The Bs

about meaning

I am weary of looking for meaning - it’s a brutal and exhausting battle when your heart is tired. But there have been so many coincidences in these past years since cancer has entered my life. Easy coincidences. They just show up, no fighting, no searching.

When I was 5 years old, my father took me to Disney World in Florida and when we returned home to Minnesota, there was an impeccably groomed Shih Tzu waiting for me. My mother had named her Hallelujah, and ‘Hallie’ was my childhood playmate and scapegoat.

One weekend after my stage 3 cancer diagnosis turned to stage 4 and I was existing in a haze of extreme fear and resolute defiance, my sister picked me up to visit my parents on the Iron Range. Just that morning I had been working out in the gym and listening to ‘Sacred Medicine,’ a book written by physician Lissa Rankin. The chapter focused on healing sites around the world, and I was particularly drawn to Lourdes in France, where Bernadette Soubirous claimed to have visions of a Marian apparition in 1858. As we drove into the driveway of the cabin turned home that I knew and loved so well, my sister took on a tone I remember from my childhood: ‘let’s see if there is a surprise!’ I felt like a kid, but my family intuited I needed care and love of that kind and I accepted. My parents had gone to the local humane society, and the only available small dog was a neglected and suffering Shih Tzu named… Bernadette. To find a dog named Bernadette on the Iron Range of Minnesota seems laughable, much more suited to the south of France. My parents had adopted Bernadette and she was overweight with thin and patchy hair, malnourished, with skin lesions and eczema. Devoid of personality, her eyes were nearly glued shut.

“We are taking care of her just like we took care of you.”

My parents nursed her back to health, and she became alert and cuddly and gluttonous, but also sensitive like me, clearly struggling to feel safe in the world. She was a shadow always wanting to crawl back into the daylight.

Before my cancer diagnosis in late summer 2023, I booked a workshop at a residency space in Southern France for August 2024. For many years I have been interested in the modality of field recording as a method of bringing us closer to our environs, to slow our minds through attentive listening, as reconnection to the land. The workshop was led by an artist whose work I have admired, and I was really looking forward to it. After my diagnosis I was unsure if I would be able to make the trip, but thankfully I felt well enough to take part. And the residency was just a few hours drive from Lourdes - the location of the visions of Saint Bernadette. After the residency, I made the pilgrimage to this important Catholic site.

Bernadette the human was just a teenager when she saw visions of a woman in the grotto at Lourdes. The story goes that the dirty water in the grotto turned clear after her visions, and people flock in pilgrimage or tourism to collect this spring water, this holy water, this promise. A massive and castle-like church with three tiered sanctuaries was built on top of the grotto, but Bernadette herself did not agree with the response, retreating to a convent where she lived until her early death, having struggled with health issues the entirety of her life. Bernadette stated the water itself has no power: the power is in prayer. I grew up in the Catholic church, mass two days a week, stations of the cross, nuns as teachers. But I am not interested in dogma - I am interested in through lines, aspects of human existence that overlap various dogmas. These I find to be the most secure: tried and true over the course of human history, developing independently at various times in various places around the globe: sculpted by days, months, years, centuries of turmoil and disease and hope and love - the way the great lakes will tumble a stone.

Prayer. Meditation. Cultural connotation. Shall we say attention? Focused thought? Intention?

Yes, I took water from Lourdes. I also have water from Fatima in Portugal, from St. Patricks in New York City, from the sacred lake of Gitchi Gami, from the mighty Mississippi and my childhood church in Hibbing, Minnesota. I also took water from the stream in Aulus-les-Bains, site of the artist residency in France. In the late 1800s the water running in three streams from the mountains was believed to have healing properties. I put these waters on my head almost daily, in ritual. It isn’t the water, it’s the intention.

Bernadette the dog was healed, it seemed. She was healthy, well-adjusted, and true to her breed as a lap dog. But then she developed mammary gland cancer - breast cancer for dogs - at the same time I had breast cancer for humans. Bernadette had surgery to cut it out, but I cannot. And Bernadette the human died very young from childhood cholera leading to tuberculosis, but even with a short life, Saint Bernadette left a lot to the world if we can wade through the constructed clamor to reach her message. I am wondering about my own healing and legacy, wading through my own constructed clamor to find how I can best use my life.

