The Tree of Life: Bahrain

The trip to Bahrain on May Day was perfect! I could not have planned it any better, even though I was not consciously aware of the dates and their significance at first.

Where to start? I have kept relatively silent on the most traumatic experience in my life, muttering the odd bit of information under my breath to those in the close circle while under the influence, asking why we left Fiji.

One can never really quite explain an experience such as this, and one only hopes that no parent will ever have to go through it.

Thank goodness I have walked through fire literally and figuratively many times in my life, for I think those moments prepared me for the stillness that would fall from above and beyond May 1st 2009.

It all started back in Fiji November 2008. We arrived in Nadi set to live in paradise for the next 3 years. Matt was flying; I was crowned the Branding and Product Consultant for Air Pacific, Fiji’s International Airline. It was our dream, both of us working and traveling with our children. This was to be my big career launch into the great reaches beyond.

Matt shortly went off to fly a Search and Rescue contract in the Solomon Islands mid April. Both of my children have a tendency to get sick when Matt leaves home. They react physically to their Father leaving, which so many parents report. I have grown used to it.

Felyx is a very gifted child. Not in the sense that so many other parents brag about. This child is a brilliant manifester, lives completely in the now, and could teach the author’s of the Secret a thing of two.

Our nights were like any other, cuddling in bed and telling stories from our imaginations, and visualizing the things we wanted to attract into our lives. After all, that was how we landed in Fiji to begin with.

P.S. If you do not have a visualization board, I suggest you make one!

Anyway Felyx’s story built daily as dad was away, and climaxed May 1st 2009.

It began with, I am gonna get really sick, so sick, that Dad will have to come home to get me, and we will fly across the Sea to Sydney in an air ambulance, and I will get to eat all the ice cream I want and play with all the toys I want without sharing.

As the story would build and evolve daily, I would redirect him drawing his attention to the fact that what we focus on we draw to ourselves, it is the law of attraction. However, the story never really changed to my satisfaction.

He woke the morning of May 1st, with a very high fever, one that would not break with Panadol. I knew it was bacterial and very aggressive, and became a bit nervous thinking about the third world Fiji healthcare system. I immediately put the worse case scenario out of my scope of reality, and found solace in the fact that we lived next to a Gynecologist Dr.Naidu who we trusted implicitly. He was no pediatrician, but was the best Doctor in Fiji and was a close friend.

I loved the fact that occasionally as I would have my morning coffee, I would see heaving pregnant bellies slip into his office, and come out after their labours with a bundle of joy, sometimes two. Birthing with a view of Wailoaloa beach, amazing!

I spoke with Doc and we agreed the best course of action was the strongest antibiotic Cipiro to nip anything in the bud.

After two doses, no change, and a listless child, it all went down hill in a matter of moments.

I went to get Felyx water, and as I stood at the sink chills went through my body. I ran to his bedside without questioning, to find him blue, not breathing, and no heart rate.

There was no panic, only instructions. “Kristine take Tyl and get Doc, tell him we need the oxygen tanks in his office, Felyx is VSA.”

With super human Mom strength, I gathered him up supported down his spine by the length of my left arm. I began breathing, compressions with my right hand, while walking calmly to the office watching from above, never losing time.

To Doc’s examination table we descended, oxygen mask in place, compressions pumping. I felt him slipping; he passed through my body like a breeze, and hung around my head. I was aware of having many levels of conversations with him. Before I knew it Doc grabbed my arm tears steaming down his face, saying “Angela it is been longer than ten minutes.” “He is gone.”

I did not speak, I merely reached down looking at my feces covered skirt, to push his prolapsed anus back into his body and asked in a calm clear voice aloud to that great being beyond, “What must I do.” I heard a resounding echo of many voices saying, “Let go”. I knew in this moment that child was not mine to have, but only came through me to bless this world. I had to let go. I had to find the strength to acknowledge him and love him to a place far beyond my comprehension.

It took all of the trust and if you can believe it, joy to step into that moment in that place and time which I was clinging to deeply whole heartedly in order to let him go.

As I let go, I looked at his grey lifeless face for what seemed like an eternity. I visualized him running on the beach chasing crabs shrieking with laughter and joy. From that special place on Natadola Beach, I found the courage, trust, and joy to release the final traces of his breath that washed through my lungs then, the same force that had passed through me once upon his birth. That exhilarating exasperated cry reverberated out of my whole body shuddering, and then miraculously I felt him fall back passing down through me, my uterus, filling into his own body once more.

In a jolt he sat up proclaiming, “I’m still here”. He did not speak again for five days, except to ask for Dad and to listen to Pink Floyd’s Division Bell album, which was my private ipod escape, that he knew nothing of prior to his departure above. It took five days for Matt to get back to us, with the International Medivac Service in tow, which was scheduled to take him to Auckland NZ. It however was inadvertently diverted to Sydney Australia due to weather conditions.

Those five days in Lautoka Hospital were the longest toughest of my life. They suspected bacterial meningitis, but did not have the blood testing capability to diagnose him, and a spinal tap was out of the question initially with his fevered delirious state upon arrival. Once he settled, I would not allow them to puncture his spinal column to withdrawal fluid. With his ant infested bed, and rusty tub for bathing there was no way I would allow a direct entry for further bacteria to take hold into his little body.

Once Felyx was airlifted to Sydney, he spent a further four weeks in isolation with all the ice cream he could eat, and all the toys he wanted to play with without sharing. That is the one great thing about an infectious disease isolation ward for a little kid!

It was never determined that he had full-blown meningitis. However, after his full recovery, we checked our “this will never happen to our healthy kids attitude” at the Nadi International airport, and boarded the plane home for Canada, leaving paradise and grand career deigns behind.

Exactly a year later, with the post traumatic stress put behind me, we ventured overseas again and on exactly May 1st 2010 found ourselves at the Tree of Life in Bahrain.

Felyx climbed the tree and sat firmly supported in her branches with a huge smile across his face. As I held his hand he asked, “Have you figured it out yet?”

I replied “what?” Although I knew full well to what he was referring to in that moment, as I swayed with the tree in complete gratitude remembering this exact day a year ago.

He asked, “Have you figured out why I left?” “I left so I would know that you truly wanted me, I needed to know.”

I asked, “Do you know now?” He said, “YES!”

I Held him tight and whispered into his hair, “I have always wanted you and loved you. I just needed to figure out HOW to love you.” “Now I know, to let go!”

As we walked back to the car from the tree of life in Bahrain, he said, “I saw the world through the layers of the tree, and she hangs by a thread!”

And the Division Bell rang and echoed out through the High Hopes of my child.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_Life,_Bahrain