What's on the Other Side is Good - by Nan Brooks

I went close to dying, looked over into the Other Side and came back. I’m here to tell you it’s all good. We’re all afraid these days, me too. I don’t like losing the ones I love and I don’t want to leave them. But it is also true that there is nothing to be afraid of in dying. Here’s my story.

When the Consortium of Seven blog series began, Garbo, our esteemed leader, asked me to be the non-fiction contributor. What follows is not fiction. I have questioned the experience many times, as have others, I might add. But I keep coming back to the truth of it and when I share it with someone who is dying or grieving, it helps. I see the relief in their bodies, their faces, their smiles. So, please take what you like and leave the rest. I hope this is helpful.

At the Michigan Women’s Music Festival in 1988, we were, as I recall, two weeks out from the day our gates would open and almost 10,000 women would gather. It was another world. We all camped in tents on land with outdoor communal kitchens, cold running water at scattered locations, and portable toilets (“porta-janes”) cleaned in the wee hours of the mornings. In short, minimal conditions to prevent contagion.  Showers were communal and cold water only. During the festival we were the largest town in the county. Local merchants loved us, law enforcement had come to respect the festival organizers and were supportive. It was a place where women – and we were only women – could feel completely safe.  This was a shock to most of us and adjusting to the safety always took a couple of days at best.

There were many ways we could find support, both organized and informal. Physical and mental health care workers at the medical tent, twelve-step groups of all sorts, gathering spaces especially for women of color, women of size, lots of support for differently-abled women. Our language and organization reflected our desire to care for one another in the best ways possible.

I had been working in the festival office for two months in that particularly hot summer. One night I had a nightmare that I was in the office creating a giant chart to track how we were sending drivers out to distant towns in Michigan and northern Indiana and across Lake Michigan to Wisconsin. Their mission was to take prescription forms signed by the festival doctor to pharmacies where they could get small quantities of a sulfa drug. The supply would be meted out to sick women from the health care tent. I woke from the dream, realized it was impossible and went back to sleep, only to dream it again and again. Then I woke up very sick. I made my way to the Womb, stopping at porta-potties on the way.

The large tent was full of sturdy wooden tables intended for use as beds. They were about table height off the dirt floor, sometimes padded with sleeping bags or blankets. Every bed/table was occupied and there was a steady flow of women walking from their beds to the portable toilets just far enough away to be safe. Some could not walk without help. I was running a high fever and knew I couldn’t make it back to my tent, but the staff were reluctant to let me – or anyone else – stay. They already had enough on their hands.

Eventually I was given a bed in the supply tent, which had been hastily emptied to make room for a few  portable banquet tables. I don’t remember how I got to my bed/table, but I do remember a terrible headache and being urged to drink water. Volunteers made the rounds from bed to bed, urging water on us all, then helping us to the porta-potties when the inevitable happened. When the sun came up, I could see the supplies stacked under a huge tree just outside and I was grateful the tent walls were rolled up in the heat.

I remember the chills despite my layers of clothing and three sleeping bags. I remember the violent headache and a woman who came and asked if she could help me – “Headache” I mumbled. She moved her fingers across my forehead, and I could smell a lovely herbal scent. Then she was gone, and so was the headache.

Friends came to see how they could help. Linda Ummell brought me my necklace of rose quartz, which I’d apparently asked for. Jane Winslow came often, urging me to drink water, singing quietly – her voice always a balm. Kay Gardner walked through playing healing music on her flute and I could think clearly enough to remember that she was an early expert on the technical and spiritual components of music for healing. Margarette Shelton, a new friend, came before and after her double work shifts to give me Reiki treatments and encourage me.

There were rumors that two very sick women had been taken to a local hospital where the exact identity of the dysentery could be determined, which would let the docs know what drugs to use (if they could get them). Each woman was accompanied by a healthy women who would answer questions by the hospital staff. I have no idea if any of the rumors were true. The gist of it all was that the scope of the illness was to be kept secret lest the local health department shut down the festival. This was an economic worry, of course, but just as important was that women were coming from all over the world, thousands of women. They were prepared to camp but not to find expensive accommodations in central Michigan during tourist season – where would they go? How would they get there? Somehow, all this occurred to me as I lay there with chills becoming more dehydrated no matter how much water I drank.

