May All Those Who Enter Here Be Comforted
by Cathy Warner
Wearing a hospital gown and blue-paper shorts I ease down, first onto my side, then gingerly onto my back that still protests after a month in response to once innocent movements. The technician slides a bolster under my knees, and warm blanket over them, hands me earplugs and an emergency call button, pushes a button, and I slide like a shrink-wrapped ham into the scanner, my lumbar spine a barcode to be deciphered, revealing, it’s hoped, both diagnosis and cure.
If the very recesses of one’s body are going to be laid bare, the terror and promise of what lies hidden inside muscle and sinew, tendon and bone on display, these secret mysteries should be exposed quietly, reverently, in the hush toned of candle-lit chapels and whispered prayers, not while one lies prone and motionless for thirty minutes in a confining space-aged tube that roars like a jet turbine, an unrelenting jackhammer rattling teeth and nerves.
Yet noise it is, in a tube that looms stark and sterile only a few inches above my face. I will panic if I don’t clamp my eyes closed and focus on my breath—in and out, in and out. I feel the expansion in my abdomen upon inhalation and worry the movement will obscure the necessary view of my innards.
What to try instead, perhaps an equal and opposite noise that I could somehow incorporate into the raging magnetic soundtrack? If only I knew songs in a genre that could match the machine’s violent thumping and insistence on victory, but I don’t even know the names of genres I might utilize. Death metal?
What I do know by heart are hymns, though it’s been a few years since I’ve sung many with any regularity. If I’d known about the earsplitting noise beforehand, I could’ve flipped through my hymnal reminding myself of second and third and fourth verses.
I don't sing aloud, or even hum, in case inner vibrations will mess with the imaging. But I call up tunes and words on a mind-screen. I start with the cheerful, “Morning Has Broken,” and “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” but there’s too much dissonance between the metallic pulsing and these happy hymns.
I need a hymn of sorrow, of lament. It is Lent now—though I confess that in my immobility and pain, the liturgical calendar has been the last thing on my mind—and “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” a hymn I was first introduced to on Good Friday almost thirty years ago floats into consciousness.
The first two verses are all I can reliably recall:
O sacred Head now wounded,
With grief and shame weighed down,
now scornfully surrounded
With thorns thine only crown:
how pale thou art with anguish,
with sore abuse and scorn!
How does that visage languish,
Which once was bright as morn!
I latch onto Jesus, and to the words of his wounding for the remainder of the first eight-minute imaging cycle, and all of the second eight-minute cycle while the thundering brings on a headache and hot flash—for who and what else can be present with me in this coffin-tube? Not the technician who is only a disembodied voice speaking via microphone in the few silent moments between scans. Not my husband in the waiting room. Not even my wedding ring stashed in a locker with my clothes.
I wasn’t supposed to appear before this oracle today, at least my insurance didn’t think it was medically necessary. I am here by grace, because someone who loves me said, “let me pay for this.”
No matter what images this machine generates from my body, no matter what sort of treatment I may or may not receive, I know I will be healed. I know this because people I love have suffered much worse, their bodies missing pieces, their lives permanently altered in the name of survival. They are whole despite diagnosis, disease, disability. God did not take the cup from them or from Christ—though everyone of them asked to be spared.
Despite our fear God will not forsake us, and that knowledge penetrates me bone deep. I can’t say if my doctor will see Jesus lurking between the L-3 and L-4 vertebrae in my lumber spine when she reads the MRI report. But Jesus is there, always—love alive in me, in each of us. There is nothing more to resist.
For some, being inside this machine is to be trapped in a blaring and claustrophobic torture chamber that will deliver nothing but bad news. But in this confining cacophony I have somehow been cradled and blessed. And with that realization I wonder if anyone has blessed this machine, this room, the people whose bodies have slid like mine, specimens on a diagnostic tray.
It’s a challenge to pray in this bone-rattling din, to hold absolutely still and think, but I cobble a silent prayer: “May this machine be used for the highest and best good by all who come in contact with it. May those entrusted to operate this equipment do so with great skill and compassion. May all who enter here be comforted.”
