Seen Any Angels Recently?

Rick Bowie’s message for carers who find themselves in situations they didn’t sign up for.

For some reason angels are a popular topic in our society today. Everywhere you go, you can see magazine articles, coffee table books, wall hangings and prints depicting angels. We read of people who claim to have seen angels and hear them interviewed on radio and television talk shows.

Much of the popular art surrounding angels involves a winged figure in flowing robes hovering near a child or children. The paintings are usually soft pastels, and the children most often have blond hair and blue eyes.

But who are the angels? What do they do? Are they really those shoulder length-haired creatures with long, white robes and feathered wings, who hover in the clouds plucking idly at their harp strings? Or are we talking about something different? Can we even believe in angels? Perhaps we should put them in the same category as the extra-terrestrial visitors. I’m quite sceptical about UFOs and the like, and yet when I think about the meaning of the word “angel”, I find I need to approach this subject with a degree of reverence.

The fundamental meaning of the word really means no more than “messenger”. As such, it does not necessarily have any supernatural implications. A messenger can bring us a message in words, or sometimes a message in an action, or a gift.

My own experience with a person who brought me a good message of caring and healing happened in that cloudy time when I was slowly waking up from a coma. I have this vague memory of someone bending my legs up towards my chest, one at a time.

I subsequently found out from the hospital staff that I opened my eyes and said to the physiotherapist “Are you an angel?”

The physio brought a message of healing and relief as she slowly and carefully bent my legs back and forth, with an occasional little massage between lifts. We can think in a different direction as we wonder about the place of “angels” in this 21st century.

You’re an angel!

Often, when we visit an older person, or do something unexpectedly pleasing, we hear the expression “You’re an angel”. I can remember my grandmother saying things like “Richard, be an angel and pass me that wool!”

Have you ever stopped to think what that expression really means? Angel doesn’t simply mean someone rather nice. I was reminded of this during the recent Anzac Day. The “fuzzy wuzzy angels” were Papuan men who gave incredible and often heroic help to our diggers during the Kokoda campaigns in Papua New Guinea, and it is this meaning of angel which captures our imagination.

There is a famous picture taken by the Kiwi photo-journalist George Silk – I’m sure you have seen the photo of a soldier called George Whittington being helped down a jungle road by a Papuan orderly Raphael Oimbari. This “fuzzy wuzzy angel” was a great grandfather of my wife Joyce Tindeba, herself a Buna woman. It is humbling to think my adult children have such an angelic ancestor to emulate.

The popular paintings of angels usually have an angel hovering around children, but they are unaware because the angel’s presence is invisible or unrecognisable. George Whittington knew that he was being helped, but probably had no idea of who was helping him.

This experience of being assisted by an unknown or unrecognised person is still experienced in this rational 21st century. A few weeks ago, one such “angel” went to the assistance of a Muslim woman being harassed on a suburban train in Sydney. These stories abound. I am certain that the young woman concerned would not describe herself as an angelic being, watching over the dispossessed, and offering assistance and defence when necessary.

Thanks to our personal angels

For many of us with a brain injury, our personal carers are our angels. They face the daily grind of helping us physically, absorbing the many changes of mood we travel through each day, and many of the tasks of life which are sometimes tedious, and many times thankless.

To all you carers who read this, often we don’t think to thank you, and sometimes even get cross at you. The person you care for might be still unaware of how much you care. Many of us carry some deep-seated anger at what we have lost, and sometimes we take this out on you.

So, it could be that I am just coming to consciousness after being comatose, and I am asking you: Are you an angel?

Photo by War Correspondent George Silk courtesy of Wikipedia Commons – Private“Dick”Whittington, being helped by Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel Raphael Oimbari, to a field hospital at Dobodur, New Guinea – World War II