A Healing Conversation

Sometimes you learn about a concept that’s totally new to you, and then all of a sudden you run into it everywhere. My past week at the Red Vic has been that way with perspectives on healing.
First, I met a woman who was in San Francisco for a training on massages in hospice settings. She told me about how healing touch can calm and comfort elderly folks and people with diseases like Alzheimers in a way that even high doses of often expensive medication sometimes can’t. We discussed how it was emotionally taxing work. With some patients, she said,  “their relatives miss the person they used to know. They try to force them to remember, which can be difficult. They’re in a different world, and sometimes they don’t want to remember.” With a faint smile, she added, “I try to accept that world. It can be a beautiful thing.”
I quickly realized that this week began “Interview Season” at UCSF Medical Center. At least five aspiring residents have stayed at the Bed and Breakfast this past week, and all of them had interesting stories to tell. One man, who is hoping to be a surgeon, had just returned from living in Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana, working in a hospital there.
But where the energy of healing really came together was at Sunday morning’s Peaceful World Conversation.
One of the conversation participants is a psychotherapist who bears every day the burden of caring for his multiple clients. Another, a care provider who has been intimately involved with helping the healing process of one individual with brain damage for several years. Another young man who had been silent most of the conversation confided that he had been in a caretaking role for his mother for several years, a role that was difficult as “she’s simply not herself anymore.”
Laurie Marshall, our Peace Coordinator here, reminded us that death must be accepted because it is, eventually, inevitable. That it is impossible to avoid, that it is the one natural thing we can all count on happening to us, make it in some ways beautiful. In some ways, the experience brings us together- it’s a strong common thread.    
As Laurie says, “caretakers and healers are a part of the Peace Movement. We’re creating a culture of care, instead of our culture of fear.”  All these people who came through the Red Vic this week are part of a momentum to build a loving, just and peaceful world.