Tending to Endings (fifty-one)
My friend Ana and I went for a walk sometime mid spring as the pandemic was taking hold, me walking in the street and Ana on the sidewalk so that we could keep six feet between us. We were not yet sure how the pandemic would affect us financially or health wise or, even more concerning, how it would affect our children, all in their twenties and still launching their adult lives.
Hospitals in Italy and in New York were filling with patients and running out of ventilators. Our empty neighborhood streets seemed eerie, like the quiet before a storm of the likes we had never seen and we did not understand.
We talked about how hard it was to write anything of substance while the whole world felt topsy turvy. We talked about not knowing what was even important enough to write about. I had just started Tending to Endings, and I couldn’t decide whether a blog about death and dying during a pandemic was serendipitous or the worst timing ever.
And then I yelled over the curb, Nouns! We don’t have to write anything important but we need to journal and include nouns!
Ana nodded, and cocked her head, waiting. She is a good friend, and she knows if she gives me time I’ll eventually make more sense.
I told her how when I go through times of great upheaval—say, the complicated pregnancy where I didn’t know for months whether my sons would make it—I cannot write anything of substance. During those long days that turned into months, I couldn’t even read anything but formulaic detective novels.
But I jotted down things in my journal each day. A few thoughts. A couple feelings. And yes, people, places and things: the green pitcher of water on the end table, the hyacinth growing through hard cracks in the flowerbed, the medication pump I wore clipped to my pajamas that was the shape and size of a pack of Camel non-filters.
Someday that would become my favorite story, but I hadn’t lived it yet.
Flannery O’Connor famously said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” I love this quote and during calmer times when I have reserves, I find it true.
But during times of illness or huge loss or upheaval, I’m not sure the first order of writing for me is about making sense of anything at all. All that matters is whether my babies are going to make it to the point where they have skin that will withstand touch and lungs that will breathe air.
Instead, I think that during chaotic and confusing times, times of loss, writing tethers me like some umbilical cord between inner and outer worlds. It is how I don’t lose sight of what is right at my feet when anything more than this step is too much. I write thoughts, feelings, and concrete nouns, while every sentence on the page really says the same thing. I’m here. I’m here. I’m still here.
My favorite places to teach writing have always been with those in the midst of things or on a precipice of big change: juvenile detention centers, the school for pregnant and parenting teens, at camp on a wilderness adventure, the cancer unit of a Boise hospital. There is something about creativity that is begun amidst upheaval—before we know where things might go or how they might end—that feels particularly vivid. Maybe it is only that writing in the middle of things means I have to pay attention. And paying attention makes for better art and better life.
I was excited back in 2001 to teach the drop-in workshop at what was then called Mountain States Tumor Institute in Boise. The class was part of a new integrative health program open to cancer patients and caregivers and hospital staff. And I was nervous, too. I didn’t have much experience in a medical setting and I wondered how it would go with so many different perspectives in the room during such a vulnerable time.
One of the books I read in preparation for the workshop at the hospital was John Fox’s Poetic Medicine. It is full of poems and anecdotes and teaching ideas. But one of my favorite lines of the book is from the preface which was written by another author, Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.:
Our poetry allows us to remember that our integrity is not in our body, that despite our physical limitations, our suffering and our fears, there is something in us that is not touched, something shining. Our poetry is its voice.
And what I remember most about that conference room as we lifted our heads to listen to what each had written was how poems would begin with chemo or medical charts and make their way to planting green beans in the garden after work or the puppy that the grandkids brought by for a visit or the messy sweetness of a shared slice of watermelon. It didn’t matter who was a patient or a chaplain or a caregiver or a teacher. We could see each other, and we were all here.
Resources on Writing
In February I’m offering a three-part workshop focused on saving family stories for future generations: Writing Family Memoirs: Getting Started. Please take a look at my workshop and events page if you or or someone you know might be interested.
I will also be teaching two half-day writing workshops through the McCall Arts and Humanities Council, Room for Grief: Writing through Loss will be held online on January 23 and Beyond the Obituary: Writing End-of-Life Stories will be held online on March 6. These events are free but with a suggested donation to the McCall Arts and Humanities Council for those who can offer support. I would love to see you there!
If you want to explore writing on your own, two classics that I’ve found particularly helpful for getting into the practice of writing are Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within.
Other Resources
The McCall workshops listed above are offered as part of a winter series: Looking Ahead: Conversations on Aging and Dying offered by Community Hub McCall. They are open to the public and explore many topics I’ve written about in Tending to Endings including a Death Cafe event, advance care planning, and caregiving. I’m excited to attend some of these events myself. Sessions are online and either free or for a suggested donation.
If you would like to receive Tending to Endings the first Friday of every month, please leave your name and email below. Tending to Endings aims to build community and conversation around end-of-life matters. It is always free, and I do not share your info. Thank you for your interest!
Ah, Laura, your mention of how we need nouns resonates strongly for me. As we’ve discussed and as you write here, it’s a hard time for many of us to write about what we’re living through in the pandemic because we’re still living it. Yet whatever we can capture now–however we do that–will be gifts of memory to us, to our families and friends, and to the future itself. Thank you for your writing.