The Nurse





The Nurse

While I lived in Edinburgh, Scotland from 1985-1986, I learned much about its people and made many friends who, like most, worked 9-5 every day.  Although I traveled extensively throughout Scotland, England, Wales, and Ireland, I found myself with plenty of time left to pursue hobbies, including charcoal sketching.  Hence, The Nurse, I fondly call her, was born. 

When I returned to the United States, my sketches, including The Nurse, were buried away.  Some time later I met a woman who believed in psychics. She's not the first acquaintance or friend who believes; quite a number take their professional horoscopes quite seriously.  I, on the other hand, was skeptical although I kept an opened mind.  I've heard numerous proclamations made by my peers that their professional, love, and everyday lives were directly affected by psychics or horoscopes.  I'd listen without judgment, but still, somewhat skeptically.

As I mentioned earlier, soon after my return to the United States a friend met with a psychic every week.  During our occasional lunch, she told me that I came up as a new friend, and asked the psychic what it meant.  She truly believed that every person who entered her life had a reason for doing so.   

This was the result of my introduction; not physically, but spiritually, to her psychic.  That during WWII, I had been a nurse living in London, and killed during a Nazi air raid.  "Wasn't it obvious?" she'd remark.

1)  That I would be reborn in Germany due to the union of a man, my father, who served in the British army while stationed in Germany and a woman, my mother, who was German. Really? 

2)  Then there was my burning desire to become a doctor, a Pediatrition to be exact, from the first moment I held my baby sister, Janie. Obviously, this never came to pass.  To the psychic, it was part of a master plan in that I secretly desired to be a doctor while I was a nurse during WWII but was cut short due to my death.  Okay.

All quite fascinating and without the knowledge of the existence of The Nurse.  But to quote a line from the film, The Big Chill, that "rationalizations are more important than sex..." seems plausible in situations such as these.  Because without them, how do we try to understand the incronguous, the unexplainable, the coincidences, everything?  Here, I agree with Iris Dement, "Let the mystery be..."

Yet, over 25 years later, I sometimes wonder, why, out of the blue, did I sketch a portrait of a woman I've dubbed, The Nurse?  Perhaps, this is a case for John Edward, after all.