Jessica has Moved On 

When I got home from walking in Carkeek today there was a group email from Jessica’s friend saying Jessica died last night at around 6:30. She took the death with dignity drugs and died at home with her sons Isaac and Adrian and close friends with her. The process was peaceful. 

I was somewhat surprised to get this notice because when I spoke with her one week ago today she was planning to start the immunotherapy treatment today. When we spoke I sensed she was going to try it more out of curiosity and obligation than because she really wanted to, so in that sense I was not totally surprised that she decided to take the life-ending drugs instead. I am grateful I was able to have that chat with her last week. There was nothing more I wish I had said, other than telling her one more time how grateful I am to have known her.

I met Jessica when Cedar was 5 and I took him to the Bastyr University student clinic for acupuncture. Jessica was in her last year of school there and was the practitioner assigned to us. I’m pretty sure it was during that first meeting that she said matter of factly that we would become good friends. Indeed we did, although our friendship wasn’t the sort that involved frequent visits or calls. I saw her for treatments, took Cedar for treatments, and when Cedar and her son Adrian were young we exchanged childcare. We also shared holiday meals, went for occasional walks, and got together once in a while to hang out. After she moved to Pt. Townsend (10? 12?) years ago I would stop in to visit anytime I’d go to Pt Townshend. Over the years we also did trades- massage for acupuncture or psychic ‘readings’ for myself or for Cedar. Sometimes I offered her process work sessions. One year we went to Portland together and shared a room during a Process Work conference. That’s when I introduced her to Lisa. At the time Jessica was preparing to move to Pt Townshend and Lisa, who’d lived there for years, was a good resource for her.

Even though Jessica and I didn’t see each other often we did call upon each other for support once in a while. Years ago Jessica was hospitalized for a blood clot in her leg and called to see if I would come sit with her in the hospital and help her advocate for her in dealing with the doctors and nurses who she did not trust to give her the kind of care she wanted. And when she got her cancer diagnosis in the summer she called me because she knew I was someone she could talk with about death and suffering without me getting upset or afraid or pushing my beliefs and biases on her.

And any time I had a health issue i would seek Jessica’s impressions and suggestions for treatment with acupuncture, herbs and/or meditations. I have numerous healthcare providers who I respect and trust to a degree but there is nobody I respected and trusted more for my health care than Jessica. She had a brilliant inquisitive scientific mind and knew a lot about anatomy, physiology, and Chinese medicine, and also was extremely intuitive and sensitive to ‘seeing’ energy and exploring symptoms energetically and was great at offering meditations and visualizations as a way of working with physical issues. I know of nobody who might replace her in that role for me. 

Cedar told me that of all my friends he met while growing up Jessica was the one who he liked the most and learned the most from about health and the Unseen world. She has had a lasting positive impact on him. He is grateful he got to see her one last time a couple months ago. 

Jessica was also an extremely creative artist. Usually she made art for a bigger purpose than simple personal expression. She made sculpture installations in the community, including a couple that she installed anonymously in public places without permission. One was a big metal pig and trough that she cast and put by the street in Fremont. She filled the trough with junk, money, trinkets, fake guns, Barbie dolls and other pop culture items, etc. The pig was positioned eating the junk from the trough, a statement about our over the top consumerism. After that she made a giant angel and stuck it on top of a low building downtown where it looked down at passersby below. And another time she created a giant mural of a multi-ethnic community on a wall downtown. She was also very involved in creating floats for the Solstice parade, and beautiful painted banners of trees that she hung from freeway overpasses. In addition she spent hours studying and researching issues related to forestry practices and numerous times testified at State hearings against the use of toxic chemicals sprayed along state roadsides.

Her house outside of Pt Townshend was totally ‘her’, filled with her artwork and metal and woodworking projects and lots of tree branches that she crafted into structures that were both useful and decorative. Similarly she created lots of artistic projects in the woods on her 15 acres, including a forest bed woven between trees about 12 feet off the ground. 

Before she became an acupuncturist she was a heavy equipment operator on large construction projects, one of very few women in the field. Prior to that she traveled in Central America with a social justice street puppetry group. It was there that she got pregnant (from having sex only once with a Honduran guy) with Adrian. She raised Adrian here in Seattle on her own until marrying a guy who is father to her second son, Isaac.

All of this despite having extremely dysfunctional parents and being violently sexually abused by her father (a OBGYN) when she was an infant and young child. She had numerous surgeries as a child to rectify the damage, and also had many X-rays at that young age which she speculates may have made her vulnerable to the cancer.

Phew! What a life! I am so grateful to have been her friend and will miss her a lot. But if anyone can communicate from the Beyond it is her. I will be listening.

This afternoon I cleaned up and rearranged the stone circle out back and lit a candle in her honor. The message I received from her (or myself) was this- she and I both love this planet and Nature so so much. We aren’t afraid of death or what comes next but she admitted when we spoke that she felt so sad about leaving the trees, sea, birds, etc. Today I had the sense of her smiling, saying, ‘it’s ok over here!’, and that her love for the Earth is as strong as ever but there is no sadness about leaving. It’s much like how when we look back on being a child, or another happy period of our lives we see it and remember it gratefully and fondly but with no need or desire to go back to that phase. I imagine Jessica (and myself some day) feeling deep gratitude for what was but equally grateful for this next phase, now unencumbered by a physical body.