Edward Fahey said this quote

[Charlie is dying:]After what seemed a long while, but hadn’t been, Marsh gave Paulette’s hand a warm and caring squeeze. “They’re here for him,” she said.But their heavenly visitors didn’t take him right away. They had to make room for the chaos of modern medical urgencies. To get out of the way of well-trained professionals who had dedicated their lives to holding back Heaven.Choppers are just as noisy and turbulent as we imagine them to be. One tore in over the hills and shattered every bit of peace Charlie otherwise could have lost himself into.In an instant the Med-Evac team was all over him. In the midst of that blatant orchestrated chaos Paulette fought to find her peace, and to hold him inside it.“Hang on, buddy,” techs kept telling him. “Don’t go leaving us now. You just hang in there.”But they didn’t understand, Paulette thought. It was his time.The chopper made a horrible racket carrying him off. Marsh, Paulette, and Ailana held their peace as its winds whipped their world into a froth.Harve’s face twisted with something that might conceivably have been rage.Then, all of a sudden, the birds sang, as though someone had given them a cue. “So that’s what it’s like,” Marsha said, very softly.“The afterlife.“My God, it’s so beautiful.

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Harvey wanted to dive into his ugliness; he intentionally reached for those long hours of soul desolation. He waited. He paced, ready to face down whatever was to come.Paulette’s, though, busted loose uninvited, catching her completely off guard when she was already hurting, feeling crumbled, and vulnerable. When all she really wanted was some quiet gentle feelings for a change. A few flowers. Some sunshine. A way out of all that inner torment for even just a moment.Had she had brought only nastiness out of her childhood? Hadn’t there been anything sweet she could remember instead?As she wandered back to her cabin, searching for even a single fond memory, light faded everywhere around her.Aw, c’mon, she thought. Everyone had some happy childhood memories. She had to have at least a couple.How about the coloring? Children enjoy coloring; how about that? She’d spent hours and days on her art. It was as close as she could remember to having her Mamma stand over her with anything even remotely resembling approval. Her books and comics could be tales of Jesus, but coloring books had to be Old Testament because “No child’s impure hand could touch a crayon to the sweet beautiful face of our beloved Lord and savior Christ Jesus.”So the little girl had scrunched down over Daniel in the lion’s den. Samson screaming in rage, pain, and terror as they blinded him with daggers and torches. The redder she made the flowing wounds of a man of God shot full of arrows, the richer the flames around those three men being burned in an iron box, the longer Mamma let her stay out of that closet.- From “The Gardens of Ailana

~ Edward Fahey

Paulette awoke with an ache in her heart, a grinding in her gut. If there really was a God, why would He have let anyone put a child through that? …She had survived, but at what cost? She was an itinerant professor, living in her head, not her heart. She had broken away, but abandoned her sister; hadn’t contacted her family in years.Paulette wondered what she was looking for in these weekend workshops. Absolution wasn’t on the curriculum. What could she possibly hope to accomplish? To be a healer you need to connect with people. You need to touch, and let yourself be touched. And not just with your hands.Watching these nurses, she envied them their friendships. Here were real buddies truly caring about each other, taking jabs, sharing private jokes and fears. She’d never had that. Even witnessing it from across a room, or a yard, only made her feel that much more lonely.She got along with people well enough. Agreed with whatever they said, watched their pets, helped them move from one apartment to another. But no one really knew her.Paulette had never been flush with self-confidence. People took that as humility, but humility isn’t painful and crippling. She hadn’t yet learned that humble and self-destructive aren’t the same thing at all. They’re not even on the same team.And now here she was at a workshop for healers. Had she come here to heal; or to be healed?It was one of those warm, charming days that write poems about themselves, and then settle these very softly into your mind. Paulette sensed what felt like a rain-laced breeze stirring her soul; sodden, and yet beautiful; laden with both the dismal, and the promising.- From “The Gardens of Ailana”, a fiction largely based around adults still traumatized by having been abused as children, in the name of their parents’ religion.

~ Edward Fahey