Years ago, a hospice patient with dementia asked me what I was “heart-ing” for. A moment later, she then asked: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Living outside the bounds of time, she asked me this question as earnestly as if we were two schoolgirls imagining our futures ahead of us while sitting together on a schoolbus rather than where we were on a couch in a locked-unit of a dementia care facility. But before I could even begin to answer, she shouted: “Rosebeam!” At this, she began to laugh and laugh, surprised by delight, I laughed with her. “Yes, yes! That is exactly what I want to be when I grow up,” I said. “A rosebeam!” Her language,

splintered by dementia,

gave me a word truer than

any I can find in the dictionary. I do not know precisely what she meant—perhaps rosebeam was her version of Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud” or perhaps evidence of paraphrasia creeping into her dementia in the event she really meant to say “sun” instead of “rose” as in the Christian song “Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam”— but regardless, she was right—

I want to be a rosebeam—and I have been “heart-ing” for this my whole life. I just did not have the word for it before it was given me that day by someone who was in process of losing all language. Being a rosebeam is not a job or a destination—it is more like a poem or a puzzle that lives inside of you. It is “sunbeam” adjacent but belongs to no one savior. It inhabits both light and form. It is a journey to me-ness that recognizes and protects the brilliantly specific and beautifully unrepeatable you-ness while recognizing and protecting the same within me. It is the “inscape” of the heart. Perhaps you know what I mean, not because “rosebeam” means anything definable by-the-book but because you are yearning for that clarity of being for yourself and everyone else and the collective space and safety (bodily and real safety!) to shine/bloom as you are.

I am writing this in the boundary hours between my 45th and 46th years of life. But the memory of this rosebeam encounter has been pushing its way to the forefront of my mind for weeks—this beautiful riddle I am quite sure I will never figure out. Like the existential version of playing an Escape Room that is forever more clever than I am and I will use every minute of my time on Earth to solve it and still find purpose in the trying. So instead of solving the mystery of the rosebeam, I try to remember the next closest thing, the rosebud outside my window—the one that grows with the others to be unfettered 8 foot long rose spears—does not know how to become a rose either. But she will become one anyway.

The day my patient gave me just the word I needed—rosebeam!—it was like she was seeing the seed of something that does not yet exist but is destined to do so with time. She gave me a holy clue to this deeply personal quest for something that cannot be grasped like an object but rather becomes changed by the reaching for it. As a white, cisgender, straight, presently able-bodied woman I endeavor to be changed by this quest not only for myself but for others, that I might be part of the healing of legacies of harm and not their perpetuation. I am living towards the rosebeam with greater clarity of those relationships that hold the mirror with love and accountability to my utter rose-beaminess when I (often) forget. And I honor those stories of so many who have lived and are endeavoring to live from their deepest rosebeam truth and innate beauty at cost to their own safety, in splintered forms, in dissolution, in these dangerous times, in aching loneliness staying true to the path of their inner voice that forever (or even once) knows the soul-to-body answer to that perennial question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

For my birthday, I wish for all who want it: Rosebeam!