In the final eight-minutes of magnetic tumult I conjure and bless those who work here—technicians, physicians, janitors. I bless those, like me, who come under extreme circumstances, a failure of the body to work as expected. I bless our friends and families, at home, in the lobby, on social media, waiting, hoping, fearing.
I pray until the din ceases and I’m finally freed. An aide offers me my crutches, leads me down the hall, opens the locker, and leaves me to dress. I slide my wedding ring back on then reach for my shirt, pulling it on while trying to keep my aching back motionless. Though the room is quiet, my chest still resonates with sound, a reverberating benediction.
Tahlequah’s Grief
by Cathy Warner
On July 24, 2018 an orca calf died off the coast of British Columbia within thirty minutes of birth and Tahlequah, the calf’s mother, carried her dead daughter on her rostrum, pushing her through the Salish Sea from Canada to the U.S. and back again in a funeral procession that logged a thousand miles and lasted seventeen days.
The Puget Sound region, and soon the world, watched in grief, horror, and helplessness as Tahlequah’s ordeal made daily headlines, noting that at first her family swam slowly by her side, keeping vigil. But later they reported days when she visibly lagged behind, and other days when, due to poor visibility, there was no sign of the pod at all.
Moving to the Seattle area six years ago, I became captivated by the Resident Orcas, as they’re dubbed locally, attending educational events, following their movements on a Facebook page, and trying to spot them whenever they swam well south in the Sound.
I was among those who wept after the news of Tahlequah’s calf and her grief, sharing in the heartbreak and feeling my complicity in the precarious future of these seventy-five endangered fish-eating orcas who stay with their mothers their entire lives. This iconic species is starving from lack of salmon, drawing instead on their toxic blubber for the energy to navigate marine channels ringing with ship noise and naval blasts that jam the whales’ own sonar, inhibiting their communication and hunting abilities.
Survival is fraught with peril, and mothers lose their young at alarming rates in the animal kingdom, and I usually console myself with the idea that it’s all part of the circle of life. But here was a circle of death: this neonate orca and others that’d undoubtedly slipped from their mother’s wombs to the bottom of the sea since the last viable birth in 2015; the loss of their 105-year-old matriarch, Granny, in early 2017; and young Scarlet, the sick and starving three-year-old wasting away while humans develop plans to help her.
On August first, a week into her vigil, I picked up my journal and wrote to Tahlequah:
The depth of your love and the depth of your grief are unfathomable, and I am terrified you’ll be undone by it, afraid that we will watch, helpless, as your strength gives out. Your mourning is so very powerful and so very public that our private grief is carried with you and your daughter. We look to you—no we beg of you—to swim through this sea of sorrow and emerge somehow. We pray you’ll find a way to give up your daughter to the dead, but not give up on your own life. Without you, there is no hope for us.
Three days later, I received news of a twenty-nine-year-old friend who’d needed an organ transplant and had married his love by filing paperwork (without even a celebration) in order to be considered more “worthy” of the transplant. His new wife, now widowed (without even a ceremony) had made the terrible decision to withdraw life support after he suffered a brain hemorrhage. Like Tahlequah’s family, parents and friends gathered as she plied the waters of loss.
Another friend, a thirty-eight-year-old husband and father who seemed healthy in November, was diagnosed with aggressive cancer in December. His body took leave of this world on August 6, before his mind and spirit were ready. His wife and toddler daughter were plunged into private mourning while every day the news carried stories of Tahlequah’s unprecedented tour of grief.
During those days a mother I’ve never met keened as she rocked her dying child in a hospital room. She may have walked through the valley of the shadow for weeks, or rushed in behind an ambulance only minutes before. Somewhere else another mother carried flowers to a grave, pressed her body into the hot grass, and prayed for the impossible.
Loss has swirled through my life as I’ve grown older, but the severing has always been once-removed: my grandparents, not my parents; my husband’s siblings, not my own.
