Rain or Snow…Everybody Needs a Barbara

Moments later I was standing in the slushy snow of the shoulder, staring at my blasted tire, thinking of the spare tire, the tools buried somewhere—but could I do this, get myself going again? I let go a frantic laugh, then spoke to the vapor lights—“ Thanks, Barbara, your belief in me has contributed to me being here right now!”

Almost immediately a car pulled off the road, maybe 30 yards behind me. A beat-up old junker. I hurried back inside, locking my door, watching the slow progression of the car through my rearview mirror. Disquiet had been part of me nine hours earlier, while driving into the hospital parking lot to begin my 3-11 shift in Labor and Delivery. The van wasn’t riding right. But my first patient presented with a prolapsed umbilical cord…thus, an emergency C-section. I told myself that at the end of the shift I’d deal with the van; I prayed: help me get home. Please get me home. A new mantra—Barbara would have been proud. 

I met Barbara in my confusing early 30’s, she in her secure 50’s. She came to a neighborhood party greeting everyone, emanating an intense presence, her blue eyes bringing people out of corners, her full-throated laugh cheering the room. I watched her wave a drink in the air with crooked fingers, move about the room with a slight limp. But it was her smile that broke through conversations, pulling everyone in. I stood and watched as everyone succumbed to her light.

Barbara radiated a charge, and she readily shared her world of elation, her experience with grief. In her late teens, she developed rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease that inflames the joints. This happened when she was falling in love with her work in the fashion world, and her future husband. Three children later, a house in the suburbs, Barbara could hardly walk, bone rubbing on bone. The medical world was there for her–prescriptions, surgeries, 30 stays in the hospital, her family wonderfully present. In time, she made me want to do the same, tell her everything, including my private fears. Barbara became a gift to me.

But no one could live her life, Barbara often alone–with her pain. And maybe she thought of  giving up, until she discovered she was able to will herself to another place–traveling away from the boundaries of her body though meditation, freed from the clutches of pain. Those transforming moments becoming the basis for all that came after–“If I can elude my pain for five seconds while meditating on something wonderful—then I know I can get away from it for five minutes, thirty-five minutes, even five hours.”

Over time Barbara did just that. Her doctors were amazed, couldn’t believe she could walk without pain, take care of her family, travel. Questions…what was really happening–a new drug, a radical remission in the disease? No, what was happening to Barbara was belief, strength, the power of the mind. When I learned about Barbara’s life, things changed in mine. I had two young children and sometimes had to fight for control in my life. Barbara helped me see that I could achieve that control. 

But now in my stalled car, other thoughts…about times and places: a couple stopped, murdered off the expressway; a woman abducted from the local gas station, raped, murdered…and more. Such fears  threatened to lock me inside my home. Thus I had revealed such fears to Barbara; firmly she told me I had to stop these thoughts immediately: I was sending out bad signals; fear glowed around me, my mind was using energy to conjure danger. Just as Barbara used her mental energy to block out pain, I was using mine to bring negatives into my life.

CHANGE

Now in the car, I held fast, my panic and apprehension slowly lifting. I could put the negatives of life in perspective, no longer being afraid to journey into life, take some risks…part of the reason I went back to school, started a new career as a registered nurse, was now working at a tertiary care center in downtown Chicago…and the reason I was at this moment stranded on the Dan Ryan.

Now I was watching a man walk toward me from the beat-up car, those frightening newspaper articles outside my reach. I was a nurse at an inner city hospital. I had met people who lived and worked in the trenches of life. I could keep my head.

He came up and I spoke to him through the car window, immediately mentioning that my husband was on his way. He said he wasn’t there to hurt me, he just wanted to change my tire, make some extra money. I weighed my options. I said thank you, but no. He nodded, walked away, lingered by his car for a few moments and then came back. The snow was heavier now. I ran the window down a little more to talk to this man who was everything I would have wanted to avoid before Barbara.

“I work in Labor and Delivery at Mercy Hospital,” I told him, revealing myself as someone he could trust—I worked in his neighborhood.

“Do you know Nadine?” he asked right away. “She works in dietary.”

And so the conversation moved on, and again he offered to change my tire—it would be done when my husband arrived. Cars kept whizzing past. No one else had stopped. I clicked the lever that opened the back of my van, and this stranger changed my tire. Was Barbara there? Maybe. 

It was a defining moment for me. Subsequently, my children have claimed the world for their own, being sensible and living lives of freedom. Barbara died a year before that anxious snowy night. But as I fought my fear, she was there, showing me that by using common sense, extending trust to a fellow human being, that there are many wonderful ways to GET BACK HOME AGAIN.