Healing In (Lisa)

Healing in: a gardening reference. when a plant is transplanted out of its ideal time. Plants that are “healing in” may take a bit longer to bloom but they will survive given a little extra TLC.

An old friend who chain-smoked Carlton cigarettes told us this. It’s been years since Miss Kay passed but we met her on the day we moved into our very first home. We’d only been married a few years and prized our privacy, making it a bit of a challenge to live next door to her. She had a habit of peering in our side door window long before knocking. Miss Kay didn’t always feel like the ideal neighbor or maybe it just wasn’t the ideal season for us to meet, but in time, living side by side, our friendship bloomed. I guess you could say, we needed a little “healing in” time.

Miss Kay was a master gardener who never married. She had no children of her own but she loved, with the heart of a mother, her jumpy Jack Russell terrier Fergie. She fed her many hungry birds so religiously that I wondered what happened to them after she passed away.

She was a retired gym teacher who wanted to know us and us to know her. She would speak in a deep gravelly voice, telling of all the goings-on in the neighborhood, people of interest, politics, in town and out in the broader world, an activist who wanted to keep us in-the-know whether we wanted to know or not. She was a rich woman in so many ways, living a genuine, full life of experiences and she shared them all with us - the good and the bad. 

I was so grateful for the clumps of perennials she offered along with her extensive gardening knowledge. Miss Kay taught me that some plants were best transplanted in the fall while others preferred the spring. She explained that it was possible to divide and transplant a plant out of season but that they would need time to recover. She referred to this time as "healing in" time, as in, the daffodils will need to ‘heal in’ that first year but they'll find their way to bloom by the following year. I loved that phrase, healing in, so poetic.   

Years passed since I last heard another soul say those poetic words, “healing in”, until our daughter’s hospice doctor uttered them one cold dreary day in February, not the time of year you’d think of anything healing in. For 20 years, our daughter Claire had a feeding tube placed in a hole in her abdomen. At the time, this hole was expanding in an alarming way. On top of that, a blistering tissue called a granuloma was forming in the hole. It looked ugly, bulging out like a foreign body so we naturally thought it bad. Seeking medical advice, we were first told to apply a steroid ointment to halt its growth but it only got angrier looking. When her hospice doctor finally examined it, she told us it was the body’s attempt at “healing in”. She said we should, “Let it be. Give it time and let it heal in.”

Even as Claire’s body was slowly breaking down, her every cell was striving to live, to heal in. It made me think that God truly is creating us anew, even and especially in our dying days. He is creating us anew, healing us in.

There was no perfect time or season for Claire to pass away but when she did it was me that needed healing in. I imagined the hole in my heart to be ever expanding but God did not forget me. He is creating me and you anew, each of us, in each moment. In early days of grieving, I did not recognize or even like myself. I felt like an ugly foreign body at times but maybe that’s the normal process of us healing in, filling the holes in our hearts. I look anew now at the ugliness stage, considering that it is not without purpose, It seems to me to be the holy face of Christ making us anew. God, creating our very next cell out of thin air to cling to the next, healing us in.

I think I’m going to follow God, my Great Physician’s prescription and let me be. Give myself time and heal in.