the nurses know that she needed help. She told me that a nurses aid came in saw her foaming at the mouth and choking and left without helping her. –She later heard the same woman screaming at a resident to “shut the hell up”. Before I left for the evening I helped her go to the bathroom and got her tucked in to bed. Getting her into bed was a 45 minute ordeal. I was struck by the level of vulnerability that she dealt with. I smoothed the blankets and kissed her good night and she looked up at me and thanked me for coming to see her. I very nearly started sobbing right then and there. How could I not come?

I worry about her future. She very much wants to live but every day is an ordeal for her husband. He is not far from 60 and I don’t know how much more of this he can take. I am very much afraid that Trinity will abandon her in a few months as her 6 months of care team time will be up. On one hand I hope that she will be like Stephen Hawkins, who has lived with this disease for 20 years and on the other hand I don’t now how she can tolerate the indignities that she must deal with, how her household can withstand the expense and how her husband can take the strain.

On of the things that drew me to the Hospice work was the profound crisis of faith that I have been struggling with for the past few years. I felt that I have not really been a “Priestess”. Doing public ritual is fun. And I am good at it, but at the end of the day what difference does it make? I really don’t think that I was making a difference in people’s lives; I was not serving the gods. I think I have been serving the gods more in the past 6 months of helping Mrs K than I have in 10 plus years of being a Priestess.

In most Wiccan traditions it is believed that Divinity can manifest though and individual. I have attended, written and conducted many rituals were that has been the goal. To see divinity manifested though an individual. This has been one of the central issues of my crisis of faith, -that I have not been convinced that divinity was ever present. But very recently I have come to recognise that I have seen the presence of the Goddess, shining though the eyes of a human. Her lessons have been of courage in the face of despair, dignity throughout all forms of humiliations, and most of all, transformation. Her throne is a wheelchair.