Rachel Stedman
I began working in healthcare when I was a student, before graduating into physiotherapy and, more latterly, working for ACC, Ministry of Health and a number of District Health Boards. That’s thirty-something years in total. Scary, how time flies.
I also write fiction. So, given my working life has been in healthcare, I suppose it was inevitable that at least one book would be set in the world of a hospital. After all: write what you know. This is the story of that book, and how I discovered that, despite a lifetime in the sector, I knew next to nothing about healthcare.
In 2002 my youngest daughter, Rebecca, died of a rare appendix cancer at the age of 23. For a whole year afterwards I couldn’t say her name and the word ‘died’ in the same breath. Though I am a writer, I lost not only the capacity to articulate my feelings, but also the capacity to write. I stopped dreaming. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to be inside my skin. The silence of my own home, the beauty of my garden, the breath of my animals, the quiet paddocks and the river walks provided no refuge. They were all empty spaces that reverberated with Rebecca’s absence. This new territory was so bleached of colour, so arid and alien, so lacking in anything recognisable that I had no language to negotiate my way through it. And I could form no response to comments such as “Gosh, you’re coping so well.”
Sustained engagements and entanglements with the activities of massage therapy, counselling, arts therapy and teaching have taught me a lot about the potency of presence in the phenomena of healing, learning, creativity and renewal. There’s a particular quality of presence – both of a person and a process of encounter – that makes a difference. Such a presence, in my experience, is a mediation of a number of influences and practices, one of them being attentive curiosity. Attentive curiosity could be considered a methodology of presence.
