Writing with Juliet Iwelunmor

I begin from a space, that I hope you will one day use as your own. A space that is transitional is nature, a work in progress too. In August if 2021, we got an early morning text that stated that my sister-in law had died from cervical cancer. My memory of that day is one of anger, with so many questions lingering.

Imagine being in a moment of uncertainty, a moment of despair, a moment of grief even, and somewhere, somehow, some dreams were dreaming you in ruins. Dreams full of unusual clarity, as Toni Morrison would describe them, dreams totally vivid, dreams inspired by the other, dreams unashamed to even imagine the other. Imagine in the midst of grief so painful, these dreams are asking you to envision what it would be like to know that even in death, you are still able to dream about what if, how can, or why not. Dream the world as it ought to be, even in pain, dream. Imagine dreaming even in pain. To be a dreamer within the field of health, is to be saddled with the task of creating something not only with unusual, vivid clarity, but also to do so with conditions in which that work will attain meaning as health. There are also certain elements always present with any attempt at dreaming. The first and most awesome constant is authenticity. Dreams don’t just allow you to engage in activities that are idle but engaged. Your mind will open up to ideas far and wide, until gradually the focus is refined and the ideas for you become clear. On the day my sister-in law died, I began to dream authentically.

Inspiration is a key concept with dreaming. Through the careful choice of experience, dreaming inspires you to represent the world as you see it. Ever since the day when I heard my mother-in law shout in pain about death, I have been dreaming. I know even her scream won’t help and I was not wrong. Since I have been to a grave and layed down someone I loved, I have been dreaming. I know that the dreaming won’t bring them back, won’t let me see or hear or even live the life I had hoped we would live together and I feel like shouting, yet dreaming is helping. Death’s power is never manifested as a single, terminating act but as a series of overlapping arches that yesterday, today and tomorrow. My tears have fallen and gone and though faint traces of grief remain, though sorrow and pain linger, making this living so deep, soul deep, still I dream, inspired to make a difference.

Finally, dreaming permits you to imagine anything with unusual clarity, order and significance.

These days, I have been dream about healing. Dreaming to about a time before death. Even one year before the end. I wish I could go back in time and dream before cervical cancer came into my family, dream about its ways, learn something by dreaming a little, visualizing what life would be if only, everyone I loved, all the women and girls in my life knew something anything about cervical cancer.

Her name was Angie and she was my sister-in law. Since cervical cancer won the battle with her life in August 2021, I have tried to imagine, envision what it would be like if only I dreamed more often. I don’t have a formal background in cancer research. I have never even written a paper as the lead author on anything cancer-related. But her death, would inspire me to write not one, but 2 R-01 grants and a center grant, all because I fed a hunger, a cry for change, a dream whose manner of dreaming was as varied as it was fierce. In the search of some answers, any answer really, I refused to follow that path that wouldn’t lead to any answer. With a team of fellow dreamers, we dreamed of a time when healing was just as creative as it was local.

Dreaming allowed me to connect more authentically, lead fully inspired, while imagining what it would feel like not to be living with cervical cancer. Dreaming helped to make health more penetrating, more accessible. It’s is from this perspective that I believe that all dreaming, like creativity is local. All healing too. Healing is a creative pursuit. It had always been. It’s not distant or on mountaintops. It’s like a gentle breeze that comes to free us from ourselves, or prescriptions of what healing is or is not. And if you let the creativity to seep in, the skies will open and all your senses will suddenly awaken to how healing is full of the ambitions of individuals and communities, family systems, policy and health systems alike. To be sure, creativity has to begin somewhere and to succeed, it often arches back in a cyclical manner back to its beginning. Healing has this circular process of burying its ends in its origins.