~For Kathy
Dew Drop
From where she sat in
the mothers chair in the corner of the infant critical care unit, Tara Yeshe watched as the doctor and the nurses
worked over the basinet holding her newborn daughter. 20% was the meager number
they had offered. One in five chances of living out the night. And this was the
critical hour. By the end of it, her daughter’s organs would begin to fail, or
they would not, and her chance at life would grow better.
Tara closed her eyes, trying to calm herself. She had never
been a dramatic person. Not one who
screamed and wailed when things went wrong. She was a Buddhist, after all,
admired for her patience, her kind smile, her clear-minded unflappability.
Buddhist training had always come easy to her. Tonight, so far, it had failed
her utterly.
Tara Yeshe had never known a person could be so overwhelmed
by emotion. And such physical emotion.
Tremors moved across her shoulders and down her arms to the ends of her
fingers. Quivers of fear spasmed across her stomach, as if she traversed a tiny
wire over an abyss. Her heart felt as if it had expanded to fill her entire
chest cavity and the pressure of unshed tears came in waves that tightened her
throat so completely she had lost the ability of speech. All this for a tiny
pinched creature she had not yet even met properly, her daughter.
She bit her lip to hold back feeling and looked out the
window of the nursery for some focus to hold her spinning mind. It was a cold
night outside, faint stars visible through the bare branches of a shrub outside
the glass. Tara fixed her mind on a drop of dew forming on a twig, only inches
from her face. How beautiful it was, seeming crystalline, luminous. Remembering
her training in the wisdom of emptiness, Tara forced herself to examine it minutely,
“A star, a visual aberration, a flame of a lamp, an illusion, a dewdrop, a
water bubble,a dream, a flash of lighting, a cloud, see conditioned things as
such.”
And as her attention steadied, she could indeed see the fullness of it, the
exquisitely fine skin of surface tension that kept the shape, even against the
tiny jostles of the night breeze. The drop was growing, she knew, molecules of
water in air gathering there, adhering, creating shape, form, presence. And her
watching mind called it “dew drop” and witnessed the beauty created by the
reflection of the lights in the nursery within its surface, her own face,
watching. It seemed imbued with mystery, pregnant with possibility, alive.
Could she
ever see her own daughter that way? She knew she was experiencing attachment fully for the first time in
her life. Industrial strength mother’s love. A baby she had not yet even held
had filled her inner horizons from end to end, limitlessly precious. If her
daughter died, it seemed impossible that Tara herself would be able to take
another breath, think another thought, stand or move or be anything ever again.
She tried hard to imagine her baby’s existence as that same
drop of dew. That clear questing young mind, gathering sensation, impression,
memory with each hour. Her body, so tiny, so infinitely charming in its
tininess, would expand, molecules without becoming molecules within, year by
year. Bones would lengthen, muscles
would expand, beauty and form would emerge and that unique mind-woven presence,
her “self” would come clearer with each day. Until her daughter was a woman,
radiant, sure, fully alive. And then, one day, her daughter’s life would end.
All that presence would vanish. The dew drop would fall, and water would return
to air, and then, on another night, in this place or that, would find form
again in a different drop of dew or rain.
And her daughter’s life? Outside the window, the dew drop did fall at
last, splashing on the sill.
Tara bent double, holding back her pain. “Not tonight,” she
found herself praying. “Oh please not tonight. Let her live.” Around the
basinet, some procedure had come to an end. The doctor had withdrawn to a
corner to dictate some notes. The nurse was swaddling the baby in a blanket, lifting her.
And then she was in Tara’s lap, the soft warm weight of her
baby daughter. “Doctor says she’s doing better,” the nurse murmured. Ever so
tenderly, Tara cradled the small head between her two hands. Delicate as new rain,
she touched her forehead to her daughter’s, and let loose the damned river of her
love.