Waiting and worrying what would become of Tahlequah and my dear friends, and doubting my own capacity to live through such devastation, part of me held my breath, as though submerged, swimming with Tahlequah’s pod, and in that wavering depth these words emerged:
This is the undeniable truth: we all swim dangerously close to the shoal of death, and one day it will claim us. Be tender, then, with each other, gentle in word and deed. Our lives are so fleeting, we are so fragile—our only recourse is to love one another in the midst of pain.
On August 11, Tahlequah was spotted in the waters off San Juan Island without her calf, for the first time since its birth and death two-and-a-half weeks earlier. She surfaced in view of Ken Balcomb, founder of the Center for Whale Research, who has studied these whales for decades, who knows them as intimately as a human can. She looked, “remarkably frisky,” he said, as she chased a school of salmon.
Tomorrow, twelve days after Tahlequah surrendered her daughter to the water, I will hug a thirty-five year-old widow, her two-year-old daughter, the widow’s father dying from cancer, and the widow’s faithful mother stretched thin by caring for them all, as we gather at a waterfront park to remember the young husband who should not be dead, but is.
Today, as I write this, the sky is steel-toned thick-choked with ash from wildfires and everyone’s been warned to stay indoors. The sea outside my window is equally opaque and grim, and the future inscrutable. But in this moment Tahlequah is plying the Pacific alongside her son, mother, and pod, unseen by human eyes.
Somehow she has survived this calamity. And she is not alone. In this moment there is hope.
May it be so tomorrow.
Cathy Warner is a writer, teacher, editor, home renovator, and real estate broker in Western Washington. She is the author of two books of poetry Home By Another Road, and Burnt Offerings. Her fiction, memoir, and essays have appeared in Under the Sun, The Other Journal, So To Speak, Water~Stone, and the blogs of Ruminate, Relief, and Image, among others. Recipient of the Steinbeck and SuRaa fiction awards, Cathy has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays. Find her at cathywarner.com. “May All who Enter Here Be Comforted” and “Tahlequah’s Grief” were first published in the “Good Letters” blog of Image Journal.
by Cathy Warner
Wearing a hospital gown and blue-paper shorts I ease down, first onto my side, then gingerly onto my back that still protests after a month in response to once innocent movements. The technician slides a bolster under my knees, and warm blanket over them, hands me earplugs and an emergency call button, pushes a button, and I slide like a shrink-wrapped ham into the scanner, my lumbar spine a barcode to be deciphered, revealing, it’s hoped, both diagnosis and cure.
If the very recesses of one’s body are going to be laid bare, the terror and promise of what lies hidden inside muscle and sinew, tendon and bone on display, these secret mysteries should be exposed quietly, reverently, in the hush toned of candle-lit chapels and whispered prayers, not while one lies prone and motionless for thirty minutes in a confining space-aged tube that roars like a jet turbine, an unrelenting jackhammer rattling teeth and nerves.
Yet noise it is, in a tube that looms stark and sterile only a few inches above my face. I will panic if I don’t clamp my eyes closed and focus on my breath—in and out, in and out. I feel the expansion in my abdomen upon inhalation and worry the movement will obscure the necessary view of my innards.
What to try instead, perhaps an equal and opposite noise that I could somehow incorporate into the raging magnetic soundtrack? If only I knew songs in a genre that could match the machine’s violent thumping and insistence on victory, but I don’t even know the names of genres I might utilize. Death metal?
What I do know by heart are hymns, though it’s been a few years since I’ve sung many with any regularity. If I’d known about the earsplitting noise beforehand, I could’ve flipped through my hymnal reminding myself of second and third and fourth verses.
I don't sing aloud, or even hum, in case inner vibrations will mess with the imaging. But I call up tunes and words on a mind-screen. I start with the cheerful, “Morning Has Broken,” and “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” but there’s too much dissonance between the metallic pulsing and these happy hymns.
I need a hymn of sorrow, of lament. It is Lent now—though I confess that in my immobility and pain, the liturgical calendar has been the last thing on my mind—and “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” a hymn I was first introduced to on Good Friday almost thirty years ago floats into consciousness.
