Tending to Endings (thirty-eight)
It is true our lives
will betray us in the end
but life knows where it is going.
—Linda Hogan, Parting
My first reaction upon hearing from my sister on Friday night that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died was noooooooo. It was resistance to the tumult and chaos that was about to ensue, still six weeks before the election. So many of us wanted her to hold on. She so wanted to hold on. My first reaction was self-centered fear.
But I have walked close to death recently and so it didn’t take but a minute to pull myself back, to pause and remember what this is. To whisper to the night: Thank you. Safe Passage. Much love. You were brilliant. Go in peace knowing what you gave us was more than enough. For, don’t we all deserve to be sent off on a wave of love? I want to be that love.
And then, what I knew next–RBG is still with us. We haven’t lost what matters most, so long as we pay attention.
I recently listened to a friend’s story of caring for her mother. Cat’s mother died only a few weeks ago and I got to sit on the bank of the Snake River in Hagerman and listen to her story of the long, hard illness and the quiet moments during caregiving, and the magic that happened between them in the days leading up to her mom’s death.
Cat said, “People keep asking if I’m alright, and my heart is actually OK. Grief is quickly followed by comfort and my relationship with my mom has grown even stronger. When I find that very quiet space inside of myself that’s where I can find her.”
And I knew what she meant. I do grieve the loss of being able to call my mom and talk through the election or the last book or whether the plant that surprised me in my yard is a flower or a weed. I miss being able to sit with her or travel with her or play a game of Scrabble.
But, also, I feel as close to my mom as I ever have. She is with me. So is my friend Susan and my mentor Pat and my grandma Jean. When I go to that quiet place within me, these soul friends welcome me. I rely on them.
It always feels tricky to write about things of the spirit that happen in such interior spaces. I worry it will sound like I’m trying to talk people into a particular belief, which is not my aim. So I’ll just say that my experience of death has changed as I’ve spent more time with those who are dying and especially since the death of my mom. One of the things I carry with me is that my relationship with my mom or my friend Pat or my friend Susan or my grandmother are transformed, but not ended.
I don’t fully understand any this. Sometimes I wish I came from a culture where interaction with the souls of those who have departed is accepted in everyday life—where they show up in dreams and stories and across the dinner table—because I don’t always have the language to talk about these experiences.
But I know it is true that my mom helps me every day.
So why not RBG as well? True, I didn’t know her personally. But her work transformed our culture and the way many of us see ourselves and the world. She is with us.
Like many of us, I am troubled by the fact that we seem to be living out the plot to a dystopian novel lately. We are told we are polarized. And maybe we are. Or maybe the loudest voices are and we are living in a culture that has incentivized and thus magnified the extremes: those willing to take up arms, those seeking to confound rather than to understand. Or maybe sometimes the person we identify as the fringe is someone acting on impulse having a particularly bad day.
None of this is to say that we aren’t standing–collectively and individually–on a precipice or that things couldn’t tumble in a variety of directions. My own sense, though, is that the choice before us is ultimately not between left and right. And it is not about finding some happy middle. Instead, I suspect the radical choice that matters is whether we are going to dig deep and find the courage to choose love? Or are we going to let fear have the day?
Last week I included a link to a podcast of an interview between Krista Tippett and angel Kyoda williams, a Zen priest, activist, and author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace. During the interview, williams describes this kind of love that relies on internal work and action in a way that I found helpful:
It is developing our own capacity for spaciousness within ourselves to allow others to be as they are — that that is love. And that doesn’t mean that we don’t have hopes or wishes that things are changed or shifted, but that to come from a place of love is to be in acceptance of what is, even in the face of moving it towards something that is more whole, more just, more spacious for all of us. Its bigness. Its allowance. Its flexibility. It’s saying the thing that we talked about earlier, of “Oh, those police officers are trapped inside of a system, as well. They are subject to an enormous amount of suffering, as well.”
I think that those things are missed when we shortcut talking about King, or we shortcut talking about Gandhi. We leave out the aspects of their underlying motivation for moving things, and we make it about policies and advocacy, when really it is about expanding our capacity for love, as a species
Later in the interview, williams identifies the kind of action that comes from that place of love:
I think that if we can move our work, whatever work we’re up to, whatever kind of desire that we have for our own development in life, to be willing to face discomfort and receive it as opportunity for growth and expansion and a commentary about what is now more available to us, rather than what it is that is limiting us and taking something away from us, that we will — in no time at all, we will be a society that enhances the lives of all our species.
And that is the phrase that makes my heart catch: no time at all. Tippett comments on it, too, the hope inherent in that statement, and williams confirms it is exactly what she means.
…we are evolving at such a pace — even what we’re experiencing now in our society, we’re just cycling through it. We’re digesting the material of the misalignment. We’re digesting the material of how intolerable it is to be so intolerant. We’re digesting the material of 400, 500 years of historical context that we have decided to leave behind our heads, and we are choosing to turn over our shoulders and say: I must face this, because it is intolerable to live in any other way than a way that allows me to be in contact with my full, loving, human self.
My mom, too, believed in this kind of love and the power of it to transform. She might express it differently, at least to me, her daughter. For, when I bring my fretting about the election and about the supreme court seat to the quietest place in myself, Mom responds with her half smile and a glint in her eye, Oh, Laura, so you think the fate of equality and our nation rests on one 87 year old woman staying on the bench?
And she is not trying to diminish RBG’s work or the importance of this election or what follows. She is reminding me that strategy and politics will not be enough to save us. For that we need a Love that includes all of us.
A Question for Readers
Thank you for reading Tending to Endings. In a future issue I am planning to write about ways to begin conversations with parents about end-of-life planning. Have you had conversations with your parents that have gone well or not so well? What did you learn? Or, have your kids brought the discussion to you? How did it go?
If you are willing to share your experience or thoughts or questions on this topic, please send an email (or a voice memo file if that is easier) to Laura@laurastavoe.com.
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