Then the word floated around that the problem was a bacterium called shigella. The best treatment was a sulfa drug and we had a supply. Months later, I learned that my nightmare of charts and forays into neighboring states for the drug was true, even down to who was driving which vehicle on my chart.

Every time someone urged me to drink, I drank. Herbal teas that tasted horrid, sweet cool water, anything. My tendency to obey authority often was not in my best interest, but this time it was. It just wasn’t enough.

I found myself floating, then walking through a beautiful green meadow toward a row of trees and lush greenery of all sorts. I moved easily and gently, feeling the air against my body, my clothing fluttering in the breeze. Then I was wrapped in an egg-shaped bubble of pink light. All around me was a field of the most beautiful blue I have ever seen. I’ve never seen that color since that time, but I remember it clearly. As I floated toward the massive green wall, a sort of doorway or gateway appeared. It was both open, a narrow gap, and closed – I knew I could not just walk right through it. I had a deep longing to get to the other side of that wall. I looked through the opening to see an unending field of that blue and I knew that there, on what we do call the Other Side, there was love. Only love. There were no judgments, no criticisms, no wrong-ness of any kind. Just a vast world of beauty and love.

Just as I began to move through the opening, which was now an archway of greenery and flowers, I heard my younger son say his name. In lesss than a nanosecond, I remembered that I had made a covenant with him – soul to soul – before he was born. And I knew that I had not yet fulfilled that sacred promise. I was filled with love for him and in that moment I slammed back onto that hard bed in that very hot tent. I was so fatigued I could not open my eyes.

I heard a woman from far away say, “Oh my Goddess, is she alive?” Another voice, “She’s barely breathing.” I moved my hand toward them, and it felt like I was lifting a huge weight. “Oh thank God!” I heard. Then from beside me, “We’re here, what do you need?”  I mumbled, “Water”.  Soon they were propping me up and I could drink long gulps of that precious coolness. I realized my clothes were completely soaked through with sweat. All the other women who had been in the overflow tent had recovered and left, so no one remembered that I was there.

Two women I didn’t know came to walk me out under that big old sheltering tree where I lay on a clean soft cotton quilt that smelled of sunshine. One applied tiny gold acupressure beads to precise points on my ears and said they would fall out when they were no longer needed to restore my energy. One burned a healing wood near my navel, as she had learned as a nurse on a native reservation in the southwest. She explained that shigella thrives in heat and on the reservation it had worked fast, killing babies and the elders. I told the women that I had felt for months that a woman would die at the festival. One of them looked into my eyes and said, “That was you.”

I craved potato chips and 7-Up and a walk, of all things. Jane let me lean on her as we walked me to the festival store where we stood in line and I wondered why women were staring at us. I just grinned at everyone, then realized I must look pretty awful –long pants and shirt in the afternoon heat, unwashed for days, long hair a mess. One of the store clerks saw us in line and called out, “Nan, come up here please.”  I said, “That’s OK, I can wait.” “Oh no you can’t,” she said. “Get up here right now. What can I get you?”

Someone nearby said, we held a healing circle in the grove night before last and visualized you in the center. I guess it worked.” I could only say “thank you” again and again, and weep. Linda and Margarette kept coming to check on me. Jane walked me to the showers in the workers’ area, where I stood in the cold shower for a very long time. Women took turns coming to help me stand.  Jane, ever thoughtful, offered to drive me back to Indiana before the festival was over, giving up her time there and the possibility of performing.  We sang “She’ll be Coming Around the Mountain” in interminable verses of bad rhymes – her way to ease my fears of soiling the upholstery in her van. Such kindness.

At home, I discovered I’d lost 25 pounds in one week. It was two months before I could be out of bed for a full eight hours. One little gold acupressure bead finally fell off after six weeks, no longer necessary. I cancelled a fall performing tour, and took a clerical job. What a small price to pay to see that the world can be a a wonder of lovingkindness.  When I pay attention, it still is, beneath and all around the nonsense and the fear and hates, lovingkindness holds this world together.

And I can sit with someone who is dying and say, “Where you are going there is only love. You will not be judged and found wanting or bad or sinful. You will be immersed in love. There is nothing to fear. Only love there. Only love.”  This is true; I have been near enough to know.

There is only love. We can draw upon it at any time. May this knowledge hold you now.

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