Enter The Young Shaman

My friend Linda was pregnant with her first child when her mother died. I think how hard that must have been for her, how completely she must have been submerged then in never-will-be. That child became one of my son's close friends. Linda and I met when the boys were in kindergarten: we chaperoned the same field trip to a local lake that June. She was pregnant then with her third baby; I remember walking together through the pines around the lake, remember her swelling belly and small feet. Our sons walked ahead of us, holding hands, and I also remember how sweet that seemed to me. Then, it did not seem that long since they had been born. That day, it had been just a few weeks since my own mother had died. I was even sadder for Linda because I was so sad for myself.

The next part of this story came around pretty quickly too, when her son invited mine over to play one afternoon during those impossibly cold weeks right after my husband died. Time has funny ways of moving itself around. A maddening elasticity, have you noticed? Linda was good to me during the whole five years my husband was sick. Most everyone was, and David died anyway and afterwards, you couldn't believe how quickly those years had gone by. But on this particular day, Linda eventually drove my son home through the snow, and leaned out her car window to talk to me for a long time. She and my son, she told me, had spent much of the afternoon talking between themselves. It had begun when he mentioned to her feeling the company of his dad, very much dead by then but still very much present. Linda felt that way about her own parents as well, it turned out. Felt them in the corners of her house, sensed them in her rooms, at the edges of her conversations, random places and times, here, there. My son, though he had never said so to me, felt that about his father, too. I suspect Linda may have wondered sometimes about the reality of her ghosts. She made popcorn and sat at the table with my son and he assured her yes, they are real. I feel them too. They talked all afternoon that way. By the time she hit my driveway, Linda had shiny eyes and happiness blooming across her face. I wrote down everything I could remember of what she told me later that day; I wish I still had that piece of writing, but I don't.

The only thing that surprised me about any of this was that it was my son, my slightly awkward, slightly immature, more-than-slightly depressed 11-year-old, who had had an effect like that on another human being. Linda wasn't just interested, she was buoyed. He wasn't aware that there was anything remarkable about his having spent an afternoon eating popcorn with an adult, sharing stories of the spirit world in whose midst they both understood they lived.

My son is someone who has always seemed surrounded by ghosts. His birth was difficult and as I was being wheeled into the OR for my emergency C-section, I passed by a woman there in the hallway, there in my hallucination, sitting beside a river and reading a book--as I went by on the gurney she glanced up, but was hardly interested. Still, she was present. A couple of years later I stood over his crib one night and the thought floated into my head that he had come to us damaged, somehow. Another ghost, this one maybe of a past life I had no way to know about or to control. One night, around the time his father was getting ready to go in for his first cancer surgery, Wyatt woke crying uncontrollably after a dream in which he'd lost a tooth. He was six, and did not know what I knew, that to dream of losing a tooth meant a death in the family. But it didn't matter, that one was the omen ghost, the only truly scary ghost there is.

Being thus accustomed to them, my son was able to accept that one more ghost, his father's, remained nearby, and I was glad of it. (I only felt it once, and it wasn't meant for me. One morning a few weeks after that death, I went into my daughter's bedroom to wake her for school. It was December, and pitch dark; as soon as I entered the room I was aware of someone sitting beside her on her bed. Aware in a horrible, panicked kind of way--the sense of a physical presence was so strong I was convinced that a man had broken into her bedroom during the night and was still there at that moment. It took me a long time to find the light switch on the wall, and while I fumbled, whoever sat there didn't move. The light came on to reveal my daughter, sleeping soundly, quite alone. When I woke her she said she had just been dreaming that her father was beside her on the bed, and circled the crown of her head with his hands, and leaned over and kissed her in the middle of that circle his fingers made.)

That is the spirit that has followed my daughter. The one that trails my son is more subtle, more complex. This is the spirit that, I believe, has influenced him to become a healer: it's a notion that emerged first in his interest, as an 11-year-old, in herbalism and more recently (now that he's 12 and all grown up) in his desire to become a genetic researcher, and help find the cure for cancer through that doorway. It's that ghost, I think, who put the idea to cure cancer in his head to begin with, who prompted him to tell me seriously, not long ago, that he feels his reason for being here is for exactly that thing. To cure cancer.

Well, my son, the doctor, who would argue with that. But there's still an other-worldly component to his experiences that I cannot quite categorize. Lately he has begun having vivid dreams. Last week he had them two nights in row, and they felt shamanic to me when he related them the next morning. In the first, he was at ensemble rehearsal for a school musical. As he stood on the stage, singing, something black and vaporous flew out of the audience and into him. Later, someone was in trouble and when he heard they needed help, my son turned into a wolf. In the second dream, he fell from a great height into the sea. The fall was not the problem, since the water kept him from being hurt, and being underwater was not the problem because it turned out that he could breath there. The problem was the underwater monsters that surrounded him in that dark sea.

Later that week I was expecting a visit from a friend who is herself a practicing shaman. When I asked her about it all--the dreams, the sensitivity, the desire to be a healer--she didn't think any of it was that clear-cut. What she did tell me was the thing that was pretty obvious, but which I'd managed to miss: if any of this was real, then, taken in that context, his father's death was my son's initiatory experience.

This is a way in which no one I know is accustomed to looking at their children: backward into adulthood, as if through a long lens of future history. Just like that, I could feel my husband reduced to a foot note in my son's biography. And I resented it. That I even feel that resentment makes me uneasy, as though it's easier for me to accept that my son needed to be born wounded in order to become a healer, than that my husband should have been sacrificed for the same purpose. I also did not know until I got to this paragraph that this is how I feel, and part of me thinks that it would be better if my son never found that out. Never discovered that I was the real monster lurking in those deep pools in those bad dreams. Biographical notation: His mother was Grendel. He grew to adulthood, regardless.

It does make me wonder whether the whole notion of illness and healing isn't anything more than a zero-sum balance, in other words, maybe eradication isn't the point so much as constant movement, the pieces going ceaselessly around, square to square, and that motion the thing that truly maintains the balance and keeps the whole board from pitching over and toppling to the floor. It's hard to know what are even the right questions to ask in that case. For instance, did my husband mind being the one who got sick, if that's what engendered the healer part of his son? If my son devotes his talents to uncovering a cure, might that, in the grand tradition of Unintended Consequences, also create others sorts of illness in the world? (Is "cure" even the right word to use?)

When my husband finally realized that he wasn't going to be cured, he effortlessly, I thought, accepted it all with a "what is, is" attitude. Our son accepts his presumed role--talking ghosts with a friend's mother, spending his life engaged in a battle which may outlast him--with the same sort of easy grace. And to me, that monster who remains mired down in the mud somewhere, they are equally a mystery. But maybe, if we both live long enough, one day I can ask my son to explain what he understands of his part in it. Maybe, that will help illuminate the strategy behind those clacking playing pieces of wellness, illness, health, death.