My parents recently moved just a block from my childhood home, where I used to live alone with them and Hallelujah, the original Shih Tzu. The first time I visited them at their new apartment, I was walking Bernadette toward my childhood house. I’ve always had dreams about my childhood home - the beautiful cream foursquare with a red clay tile roof - and lately they have intensified. Dreams of figures visible thru door cracks and dreams of visiting people who live there now, imagining it all different - or mostly different but actually the same. Dreams it was still my home. Never dreams that involved my parents or family members, only dreams of the house itself, like a dead loved one, a loss. In these dreams it seemed impossible to be able to see it again.

As I walked toward the house I saw a man in the yard pulling a child around in a sled. It hadn’t been a week since we received the first snow. I greeted him and told him I lived in this house when I was the boy’s age. He asked my name, and when I told him ‘Sara,’ he said ‘Sara Pajunen?’ I said yes, how do you know? He told me my name was on the height markers in his bedroom closet. He asked me if I wanted to come inside. Here I was, so easily walking into the garage where I had spent so many evenings with my father, through the mudroom we built and into the kitchen where I combed my grandpa’s hair. Not surprisingly, it seemed smaller than in my memories and dreams. I stand at the kitchen table where I used to watch a small little push button TV (Hey Dude!).

I saw my childhood bedroom and my dad’s closet, with my name and height and date, and some for my niece too, and for Jane on April 23, 1928, and for Margaret and Darrel, Duke and Stanley. The house felt a bit empty, and certainly not as charming as in my memory. But there it was, and I heard the father say to the son that they will need to start marking his height. He told me to come back any time, my parents are welcome too. And I felt he truly meant it. And the whole time, Bernadette was in my arms. I am having a second childhood, a chance to reframe, redo. After all, I was bald six months ago. And I just walked into my home with a dog like my childhood dog with the name of a saint.

Bernadette disappeared on March 30, 2025 during an equinox, just hours after I sent a picture of Bernadette and myself in front of our former home to my mom and sister. We have never found her.

Then on Dec 30, 2025, I was driving around Bde Maka Ska in Minneapolis, close to midnight. There were a few cars stopped in front of me, doors ajar. Something small was running down the road, a rabbit? It was a very small dog they were attempting to catch. I stopped and got out, also trying to corral the tiny brown thing, clearly in survival mode. It was less than 10 degrees outside, and the dog was in danger of being hit by a car. The people behind me failed as well, and the dog disappeared and all others continued driving. I drove around for a bit and came upon an exhausted fireman in full gear. He had been at an unrelated event and was returning to his truck after unsuccessfully chasing the eight pound ball of fluff. In exasperation, he told me I was free to try to catch it.

I knew I had to employ a different tactic to save this little life, since chasing a dog in survival mode intensifies its flight reaction and makes the situation more dangerous. I drove next to it slowly with my car door ajar, eventually coming to a stop and using the sweetest voice possible to lure it toward me. Luckily it was curious enough and needing some relief. I grabbed it by the scruff and yanked it onto my lap. I knew in real time that if I missed, it would run off again and there was a high chance it would not survive the night. Once in my lap, I gave it the longest and tightest Temple Grandin hug I could muster, all the way home.

Although clearly disoriented, it slept so quietly thru the night, its exhausted little body sprawled on my bed (it made it clear a blanket in a box would not do). Early the next morning I started scrolling the lost dog pages on Facebook, the same we used to try to find Bernadette. And there she was, ‘Babette,’ ‘Babs’ for short. Her owners were on vacation and she got away from the neighbors (the same situation with Bernadette nine months earlier). Little Babs had made it a very long way in her tiny 13 year old body. It was bittersweet to return her that morning, knowing we didn’t have the same good fortune with our beloved pet, but it was some kind of full circle moment of healing. Babette and Bernadette. The vulnerable child-like part of me finally felt held, like a little defenseless dog in my arms. I know how to save myself.

When I lived in Finland in the mid 2000s, I regularly saw a woman who was studying a form a psychotherapy called psychosynthesis, Carola was her name. She lived in one of the nicest neighborhoods of Helsinki and I would visit her apartment weekly. She was so kind to me, so affirming and I think of her quite often. At the end of one meeting, she said to me in preparation for the next, “now I will tell you how to make meaning in life.” That was our last session, I never saw her again. I must have moved back to the United States.

I wonder what she would have told me.

But like I said, I am done searching for meaning - or is this it? I feel myself subtly but powerfully reorganize the details of my life, like the rearranging of sand on a river bed, far under the surface.

So we move into a new year. Now it’s January 1, 2026.