Toothless…

She’s here for the first time. An elderly woman, half the family still in Ukraine, the other half in Poland. She is staying somewhere in a shelter, where she shares a room with three others. Two of them rotate daily/weekly. The third snores terribly. She says she hasn’t slept in days…

She only has half of her teeth left, teeth are missing everywhere. She was working on a project with the dentist in Ukraine. All the bad teeth had been pulled. It had healed, and she was now ready to make a plaster cast for the prosthetics to be made. But then the war started and the dentist left… Now she is walking around with half a set of teeth…

We always start the therapy with standing still. We often do this with association cards: how do you feel? New people almost always choose the card with the big yellow sunflower and a blue sky and tell them how well they are doing. And they are almost unstoppable, as if it were the first time they could vent.

So does this lady. She only has half her teeth and no money to have this done in Poland, has not slept for nights, now has kidney stones, she is worried about her family in Ukraine and struggles with all the gossip and negative talk in the shelter where she is now staying. She clings desperately to the happy yellow sunflower: “May everyone go well, stay healthy, may the war end soon. I wish everyone all the good and beautiful!”

I hope she comes back next week—so that the therapy group can become a place for her to come back to herself and find peace.