The first two verses are all I can reliably recall:
O sacred Head now wounded,
With grief and shame weighed down,
now scornfully surrounded
With thorns thine only crown:
how pale thou art with anguish,
with sore abuse and scorn!
How does that visage languish,
Which once was bright as morn!
I latch onto Jesus, and to the words of his wounding for the remainder of the first eight-minute imaging cycle, and all of the second eight-minute cycle while the thundering brings on a headache and hot flash—for who and what else can be present with me in this coffin-tube? Not the technician who is only a disembodied voice speaking via microphone in the few silent moments between scans. Not my husband in the waiting room. Not even my wedding ring stashed in a locker with my clothes.
I wasn’t supposed to appear before this oracle today, at least my insurance didn’t think it was medically necessary. I am here by grace, because someone who loves me said, “let me pay for this.”
No matter what images this machine generates from my body, no matter what sort of treatment I may or may not receive, I know I will be healed. I know this because people I love have suffered much worse, their bodies missing pieces, their lives permanently altered in the name of survival. They are whole despite diagnosis, disease, disability. God did not take the cup from them or from Christ—though everyone of them asked to be spared.
Despite our fear God will not forsake us, and that knowledge penetrates me bone deep. I can’t say if my doctor will see Jesus lurking between the L-3 and L-4 vertebrae in my lumber spine when she reads the MRI report. But Jesus is there, always—love alive in me, in each of us. There is nothing more to resist.
For some, being inside this machine is to be trapped in a blaring and claustrophobic torture chamber that will deliver nothing but bad news. But in this confining cacophony I have somehow been cradled and blessed. And with that realization I wonder if anyone has blessed this machine, this room, the people whose bodies have slid like mine, specimens on a diagnostic tray.
It’s a challenge to pray in this bone-rattling din, to hold absolutely still and think, but I cobble a silent prayer: “May this machine be used for the highest and best good by all who come in contact with it. May those entrusted to operate this equipment do so with great skill and compassion. May all who enter here be comforted.”
In the final eight-minutes of magnetic tumult I conjure and bless those who work here—technicians, physicians, janitors. I bless those, like me, who come under extreme circumstances, a failure of the body to work as expected. I bless our friends and families, at home, in the lobby, on social media, waiting, hoping, fearing.
I pray until the din ceases and I’m finally freed. An aide offers me my crutches, leads me down the hall, opens the locker, and leaves me to dress. I slide my wedding ring back on then reach for my shirt, pulling it on while trying to keep my aching back motionless. Though the room is quiet, my chest still resonates with sound, a reverberating benediction.
Tahlequah’s Grief
by Cathy Warner
On July 24, 2018 an orca calf died off the coast of British Columbia within thirty minutes of birth and Tahlequah, the calf’s mother, carried her dead daughter on her rostrum, pushing her through the Salish Sea from Canada to the U.S. and back again in a funeral procession that logged a thousand miles and lasted seventeen days.
The Puget Sound region, and soon the world, watched in grief, horror, and helplessness as Tahlequah’s ordeal made daily headlines, noting that at first her family swam slowly by her side, keeping vigil. But later they reported days when she visibly lagged behind, and other days when, due to poor visibility, there was no sign of the pod at all.
Moving to the Seattle area six years ago, I became captivated by the Resident Orcas, as they’re dubbed locally, attending educational events, following their movements on a Facebook page, and trying to spot them whenever they swam well south in the Sound.
I was among those who wept after the news of Tahlequah’s calf and her grief, sharing in the heartbreak and feeling my complicity in the precarious future of these seventy-five endangered fish-eating orcas who stay with their mothers their entire lives. This iconic species is starving from lack of salmon, drawing instead on their toxic blubber for the energy to navigate marine channels ringing with ship noise and naval blasts that jam the whales’ own sonar, inhibiting their communication and hunting abilities.
