Butterfly Release (Video):
My Wife's Last Day of Dialysis

On the ninth day of the ninth month, Friday, September 9th, 2022, my wife Nicole had her final session of dialysis. Three times a week, for three to four hours each round, her blood would be slowly removed from her body, filtered through a machine and pumped back in. After twelve years, she had decided she could not endure it any longer.

On that final day, she went to the local Shakespearean Gardens, and released a monarch butterfly newly emerged from its cocoon (which her friend Pamela Jane Gerrand had been keeping safe). Here's a YouTube video (also available on Bitchute) of that day...

Noteworthy, in the background when the butterfly takes off you can see the county jailhouse. Nicole said she felt as if she was breaking out of prison by giving up her ill body. This was affirmed twelve hours after her passing when a painting of a mother bear breaking out of a cage arrived in my inbox from artist Bob Moran. I've since purchased a framed print which is hanging on the wall beside Nicole's mermaid hook and beneath Carl Bloch's Gethsemane painting of Jesus being comforted by an angel before his crucifixion...
Letting her go still hurts so much. And I don't think it'll ever stop hurting. Just as I'll never stop loving her. But I feel some relief knowing she's free — like that butterfly — from the prison bars of her many illnesses.

—John C. A. Manley

PS For more about Nicole's life and death visit the Sunflower Page.

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