In the Spirit of Medicine

The cemetery is far from city lights and is surrounded by tall pine trees. We are close to the same latitude as Finland and my grandmother would have seen the same winter constellations as a little girl in her homeland. We walk carefully so we don’t disturb the snow and we reverently place the candles on each grave.

In the Spirit of Medicine features the essays of Dr. Arne Vainio, an enrolled member of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe and a family practice doctor on the Fond Du Lac reservation in Cloquet. His essays on life, work, medicine and spirit are published in "News From Indian Country," and you can find the link to this story here.

She was looking down into one of the barrels and once she started talking, the words came out and it was like she couldn’t stop. She was sobbing and dipping a watering can into the barrel and she told me about all the things that were going on around the time of my father’s death and all the fears she had for him and how she never talked with him about suicide because she was afraid she would plant that idea in his head and how she blamed herself for his death. We hugged for a long time after

Money was short and you ran out of heating fuel in the middle of winter. I expect those were some bad days. You didn’t tell me about that until after it was passed. A desperate someone looking for something to sell kicked your door in when you weren’t home and made your crumbling house lose some of that precious heat. Visiting your mother in the nursing home must have been warm. Your old television couldn’t have brought much money. Your car got repossessed.

Do the leaves remember those from last year? In the heat of summer, the bright green shimmers of forever. Then the fall. The bitter cold. They show their true colors, these elders. They remind us of the passage into the next life. The commonest of them persist And they speak to me They tell me I am one of them.

I was almost to my hotel and a man was kneeling on the sidewalk pulling a trumpet out of its case. I was well past him and was about to cross the street when he started to play. Jazz? Blues?

You told me you didn’t feel you contributed anything to anyone anymore. My father, your brother, died when I was four years old. I have maybe three or four actual memories of him and some memories that are from stories someone else told me and I took them as my own memories. I didn’t get to see his smile except in old photographs. I didn’t get to hear his voice and I never had the chance to hear the advice he would have passed to me from his parents when he thought I needed to hear those things.

Skip Sandman is one of our spiritual leaders and he spoke for the pipe.

I have no doubt this sewing machine made face masks over a hundred years ago and my grandmother would have made masks. There was a huge second wave of that pandemic and entire families died in a single day. They didn’t have access to ventilators back then and this machine would have been a life saver. My grandmother saved lives as a young woman and I never knew a thing about it.

George has always told me seeing a doctor dancing would be healing for everyone and I discovered that meant me as much as anyone else.