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Themes: Contribution & Community - Stories

Lynne Gordon-Mundel is the author of Shamanchild, and the founder/facilitator of the Three Mountain Foundation in Kamloops, BC, providing a place where people learn to honour their natural development and their intuition. Three Mountain intends to make this place available to people of all walks of life, rich and poor, suffering and successful. For more information, call 250.376.8003, email: smf@origin8.org or visit www.origin8.org

The story that follows is an excerpt from Lynne’s book “Shamanchild”. It is posted here with the author’s permission.

Leaving Deana
by Lynne Gordon-Mundel

For one nursing student, the key to helping others lay in hearing their stories

When I was a nursing student, I was given the opportunity to work for three months at Essondale, a psychiatric hospital near Vancouver. At that time, there were two wards at Essondale that inspired whispered stories among nursing students. One of these was Ward J., reserved for incurably violent psychotic patients. To the young and naïve kids we were, Ward J. brought to mind visions of caged, semi-human creatures, who spend all of their bloodthirsty moments devising plans for mutilating young student nurses. The other more ominous fate that loomed before those of us destined to go to Essondale was to be assigned to the ward for the criminally insane. I was assigned to this — The Locked Ward.

On my first day, the head nurse gave me a key, an ancient thing of heavy metal. I was to keep it in my pocket, attached at all times to a leather strap that was belted around my waist. As I fastened the belt and slipped the key into the pocket of my uniform, I felt an interesting rush of self-importance. Walking into the ward for the first time among the patients, I was surprised; they did not appear insane or criminal, just lifeless, tired and discouraged. Beaten. Once I was familiar with ward routine, I was given a case study for more detailed work. Deana was a young First Nations woman who had been convicted repeatedly for theft, for violent behaviour, and for drawing a knife. Her present conviction was for having used that knife, wounding and threatening the life of a shopkeeper.

We fell into relationship easily. I had expected distrust or outright fear and hostility. Instead, I found curiosity. She seemed to be wondering, “Why is she paying attention to me?” Then, gently, day by day, began a flooding forth of stories of abandonment, disorientation pain, anger and guilt. She spoke tome of lost parents, lost friends, then of feelings of belonging, the warmth, the joy of it, of giving herself into love and being left alone, of trusting her body into relationships and being scorned, of poverty, hunger, and temptation, of giving into temptation and stealing. She told me of bad feelings, of demons inside that didn’t care if they hurt someone. She said she’d had to be locked up ‘because she was so bad.’

I cannot remember what I wrote about Deana in order to get the credits I needed for my training. I’m sure there was a diagnosis, but I don’t remember. What I do remember is that day by day she seemed less a psychiatric patient and more a young woman, like myself, like so many of my friends, with yearnings and unreasonable feelings, uncertainties about finding their way in life, fears and desires about loving and being loved. Sitting with her, this phrase would drift into my thoughts:
If you want to forgive someone, walk a mile in their moccasins…

I saw that there was no essential difference between Deana and myself. Only our situations in life made her appear to be a madwoman and me to be her ministering angel. Yet she saw me as a ministering angel. She saw me also as a friend and companion in the emptiness and seeming futility of her days; so when my weeks of training on the locked ward were over and it was time for me to leave, she was being abandoned again. Walking beside her down the long hall on my last day on the ward, I could feel the panic that she was valiantly trying to control, but I had no remedy for it. There were no tears, but her voice trembled as she kept repeating, “You are coming back.” When we got to the door, she was still saying over and over again: “You will come back.”

Deana had found someone to talk to; she had found relationship with the reality around her. With me, she was no longer insane, and certainly not dangerous. But I had to leave and pursue my life’s direction, so different from hers. She stood, docile, looking into my eyes as I stepped backwards out of the ward. I closed the heavy door between us, and visually, she was gone. I turned the key in the lock and stood, looking at the door, feeling in my ad the hard metal, and placing the key in the pocket of my uniform.

I was 19 years old. Deana only a few years older, and already she was captive while I stood free, holding the key that gave me cultural permission to Deana had found someone to talk to; she had found relationship with the reality around her. With me, she was no longer insane, and certainly not dangerous. But I had to leave and pursue my life’s direction, so different from hers. She stood, docile, looking into my eyes as I stepped backwards out of the ward. I closed the heavy door between us, and visually, she was gone. I turned the key in the lock and stood, looking at the door, feeling in my ad the hard metal, and placing the key in the pocket of my uniform.

I was 19 years old. Deana only a few years older and already she was captive while I stood free, holding the key that gave me cultural permission to exert power over others. I was clad in white, my robes bestowed upon me by those who authorized this power. I had been proud of my uniform, and when I had first walked onto that ward, I had been quite aware of the thrill of carrying that key. The sense of responsibility, and of being put in charge, affirmed me as one who could succeed, one who was intelligent enough to make a place for myself in the world. I thought of myself as a good person, and I felt I had earned my way. Looking at the closed door, still feeling Deana’s presence and our relationship, all of that fell away, layers of illusion that I had needed to get me that far. What was left was a vow, one that determines the direction of my life and work even today. I vowed that I would not forget her, that I would do something with my life that would free, if not her, then others like her. I forgot that vow, yet as is the way of a consecrated and sincere intention of the heart; it lived in the undercurrents of my psyche until the structures for fulfillment of the vow were in place.

Standing outside the door to Essondale’s locked ward, I recognized the illusory nature of culturally bestowed authority. I saw that my uniform, the key, the control, were mine only as long as I remained servant to the cultural order. I held no ultimate power — I could no even release my friend. I had to lock her up though I knew in my heart that what she needed was to be heard, to be recognized. I saw that power and control are time-bound, that only when understanding and compassion pervade our culture as a whole, will those like Deana be free. I saw that we are infants in our recognition of what it is to be human. In one heart-breaking moment that I felt my vow to do what I could with my life to help Deana and others like her to find freedom and peace with themselves, I became servant to a higher order, an order that must include and serve all of our people.

It has been 30 years since I closed the door on Deana. I am no longer working in a traditional hospital, nor am I administering medication, treatment or therapy in a traditional way. Instead, I provide an arena where rage and pain, itself can speak to us all, and in being spoken, can turn to laughter and enlightenment.

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