Whispered in the Redwoods
Your Grandmother’s Magic Jawbone: Part II
Read Part I
Are you awake?” Whispered in the Redwoods, wrapped in darkness. The air tingled with pine as a campfire faded.
“Are you listening?”
I jolted in a sleeping bag’s rustle. I could hear your grandfather’s slow breath in the tent beside me, so it wasn’t him whispering. A lone insect chirped in the dark.
After recovering from jaw surgery, chemo and radiation in the Spring, a Summer camping trip was the first foray from the security of home. I was stepping outside the perimeters of Patient life, where everything was controlled, carefully measured and close at hand: full cupboards to cater for a limited ability to eat, the security of knowing a doctor’s appointment was just a short drive away.
Camping was a timely act of impatience, Mokopuna. A sign of recovery, a step into the passage leading away from Patient simplicity, back to the complexity of being well. Camping can be simple too, but you volunteer for it.
We had a gas stove, utensils, plates, and food to cook under filtered forest light. I had been anxious about the trip. To my relief, it was fine. Sitting under a tree eating a camp-cooked meal, spoon by spoon, I was reclaiming some essentials: confidence, independence, autonomy.
Another whisper in the dark. “Out of the ashes, it’s time to rise.”
It was definitely inside the tent. But it couldn’t be? I didn’t say a word, Moko. I held my breath.
“These are the words of wish bone. I was a severed self, running ahead and leaping.”
Heaving the breath I was holding, I hissed, “Who are you?”
“At the close of the light mare, they called me her mandible.”
What the Hell? “Go away!”
“Why run from words when we walk with burnt offerings?”
Heart pounding. ‘Don’t lose it.’ I drilled my mind.
But it kept talking. “Wrapped in black bark, underneath a scorching, I am nestled in the forest, I am rising from ashes, I am turning and leaping, I am flashed through lightning, I am crossing paths striking, I am carving my peace in the face of the Sun.”
“Go back to sleep,” I said, rolling over and crushing this insanity under my sleeping bag’s Hush.
It grew silent. Perhaps it slept.
I didn’t.
I lay awake in the forest dark wondering if there was a way to ‘rise’. After surgery and radiation to my jaw, I felt shaken, uncertain, afraid. Day and night, a shadow hovered over me. I was anxious about recurrence. The skin on my radiated face felt like a beesting and I could barely talk. I couldn’t imagine feeling ‘normal’ again. I wanted to rise back up, but I didn’t know how.
Earlier that day, I had hiked down Kings Canyon with your grandfather. After a few hours, we sat at the foot of a giant Sequoia that was as wide as a room. Leaning against soft, ochre bark, we ate lunch. Sunlight flickered through canopy.
How do you feel when you trace your pencil-thin lifeline across the path of the giants?
Who are you when you sit in the shade of a mighty silence rising through eons?
What roots nourish you into deepest belonging?
After lunch, we hiked for another hour and reached the canyon floor where everything reeked of ash. The area was freshly scorched by a controlled fire, recently lit to clear the undergrowth and protect the forest from more lethal wildfires. There was another giant Sequoia, even larger than the room-sized tree we had seen earlier, but it was rising from a carpet of ash. The fire had licked several meters up its trunk, but it was clearly alive, thriving in silence. Under protective bark, streams of life rising.
Perhaps I should tell you, Moko, I don’t frown on anthropomorphism: I specialize in it. Stepping into the interconnected web, I find my belonging. Stories intersect and ripple in a wider story, larger than one life. In the canyon, I listened to an ancient tree, charred storyteller, survivor of a manmade lightning strike — well-intended to help her rise longer. This is what she said.
Rise up and shelter the sky. Stream down and nourish the earth.
Which may be the shortest story ever wrapped in a tall tale. Clearly, trees aren’t known for wasting words. But for me, lying awake in the night, reflecting on that day, I listened as my own new story unfurled. Listening in the dark, the unwelcome whispers began to make sense, or hope, “Wrapped in black bark, underneath a scorching, I am nestled in the forest, I am rising from ashes…”
Perhaps I could keep rising too, just like a charred tree. So, this is how I gained more confidence on my new path. Walking, I re-told myself in this short story. I rise up and reach for the sky. I dig deeper and nourish my life.
But who was that whispering in the dark? Imagine my quiet surprise, Moko, learning that my new Jawbone tells stories too? Once she found words, once I listened, I learned that a stick of bone-truth, that had walked silently all through my life as a fibula, now: Simply. Would. Not. Stop. Talking.
Now back at home, Jawbone wakes me to talk in the dark. I don’t mind. Since I lost my voice and found it again, there is more meaning in listening. Jawbone says, “Do you remember seeing your severed self?”
I do. During the creeping deterioration through radiation treatment, eating was a painful act of will and speaking wasn’t possible. In one of the weekly appointments with the radiation oncologist, I wrote my most pressing question, “How much speech will I regain after treatment?” He shook his head and said he wasn’t sure.
Back at home, I stared in the mirror at a mute stranger, jaw scars scorched, skin blotched nausea-gray, cheeks hollow. I wondered what she had done to deserve such a harsh sentence. My instinct was to feel shame at her disfigurement, repelled by her misery, afraid of isolation, despairing for the future.
I could have looked away. There are plenty of places to run from your misery. But instead, I felt compassion for this lost, severed self. I promised her we would make it through. I had been raging against pain for weeks, battling myself, a warrior of a patient, going down in my inner blaze.
Looking back, that is the day that I turned, surrendering to the Patient-Warrior. This seems like such a small turn, Warrior-Patient, Patient-Warrior, just another of life’s little reversals. But putting compassion in the lead has turned me around.
Hand-in-hand, the Patient nourishes, while the Warrior follows, rallying your forces.
In compassion, the Patient opens a window into inner spaces, while the Warrior watches over, protecting your precious time.
The Patient accepts what you cannot control, while the Warrior finds ways round the barriers that you refuse to submit to.
Perhaps it sounds as if I was alone, Moko, trailing the ledge of recovery. But stripped down to my bones, I was wrapped in the silken well-wishes of friends, and strangers.
I know this can mean the world, because it did. I found myself at the quiet heart of caring: gently embraced by friends and whanau. A circle of souls holding hope for me, like candles at the hearts of their inner lives.
I know we can hold a lantern for one another, Moko.
Do you believe we are all connected?
Do you believe we can survive a dark and tasteless time, if we hold up hope for one another?
I should tell you my radiated taste buds recovered after a few months. Bittersweet. For months, talking and eating took so much work, but now I can speak more clearly, and chewing and swallowing are easier. Now I savor each mouthful. Compared to then, today is a picnic leaning against the soft bark of a Sequoia, playing in dappled sunlight.
Most nights, Jawbone and I just hang out together talking ‘til dawn. Occasionally, we slip from our life-is-just-a-picnic reverie and gaze back over the ledge we struggled up. Looking down, I get giddy with gratitude. Looking up, I see that it’s morning, we are safely back home, chatting on the bed. Night has passed. I catch sight of a crooked smile in the mirror, and Jawbone and I burst out laughing.
Jawbone is like a kid at a sleepover. So happy to be alive, she wants to talk all night. See what my old bones are up against? Your grandmother’s magic jawbone reminds me that I am alive. That I need to listen. And I don’t want to fall back asleep again.
Mokopuna, there are worse things in life than being woken in the dark, so you can talk with an optimist.
Continue to Part III — How JawBone Found Her Names
Whispered in the Redwoods is Part II of a four part tale. Part I, How Maui Slowed the Sun is a memoir describing a jaw surgery in which fibula bone is transplanted to replace diseased jawbone — and how myth can connect us in healing.
