Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

A few weeks later, on February 4, 1996, he suffered a stroke. His
grandson, Angel, called us from the Loma Luz Hospital in Santa Elena.
Greg and I went immediately. In the hallway outside Don Elijio’s room we
met a sober-faced doctor who shook his head and said, “Your friend is brain
dead. There is nothing we can do for him. Take him home. Let him die in
his own bed.”
Hospital staff disconnected his tubes and helped us put him in the back
seat of our truck. Down the San Antonio dirt road we bumped and bounced
to deliver his still-breathing physical body to his family. I held him close to
keep him from falling off my lap, cradling his head, crying all the while.
Angel, who had left the hospital to prepare for Don Elijio’s return, Angel’s
wife, and several of their eleven children met us at the gate to his house.
Together, we carried Don Elijio inside and placed him in a little twin bed
dressed in clean, sweet-smelling linens. Immediately, his closest friends and
relatives began to arrive to pay their last respects. I asked to have a few
minutes alone with him during which I held his frail wrists and whispered
nine times the prayers that he had taught me. I asked the Nine Maya Spirits
and God to guide him, to protect him, and to illumine the lamp of his heart.
By the time I was done, a crowd had gathered and we left him with his
family and neighbors. A blazing orange and dark purple sunset streaked the
western sky, reminding me of the hundreds of sunsets I had watched as I sat
on Don Elijio’s doorstep chopping the plants that were his peoples’
medicine.
Greg said, “Rose, it doesn’t make sense to go all the way home. He
doesn’t have long. Let’s go up the road to the Mountain Equestrian Trails.
Maybe Jim and Marguerite have a room for us. We can come back first
thing in the morning.” And so the moonlight played hide-and-seek with the
Maya Mountains as we drove into the pine forests above the jungle in the
growing darkness. We shared a quiet dinner with our friends then slept
fitfully. I was awake from 3:00 A.M. until dawn. No sooner had I fallen
asleep than Greg woke me, at 6:10 A.M. He said, “Rose, Don Elijio has
passed. I had the most wonderful dream.” I laid my head on his chest and
listened to his dream.
“I looked down on the floor next to the bed where we slept,” he
recounted. “There was old, infirm Don Elijio gasping for breath. He took
one long breath, then one short, another long, and finally his last gasp. He
was dead on the floor. In a moment, he rose up from the floor a young man.