Survival is fraught with peril, and mothers lose their young at alarming rates in the animal kingdom, and I usually console myself with the idea that it’s all part of the circle of life. But here was a circle of death: this neonate orca and others that’d undoubtedly slipped from their mother’s wombs to the bottom of the sea since the last viable birth in 2015; the loss of their 105-year-old matriarch, Granny, in early 2017; and young Scarlet, the sick and starving three-year-old wasting away while humans develop plans to help her.
On August first, a week into her vigil, I picked up my journal and wrote to Tahlequah:
The depth of your love and the depth of your grief are unfathomable, and I am terrified you’ll be undone by it, afraid that we will watch, helpless, as your strength gives out. Your mourning is so very powerful and so very public that our private grief is carried with you and your daughter. We look to you—no we beg of you—to swim through this sea of sorrow and emerge somehow. We pray you’ll find a way to give up your daughter to the dead, but not give up on your own life. Without you, there is no hope for us.
Three days later, I received news of a twenty-nine-year-old friend who’d needed an organ transplant and had married his love by filing paperwork (without even a celebration) in order to be considered more “worthy” of the transplant. His new wife, now widowed (without even a ceremony) had made the terrible decision to withdraw life support after he suffered a brain hemorrhage. Like Tahlequah’s family, parents and friends gathered as she plied the waters of loss.
Another friend, a thirty-eight-year-old husband and father who seemed healthy in November, was diagnosed with aggressive cancer in December. His body took leave of this world on August 6, before his mind and spirit were ready. His wife and toddler daughter were plunged into private mourning while every day the news carried stories of Tahlequah’s unprecedented tour of grief.
During those days a mother I’ve never met keened as she rocked her dying child in a hospital room. She may have walked through the valley of the shadow for weeks, or rushed in behind an ambulance only minutes before. Somewhere else another mother carried flowers to a grave, pressed her body into the hot grass, and prayed for the impossible.
Loss has swirled through my life as I’ve grown older, but the severing has always been once-removed: my grandparents, not my parents; my husband’s siblings, not my own.
Waiting and worrying what would become of Tahlequah and my dear friends, and doubting my own capacity to live through such devastation, part of me held my breath, as though submerged, swimming with Tahlequah’s pod, and in that wavering depth these words emerged:
This is the undeniable truth: we all swim dangerously close to the shoal of death, and one day it will claim us. Be tender, then, with each other, gentle in word and deed. Our lives are so fleeting, we are so fragile—our only recourse is to love one another in the midst of pain.
On August 11, Tahlequah was spotted in the waters off San Juan Island without her calf, for the first time since its birth and death two-and-a-half weeks earlier. She surfaced in view of Ken Balcomb, founder of the Center for Whale Research, who has studied these whales for decades, who knows them as intimately as a human can. She looked, “remarkably frisky,” he said, as she chased a school of salmon.
Tomorrow, twelve days after Tahlequah surrendered her daughter to the water, I will hug a thirty-five year-old widow, her two-year-old daughter, the widow’s father dying from cancer, and the widow’s faithful mother stretched thin by caring for them all, as we gather at a waterfront park to remember the young husband who should not be dead, but is.
Today, as I write this, the sky is steel-toned thick-choked with ash from wildfires and everyone’s been warned to stay indoors. The sea outside my window is equally opaque and grim, and the future inscrutable. But in this moment Tahlequah is plying the Pacific alongside her son, mother, and pod, unseen by human eyes.
Somehow she has survived this calamity. And she is not alone. In this moment there is hope.
May it be so tomorrow.
Cathy Warner is a writer, teacher, editor, home renovator, and real estate broker in Western Washington. She is the author of two books of poetry Home By Another Road, and Burnt Offerings. Her fiction, memoir, and essays have appeared in Under the Sun, The Other Journal, So To Speak, Water~Stone, and the blogs of Ruminate, Relief, and Image, among others. Recipient of the Steinbeck and SuRaa fiction awards, Cathy has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays. Find her at cathywarner.com. “May All who Enter Here Be Comforted” and “Tahlequah’s Grief” were first published in the “Good Letters” blog of Image Journal.