Five years of her life didn't happen.
Only, it did. Every minute of it.
And if that sounds confusing, imagine how it felt to be Elizabeth Wesley, the woman whose life was lost for all those years.
Lost, somewhere. No one really knows.
Then, somehow, as mysteriously as it was lost, it was found. And she began to live again.
Her story begins with her last memory, seven years ago.
Elizabeth, 72, had recently retired from her career as a nurse. She remembers driving down the street and several times, bumping into the curb. Her tire blew. She pulled into a vacant lot and a man stopped to help her.
And that's where her memory ends.
The next few years have been filled by stories told to her. She ended up at the St. Catharines General Hospital, and eventually returned to the apartment where she lived alone with her two little Schnauzers.
Only, odd things started to happen. Her daughter, Heidi Avella, a nurse at McMaster Medical Centre, puts it like this: "She was disintegrating in front of my eyes."
She started chain smoking. Heidi noticed burn holes in her clothing, chairs and carpet. There was afire on the stove. She was losing weight. She fell a few times outside. And there was a debilitating pain in the back of her neck.
Doctors at St. Joseph's Hospital in Hamilton looked at her and offered a diagnosis: Pick's Disease, a rare, degenerative disease that destroys nerve cells in the brain. She was midway through the seven-year life expectancy.
"This year, would be the year of her death," says Heidi.
Heidi took time off work and made funeral arrangements. "I buried my mom," she says.
The woman in her mother's body was no longer her mother. Her hands shook so much she couldn't hold a knife. She drooled. And like a caged animal, she tried many times to escape the hospital. "She had a blank, empty look in her eyes," says Heidi.
And the woman who "would save a spider because it was somebody's mother," became belligerent.
Eventually, she ended up at Albright Manor in Beamsville in a locked unit.
She needed help with everything. Brushing her teeth. Getting dressed.
There were times when she'd do odd things like stand inside a dark closet for hours at a time.
She remembers none of this.
And then one day, something happened that she does remember. There was a man on her unit who screamed a lot. She hit him on the head with a book.
After that, little by little, she came out of the fog.
"It just started to unfold," she says.
Eventually, in September 2008, she was well enough to be moved into a more independent area at Albright.
And then, something equally strange happened. She developed a passion for poetry and watercolour painting.
"It blossomed," she says. In just over a year, she wrote 200 or so poems. They all rhyme, because that's the way she likes poetry.
Some are about subjects she's read. Some, her own experiences. She recently compiled them into a book, Polished Stones (Author House, $14.95).
"It unfolds as you write it," she says. "Sometimes it just flows out of you. Other times you have to think about it and play with it."
Elizabeth pauses, closes her eyes and begins to recite a phrase from one of her poems. Tender Moments.
Come lie with me infields of sweet clover,
Where honey bees fly and the scent hovers over;
Where all we feel is always new,
And minutes are plenty but the hours are few.
Elizabeth once lived on a farm.
She had goats whose milk she turned into yogurt. Three beef cattle. A couple chickens. And a white Appaloosa horse with black spots. "She rode like the wind," she says.
She canned and froze produce from the garden. And had her two children pick and stem elderberries, which she turned into pies for the winter.
For many years, she worked as a registered practical nurse at the Welland hospital, then at nursing homes in Niagara.
Poetry and art became part of her healing.
"It gives me a way to express my inner self in a way I don't normally do," she says.
"I love what I see," she says. "I get an idea in my head, how I'd like to translate that onto paper.
"I suppose it's the same with poetry. You get a feeling about something and you want to translate it in your own way because it means something to you."
Painting came at about the same time as poetry. She's never had a lesson. Never painted before those lost five years.
"Once in awhile, something turns out that I feel good about," she says, laughing.
"It gives me a sense of having some kind of control over a medium that can be challenging.
"It was like entering a new world. One that I hadn't experienced before."
Her small room is like a gallery of her work. Two herons dancing in the snow. A rose. Two roosters.
"Watercolour is so fluid," she says. "The colour swims in its own direction."
And in a way, so does Elizabeth. She is a different person now. She can't drive. And she sometimes feels overwhelmed in a crowd of people. She went to Walmart once with a friend and temporarily lost sight of her. "I felt totally alone in a sea of people," she says.
Doctors have no explanation. Her family doesn't believe she has Pick's Disease.
Heidi uses words like confusing, inspirational, and a miracle. "I'm grateful to have my mother back," she says.
Elizabeth doesn't ask why. She's just happy to be back and her faith is stronger for it. On the back cover of her book, she offers this: I was placed in an institution and heard stories of who I had become. Some were funny and some were sad but all were about someone I never knew.
It finally ended and I started to live again. These poems are the celebration of an awakening ...
Time has always intrigued her. Even more now.
"It's so illusive," she says. "Here we are in spring and I know it will be fall and then it will be all gone and we'll face another long, cold winter.
"Time never stands still.
"It's always moving. It's like it has a life of its own."
* * *
For more information on Elizabeth Wesley's book of poetry, Polished Stones, visit www.authorhouse.com.
cclock@stcatharinesstandard.ca
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Tender Moments
All of the tender moments we shared,
When you held my hand and told me you cared;
Bring to each day a new fascination,
With lips to kiss, a heart filled with elation.
Come lie with me infields of sweet clover,
Where honey bees fly and the scent hovers over;
Where all we feel is always new, And minutes are plenty but the hours are few.
Let me hold you close and look in your eyes,
And speak all the words my heart denies;
For when I hold you near I can feel my heart,
Beating each moment till we have to part.
And as we walk our ways into a setting sun,
The parting of ways will merge into one.
-- from Polished Stones, by Elizabeth Wesley