When a yuwipi ceremony was indicated, we brought Sonny and his singers to Pittsburgh, since Emily had become too ill to travel to South Dakota. The ceremony is done in absolute darkness with the participants sitting in a ring around the wrapped-up medicine man who is surrounded by prayer ties and flags, rattles and gourds, and his other sacred objects. The ceremony was performed in Pittsburgh in Emily's parents' master bedroom, probably one of the few yuwipi's ever performed in the Shadyside community. During that yuwipi, I pledged to sun dance for Emily, which I did the following June, joking with Emily that, dead or alive, she had better be at that dance. Sun Dance is the pinnacle of the Lakota ceremonial year, occuring around summer solstice, and providing an opportunity for the healthy members of the community to sacrifice and symbolically suffer so that the ill members of the community would not have to.
Men hang from the tree by pegs to take on the suffering of the weak.
As the pegs that were placed in the skin of my chest tore away during the piercing ritual of the sun dance, I heard Emily whispering to me that she didn't need this sacrifice from me anymore. Do it for the children that I wanted to treat, do it for the other cancer patients in your practice. Her sadness was only for the pain of those she left behind. Inspired by Emily Dorrance, I began my work with autistic children, constructing a web site, challenging our hospital's pharmacy and therapeutics committee to allow intravenous secretin therapy, and searching for any treatment that would work. I have tried to convey the ending message of my book, Coyote Medicine, to never give up.