Dreamtime by Jane Lillian Vance
Dreamtime. Completed painting, 5′ x 4′, oil on canvas.
For days, his sister dragged Holton.
She had heard that the clinic was near, so she struggled to get her brother to these people who came year after year with medicine and clothing and soap and rice and salt.
Her brother was the last man standing in her family. He was the last hope to chop the earth, to make the maize and yam and cassava grow. Everyone else was dead.
All the people who might have helped, just like her brother, they too had withered with the slim disease. No one could tell if their wasting came from tuberculosis, HIV, malaria, starvation, osteosarcomas from the copper mine’s giant slag tails. Or had that other terrible disease from the faraway Ebola River found a carrier to Zambia?
Sister had no help, but from the deep bush, she carried her brother to clinic.
Orphan Medical Network International sets up a medical mission clinic every summer in the deep bush of Zambia. Doctors and nurses from the best hospitals in America gather under the leadership of Karen Remine, to deliver medical and humanitarian aid to the most destitute people on the continent.
OMNI was present on July 12, 2013, when Sister arrived. Holton was carried into a concrete room, which served as Baluba region’s school. Holton was conscious enough to see that he had reached help. With assistance, he accepted a sip of clean water. He felt the blanket situated to make his head comfortable as he was laid on the floor so that doctors could begin to help him.
Karen Remine herself had just put her stethoscope to Holton’s emaciated chest. He had reached her, not five minutes before. And then Karen witnessed, Karen accompanied, with her hands blessing Holton over his heart, suddenly, irrevocably, his last breath.
That moment is where Dreamtime begins.
Holton’s last neurons fire. From his hand, and from his heart, the last vital chemistry explodes outward into the great stream of disembodied consciousness.
Because this river of afterlife is beyond time, you see the ghost of a stegosaur, who can scent the new presence of Holton’s energy. Because this flow is beyond space, you can see the satellite communing with the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere.
You can see women, pounding maize, carrying their starchy cassava, canoeing toward food, always carrying their hungry babies.
You can see the face of a child, the skull of a gentle gorilla murdered in expeditionary times, the pleading hands of exterminated moles, the clear ghosts of lost frolicking children, allegorical masks, others suffering and trying to find help: old memories and perhaps guides, encouraging Holton’s consciousness.
A Zambian Christ overhears Dr. Henry and Derrick convey the sorrowful news to Holton’s sister. Christ himself has a genuine malachite halo, the green stone mined with the copper, and my student Morgan Harrington’s cremains texture his halo, because part of her legacy is the Morgan Harrington Educational Wing at OMNI Village in Zambia.
Christ himself suffers with his people. His ornate ampersand of a necklace is the Ebola virus. The mandala he carries over his heart is the HIV virus. He is ribby from tubercular wasting on top of hunger. He has terrible bone cancer from the poor mining conditions in this country. And the malarial mosquitoes are drinking from his veins. This Christ carries every disease and sorrow that his people carry, and is there, with them.
So is Karen, the Mary of this pietà . She is fully present for Holton’s passage, and because the attention of her wisdom and compassion attend Holton, a part of him arrives in her. Now, among the thousand other places beyond physical place he goes, he goes with Karen.
And as the vortex of his return to her completes inside Karen, inside her heart and memory, the spiral cactus blooms. The whirl of life, and death, and rebirth, flowers delicately.
Just beside this glorious connection and transfer of love, an insouciant rooster fixes on a cell phone, whose minutes have run out. As brilliant as its technological reach is, the phone and its satellite are not the stars of this relay. Holton’s sister, Holton, Karen, and the work of Orphan Medical Network International are.
Compassionate people are. People who want no part of judgment, no acquiescence to monsters, no tolerance of viral or sexual predators.
People like you, who read stories, who feel anguish and inspiration, and who allow Holton into your heart.
Jane Lillian Vance
Blacksburg, Virginia
Here is the tribute I penned, last summer, on the rough concrete above the spot where Holton died.
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