Chapter 19 The Healing Time

 

 Chapter 19 - THE HEALING TIME

ONE OF THE SIGNS THAT JESS WAS RECOVERING nicely while she was home with us for those four sacred months of healing was that her period returned. I was absolutely thrilled when she quietly let me know she needed some things to take care of it. After I got her all set up, I went down to the fridge we had in the basement and brought up the bottle of champagne left over from the holiday. We popped that cork and toasted to the wonderful recovery of her cycles.

Later, I called the women of my family. My mother. My sister. We all cried on the phone. Hope for Jessie’s healing truly had been ignited. Here’s the part where I invite you to laugh with us. As my daughter gained weight and strength and her menstrual cycles returned, her hormones also kicked in, making her feel the tides of life pushing and pulling. She came to me one day with a question that she whispered into my ear.

“Momma, do you think I can buy a vibrator? I left mine at home and I’m feeling a little sparky!” I knew she was going to be home for several more weeks, away from her boyfriend in Portland, so I thought, Absolutely! My heart was singing with this glorious sign of recovery so I said to her, “Hell YES!” So she went online and ordered again from the discreet site, her own personal vibrator guaranteed to come in a plain brown package just a few days hence.

I was glowing inside. When fertility returned to her ailing body, there was hope. It was A Good Sign of recovery.

So when the plain brown package arrived, she let me know, because inside the plain brown package was a NEON PINK box with lots of PICTURES on it that she didn’t know what to do with. Surreptitiously, she handed the NEON PINK box to me and I hid it under my shirt as I popped into the kitchen to cover it in paper towels and bury it waaaay down deep in the trashcan. This was PRIVATE stuff! 

Mission accomplished.

Then I arranged for Rob and I to walk the dogs and assured Jess that it would be a long, looooooong walk and she’d be home alone for a couple of hours. We walked and we walked and we walked some more, and finally we came home. Jess was smiling a Mona Lisa smile most of the evening and every now and then our eyes would connect and twinkle and our lips would press together in secret laughter. It was private, and the man of the house could not know.

We made a pact together. “When I die, my sweet Jess, would you please be the one to dispose of my vibrator? I keep it in the little drawer beside my bed.” “Of course, Momma, you can count on me,” she said. There are some secrets especially precious and sacred between mothers and daughters, and this was one of ours. It’s one of those things about a relationship that cannot be replaced in any other relationship and after Sweet Jess’s death, I keenly miss that sense of trust and the unique bond between us as women.

When I went to her beautiful home after she died, one of the things I did was go into her bedroom alone and put her sacred vibrators deep down into a big, black trash bag. There were two of them, the one she’d had for years, and the one she’d picked out just a few short months before. I cried. I cried for the beauty and pleasures of life, for the hope that had sprung in our hearts with the recovery of her fertility, and for the finality of the dissolution of her beautiful body.

I was ever so grateful for every single moment of pleasure in my beautiful, sweet Jess’s life. Every. Single. One.

I still have that champagne cork.

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NOTE: This chapter might be considered by some as controversial and it's important to understand that my view of life includes all of it, without shame about the parts that are our inherent gifts as humans (sex). There are about four other chapters that weave in with this one and though each one has a different angle, they're central to the acceptance and celebration of who each individual is and to Jess's life story in particular and how it intertwines with mine. Apologies if you are feeling a little shy about it. Please know that one of the major points of my book is that love is much bigger and more wondrous that we've been taught and we can celebrate it as long as we're not hurting anyone else. You kind of have to read the whole book to really "get" this thread. I hope it doesn't seem exploitative out of context.