When Words, Faith, and Self Vanish

and the dead still hold our souls

[mother possum with two joeys in her pouch]

Prayer guides me through my days. I call upon the dead, the saints, the ancient mothers, and the cosmic beings for help with everything—from bureaucratic tussles to friends who are ill to the deepest longings of my soul. I say traditional words, ancient mantras, made up spells, and I speak the names out loud of all those on the other side who might come to my aid. I begin the day calling upon Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, ancient mother of ancient humans, Star of the Sea, and end in bed reaching out to St. Anthony, healer, finder, protector of the very life force of this planet. I say ER novenas, give assignments to the ancestors, pray rosaries, breathe into words given me in dreams….my faith is verbal, visionary, constant.

Until it wasn’t.

On Christmas Eve I came down with a fever, pretended it was no big deal for a Christmas gathering that was an answer to so many of my heart’s longings but found myself chilled, sweating, and debilitatingly sick before the dishes were done. For nine days the fever got worse until I was finally admitted to the hospital with what would eventually be idenfitifed as a “mysterious” pneumonia (there in my lungs with no respitory symptoms) and a “mysterious” sepsis of unclear etiology. There are more tests and procedures to come and I ask for YOUR prayers—your dead, your saints, your special mothers and guides to help me through all this with ease and healing.

I have never been too sick to pray before but I could barely hold on to my rose beads. Nausea and headaches obliterated my every thought. I reeled through delusional apocalyptic visions, ten thousand years of horrifying genocides and massacres that came unbidden and from which I could not flee. I felt myself getting sicker and sicker. I barely knew where or who I was or where I was headed. I tried to find soul succor but was so weak all my powers of intuition and imagination had vanished.

Unexpectedly, tossing and turning, reeling from antibiotics and antiemetics and anticoagulatns, a Mother Possum bustled into my hospital room and nudged me into her pouch. Smooth and tight, I felt held against her heart. I could hear her snarling, fierce, banishing all those unwanted horrors that had arrived to torment me. She began walking and, step by step, carried me up Mount Guardian, the mountain I have walked almost every day for more than a decade. Touch the earth. See each tree, each fallen branch. This is where the honey fungus blooms. Here is the green moss, here is the mountain laurel that will bloom in June. Step by step she walked me up the body of my Guardian, my mother, when I could not walk. She brought me to the crossroads and we walked the path that leads to Camelot Rd. Across the stream, through the field. I did not ask for her to come. I did not expect her to come but she came.

That night the fever, after two weeks, finally broke.

It is easy for me to pray for others, and I have learned how to pray for myself and call forth that river of joy that when it flows to us flows through us, but during this illness I have discovered what it means to be sustained and buoyed by prayer even when we cannot pray. I felt my friends and family holding me in prayer. I felt the trees and my beloved mountain—with her stones and her salamanders—carrying me. I felt the dead beside me, beneath me, within me, I felt the animals, the mother possum who’s babies, once upon a time, I’d nursed to maturity when she’d been hit by a car. And now she would nurse and mother me.

I can pray again. The words are back. The fever broke and the legions of the dead showed up, name by name, in the night to be at my side. Our Lady of Einseldeln, Our Lady of Le Puy, Our Lady of Rocamadour, Our Lady of this tree outside my hospital window, they all showed up for me, right there, their names on my lips.

But I know, too, because I pray to and with the dead that none of us know the time of the end. It can be too fast and unexpected, too slow and drawn out, so often unpredictable. We will, so many of us, arrive at that moment incapable of prayer…andd yet sustained by all those we have prayed for and with. The night after my fever broke, I dreamt that they were setting up for my funeral and I was furious. “I don’t even put my animals to sleep!” I announced. My father, my tough, fierce, irrascible father, was at my side. “Listen to her everybody. She’s right. This is not her time.” I woke up with tears in my eyes feeling him right beside me, my champion from the other side.

There is more to say, how I dreamt months ago, by name, of the nurse who would simply hold me on the scariest night of all, of the wild synchronicity of the independent IV nurse who got me to the ER…and then turned out to be my hospital caregiver.

But I am not through this ordeal yet by any means. I am astoundingly weak. For someone who is used to overflowing with energy it is a strange experience. I take a bath and I take a nap. I eat lunch and I take a nap. I am mentally fried, and words aren’t flowing like they usually do. I have been advised to quarantine because I cannot risk another infection right now. I’m also still distracted and scared about these procedures that need to happen. And what energy I have is going to wrangling with insurance. UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE NOW! They denied my hospital coverage despite having pneumonia and sepsis. SEPSIS! But apparently this is just the dance, and we appeal and re-appeal….but all this with only about an hour of vertical energy each day. (I’ve got Ruth Nelson on it. She was my father’s secretary, the whole medical building’s only secretary—handling scheduling, insurance, and even babysitting me when my mom was busy…)

Every syllable of every prayer is like a drop of water we summon to us. When we cannot call, we cannot swim, those prayers to all those beings will sustain us, carry us, hold us, guide us. They are holding me even now as I wait inside the mystery of all of this for answers I pray are easy but might not be. I pray they are easy.

The hardest part is feeling worthy of those prayers I have not made happen, to open my heart to receive them, to be mothered by all the mothers, living and dead, to feel held. Is that possum worthy of my love? I am worthy of hers? This is not the question. I pray to the dead to remember how to love, how to feel worthy of love, to see myself with the eyes the dead see me. The dead know we are all worthy, we are all loved, we are all carrying and caring each other.

As a final note, when Clark and I were commissioning the art for Way of the Rose we struggled with how to depict the cosmic multiplicity of The Mothers of All Life. Finally we all settled on the most humble image we could imagine…a mother possum, her young clinging to her back as she waddled along.

[art: Thorneater Comics, aka Will Lytle.]

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Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and the forthcoming Mothers of Magic: Recovering the Love at the Heart of the World. With her husband Clark Strand she is the founder of the feral fellowship The Way of the Rose and the book by the same name. She lives with her family in the Catskill Mountains.

This is a free offering for my substack. I also have a paid substack which includes up-to-the minute offerings from works in progress and a monthly Zoom conversation about collaborating with the ancestors.