The Most Magical Story I May Ever Tell

It started with a pumpkin

A year ago, I was experiencing so much neuropathy from chemotherapy I couldn’t feel my face, hands, or feet. I wanted to discontinue treatment until a friend told me about an acupuncturist named Jessika who had considerable experience treating cancer patients. Because I hadn’t had a ton of noticeable response to acupuncture in the past, and because I’d had some really dynamic panic attacks as a human pin cushion, I was hesitant. But after my first appointment, the neuropathy completely vanished. I could hardly believe it. “Like magic!” I told Jessika, during my next session.

I think it was on that same day that I was casually talking about mortality (as I tend to do) when Jessika told me a little bit about a close friend of hers’ who had died of ALS.  The immense love and awe in Jessika’s eyes as she spoke about the fierce resilience of her friend’s spirit made me wish that, I too, had known her. She sounded like a human lighthouse. Someone whose presence guides you to your most buoyant self. Something Jessika said about the very end of her friend’s life has never left me: “...she was already seeing things that we could not see.” 

What was she seeing? I wondered. What magic was dancing in front of her eyes?

It had been almost a year since that conversation, when I found myself having a really unusual morning-meditation. After taking my first conscious breath, I suddenly felt that someone was there with me, and though I had never met her and didn’t know her name, I knew that someone was Jessika’s friend. 

“Hello, Jessika’s friend!” I said out loud, laughing, while the most joyful energy filled me. For the next hour she sparkled through the room. Playfully pointing out whenever my seriousness was in my way. She wove wonder into my pulse while teaching me how to inhale and exhale the stars. 

Most of my friends would say I’m pretty far out in what I’m open to believing.  But I’m not so far out that I wasn’t considering the possibility that my visitor was a figment of my imagination. I was simply having such a wonderful time, I didn’t care what was “real” or not. Her presence stayed with me for the rest of that beautiful day. In the evening, when I was doing Qigong in my driveway (a healing practice Jessika had taught me), she told me to take my shoes off and do Qigong in the grass instead. A short while later she guided me to the magical pumpkin patch in my yard. I call it a magical pumpkin patch because, while we grow many veggies at our house, we have never grown pumpkins. And yet—this year, a whole pumpkin patch burst through the earth on the outskirts of our garden beds.

“Give that big pumpkin to Jessika,” she said. 

When I told Meg I intended to lug a pumpkin into my acupuncturist's office and give it to her as a gift, we both agreed it would be…awkward. But Meg knows I’m notorious (or renowned) for making awkward life choices. So much so that my friend Julia once made me a shirt that reads, “Awkward is Awesome.”

I wished I was wearing the shirt as I was lugging the pumpkin up the stairs to Jessika’s office, along with a note thanking her for being such a nourishing part of my health journey and a recipe for baking a stew inside of a pumpkin. (If you’ve never baked a stew inside of a pumpkin, you must!) I thought the note and recipe would make the pumpkin a “reasonable” gift. What didn’t feel reasonable was telling my acupuncturist that the friend who she had only briefly mentioned to me a year ago had told me to give her the pumpkin. I had zero intentions of ever doing so. 

Until…

“This is a magical pumpkin,” I said to Jessika, as I handed her the enchanted orange squash.

Jessika paused, surprised, then said, “Oh, I KNOW it’s a magical pumpkin!” 

“You do?” I asked.

We sat down and Jessika said,  “Have I ever told you about my friend Teri who had ALS?”

As soon as she spoke those words I couldn’t feel my face, hands or feet. But this time it wasn’t neuropathy. It was the electricity of being wowed by the universe in a way I never had.

Jessika began to tell me about the last day of her friend’s life. She wanted to bring her a gift. “But what do you give someone who is dying?” On her way to Teri’s house, Jessika stopped at the market and bought a giant pumpkin. When she arrived, Teri was so lit up by the gift, she insisted on holding the giant pumpkin on her lap. And in her final moments, Teri communicated to Jessika that she would support her and her acupuncture patients from the next realm.

At that point I couldn’t hold back my tears. Or my words. I was trembling as I shared the story about the time I’d spent with her friend, and how, at the end of that day, she’d told me to give Jessika the pumpkin. The conversation was one of the most enchanting experiences of my life.

“I’ve always known she was helping me,” Jessika said, “but this is the first time anyone’s walked in here with a pumpkin!”

…

During one of my next appointments, Jessika gave me a gift. A book titled “No Pressure, No Diamonds,” which Teri had written at the end of her life using EyeGaze technology. I had no idea she was a writer. And not just a writer, but a writer who had written three hundred and thirty two pages with only her eyes. In tears, I called my partner Meg to tell her about the book on my drive home from acupuncture and she said,  “Baby, we have that book. Someone mailed it to you after you were diagnosed with cancer. Do you remember who?” Because chemo has taken a toll on my memory, I didn’t remember who. But what I did remember was thinking, “When I’m reading books again (I’ve only listened to audiobooks these past years) I’m going to read this. Then I held the book to my heart and found a home for the book on my bookshelf.

Sweet community, it took me just three days to read, ‘No Pressure, No Diamonds’ and it has changed my life in ways I don’t yet have words for. It is raw, unflinchingly honest, and powerfully beautiful. Before reading it, I had not been in touch with much of the loneliness I have felt through my own diagnosis. After reading it, I stopped feeling alone. Though I know many of you are navigating illnesses yourself, you need not be facing a health challenge to be altered by the book’s wisdom, humor, and insight. Please go get it. And, if you are able, please consider donating to “I Am ALS” a nonprofit that Teri loved that provides resources and support to people with ALS, their caregivers, and loved ones.

Thank you for being here, pumpkins. 

Love, Love, and More Love, 
Andrea