When I met Eva, it was after she had passed on from this world and gone into the next one.

A friend on Twitter wrote, “Rest in Peace Eva http://65redroses.livejournal.com – thank you for sharing your spirit of love & courage”. In less than 140 characters, I was motivated to see who Eva was.

Eva Markvoort was a 23 year old living with cystic fibrosis.

Eva, a New Westminster native, has been struggling with cystic fibrosis ever since she was a youngster. A moving documentary film, titled 65 Red Roses, was made of her wait to receive a double lung transplant. Directed by Vancouver filmmaker Nimisha Mukerji, it aired last year at the Vancouver Film Festival and on CBC TV. This heart-wrenching six-minute video taken in Eva’s hospital room on Thursday reveals the overwhelming strength and purposefulness of Eva, the dignity of her father, Bill, and the devotion of her sister, Annie, and mother, Janet. The walls of the Vancouver General Hospital room are covered with cards and letters from Eva’s many admirers.

The first post of her blog says this:

Our beautiful girl died this morning at 9:30. She is at peace.
Will write more later.

As a mother, my instant reaction was heartbreak. In just a few seconds, I understood why Eva was so deeply cherished, and why people who will never meet her, will love her just the same.

© Eva Dien Brine Markvoort 2006-2010

i can’t breathe

Mar. 25th, 2010 at 9:55 AM

i’m at that point now
i’m done with the poetics
asking for help
my sister is helping me write
actually helping me write

the medications have been piling up
they are taking their toll
i am supersaturated with medications
i’ve been medically missing in action for two days
the docs started taking me off some of them to see how i would manage

and i am not managing
not managing at all

i’m drowning in the medications

i can’t breathe

every hour
once an hour

i can’t breathe

something has to change

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Visit 65 Red Roses to celebrate this beautiful Soul.

I sat on the back deck this evening, listening to the sounds of the crickets singing, feeling the soft breeze fragrant with the magnolia blossoms of the tree I planted a few years ago, seeing the stars peeking through wide holes in the drifting clouds, and seeing reflections of lightning way off in the distance… All of it put me into a bit of an altered state…

I wish everyone could Know the God I Know.. How I wish everyone could feel the way IT ruffles my hair with the wind, and breezes into my ear, “I am IN LOVE with you!” I wish everyone could see the magnificent love that I see in the stars and fireflies twinkling at each other, the munificent smile in the soft roundness of the rising moon, how my God wraps ITS arms around me and kisses my face with the great golden warmth of the sun…

I see my God reflected in every pair of eyes, ablaze in every heart, radiant in every smile… In the voices of mothers kissing their babies goodnight, the soft voices of lovers talking in bed in the darkness before sleep, the way the light lays across the land… I hear IT in the songs of crickets, running water, the shouting of the sea and thunder and music…

This is the God that I know… All loving, all forgiving, supremely detached and at once, deeply personal and reflected in every atom and molecule of the universes! God speaks!! Everywhere! In everything!! In me! In you!

Love and longing and eternity and distance and death and birth… That voice, the Logos, is in every sound, that love reflected in every love. So far beyond mere words and great hymns and the greatest feats of architecture and art and beauty, and reflected in all of it and shining and shouting and whispering and speaking from everywhere!

This God that I know… So far beyond religions and denominations and systems and techniques… The very spark that animates every living creature. It all grows pale with the clumsiness of mere words. It is Knowing.

And IT is far beyond my paltry skills of articulation, but I was inspired to try, just the same. I recognize and respect that this may not be the God that anyone else believes in, and that peoples’ theologies and systems differ, and that a lot of people simply don’t believe in God at all. For me, this is something that supersedes belief. I am a born skeptic. But this Knowing… I can’t remember a time when I didn’t Know this.

So… This is my attempt at supplying some kind of introduction to this God that I Know, however wholly inadequate, tho’ it may be…

The moon dropped her clothes into
the garden pond, and utterly enchanted with
love for her
I swallowed the sky.
It tasted like rain
and wine
and dandelions
and babies
and made my heart
smile like the sun.

Her breath stirring expectant leaves that
whisper sweetly under warm
hymns of the cicadas

Building higher and more majestic her
voluptuous cumulus rises in a shuddering sigh
her face growing dusky with growing ardor
her ragged gasps ringing hot against my cheek

Thunderclap of her climax and silver rain laughing down
on this withered land, quenching my parched lips.
I turn my face to the sky and laugh against her humid thigh.

-Frank H. Weeden

Dwelling in your high lonely house, can
you see me waving, waiting beneath your window?
Through the walls of your stout fortress,
can you hear me hailing you from the garden?
Who has imprisoned you? And whom do you
say has imprisoned you?
For the power and consent is in the saying of it!

The roses weep dewdrops for you.
The grass begs the kiss of your dancing feet.
The wysteria has grown wild over the gate.
The doves sob with longing for sight of
your radiant countenance!

Like Rapunzel, I implore thee,
“Let down thy hair!”

Bound and smothered in gray-brown gowns
of stiff, scratchy lace, shrug them off!
For what richer raiment can there be, than
the sky, the wind, and the fragrance of flowers?
Rip the laces of the confining bodice so that you may
stretch your arms wide as you whirl into the sun!
Pin up your skirts as pantaloons, so you may
leap, run, tumble, and dance and dance and dance!
Kick off those narrow shoes that bind and pinch!
Sweep the pins from your lustrous hair and shake
it all out! Let it be wild once more, and filled
with leaves and grass, giggled secrets,
starlight, and dreams….

O Beautiful One!
Can you hear me calling?
I shall never stop, shall never
leave, shall never fall silent!
In the utmost depths, the shadowed chambers
where your gypsy heart languishes like
a caged bird, I AM YOU!
Lazarus, come forth!
Come down!
Come out!
Come away!
O please! Please! Please!
Come out and play!

-Frank H. Weeden