Uncategorized – Laura Stavoe

November 6, 2020November 6, 2020

Future Tendings

Tending to Endings (forty-four)

I mentioned in my last blog that I was going to write something about legacies this week. I have moved that post to November 13 because I wanted to give you a heads up about some changes to Tending to Endings and a few new projects.

When I started this blog in January, I had recently left my job of ten years in order to care from my mom at the end of her life. Afterwards, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next, but I had a feeling it had something to do with death. I was surprised at how much I did not know going into that experience and it had been a profound one.

I gave myself this weekly research and writing assignment an exploration into end-of-life matters, planning to write for at least six months. By June, I wasn’t running out of ideas and I was enjoying writing the posts each week. Plus, the pandemic was in full swing. I saw no reason to stop.

I am grateful for our small but caring readership. There are currently 129 subscribers, plus the others who find their way to my website, often due to subscribers sharing the link on social media sites, thank you!

Tending to Endings will continue as a weekly publication through December 18 and then it will move to a once-a-month schedule. I still haven’t run out of ideas. Everyone dies and hardly anyone talks about death, so there is more material than I can possibly cover. But with the new year, I want to make room for some new work as well.

Beginning January 1, subscribers will receive Tending to Endings on the first Friday of the month. It will still be free. I hope you continue to find it relevant and readable, and that you continue to share your thoughts and ideas and stories with me. I love receiving your comments and mail!

New Work

About a year ago a friend asked me if I ever wrote stories on commission. She had been meaning to write something about the birth of her two daughters born through invitro fertilization, but she was never finding the time. She wondered if I could write it for her so that she could save the stories for her daughters when they were older.

I was intrigued. I had written my own pregnancy and birth story for Parents magazine, and I have always been grateful to have that story. It helps me remember all those moments of worry and hope and grace. It gives me a window into that time and reminds me of all we went through at the start of my sons’ lives. I loved the idea of helping another mom capture those moments. Plus, it sounded like fun.

Darcy and Mike were able to share their journey with me through a series of conversations and then we worked collaboratively on a beautiful book. They made twenty copies for friends and family and of course saved two special copies for their daughters. For me, there was a gift, too. I found a new kind of magic happens in the deep listening required to write another’s story. I was hooked.

I took out a business license for Story of My Life last January and planned to launcy a personal memoir service. When the pandemic hit, I backed off on these plans. It seemed the wrong time to begin a business for anything other than essential goods and services.

Still, a few projects have serendipitously made it to me, including a couple stories about caregiving and end-of-life. It has been such an honor to receive these sacred stories, and I am very excited to continue this work. If you are interested in learning more, please visit Story of My Life. I will continue to add information about process, pricing, and gift certificates in the next day or two. Also, feel free to reach out with questions anytime at laura@laurastavoe.com.

Story Workshops

Maybe by the time you read this, we will have final election results, and maybe not, but regardless of the outcome a great deal of uncertainty remains. Uncertainty about the pandemic, the economy, and maybe most of all, uncertainty about how we will rebuild trust in our systems, our processes, and most importantly, in each other. I of course don’t have answers for all this. But I know the work will take a great deal of courage and love. I don’t know any other way to build trust.

My years of teaching helped me to know the way I come to love people I do not understand is to listen, not to their opinions, but to their stories. This is one reason I have been missing teaching during this time that I’ve called my accidental sabbatical. I’ve had the luxury long walks and creative work each day. But I am at my best when I am also teaching, in part because I have access to so many living stories.

And so, I’m planning to launch two workshops starting soon after the holidays. One will be a writing workshop for who want help writing and saving their own Family Stories. The other will be Storytelling and Storylistening with the aim, not on performance, but on building connection and community. The first round of these workshops will be online and I will post more information soon.

Also, I wanted to share one of the things that helped me to get through Thursday, Who We Can Become, the most recent episode of On Being. I found it calming and hopeful, and thought you might appreciate it as well.

Have a beautiful weekend.

With love,

Laura

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May 22, 2020June 14, 2020

Hearing Voices

Tending to Endings (twenty-one)

The truck was overheating and I only had minutes. The A/C pump froze and now I’m trying to make Banner Summit so I can coast to where it’s a few degrees warmer and within hiking distance of a phone. It’s ten below and the Eve of New Year’s Eve, December 30, almost midnight and there hasn’t been a single car since Stanley. When I finally crest, I turn off the engine and hope I haven’t ruined the motor. I remember there is a flat spot a couple miles down. I keep hoping to get past it, closer to Grand Jean. But it’s cold and there’s black ice so I can only go so fast. Then the road flattens and the truck comes to a stop. It won’t start. It’s toast. I sit there and the world is as quiet as you’ve ever heard.

My husband, John, is telling the story which begins with the divorce and the ill-fated elk hunting trip and eventually leads to him building a house in the mountains, a project that takes eight years. The story of Elkhaven is family lore and any one his kids could chime in with details about how he raised the walls himself by riggin’ ropes and pulleys, or about George, the grouse who kept him company. I’ve heard the story many times, and I eventually lived in that house for six years before the boys hit driving age and we moved back to town.

Only this time, I have promised to write it down and so I’m sitting on the couch of our living room during quarantine time with the voice memo feature of my iPhone on. Also, I’m hearing the story as a woman who has recently lost her mother. Which means, I’m hearing the story with the ears of his grown children and I am so grateful I hit the record button. Because what really will matter to them someday when we are both gone, is not so much the story but the way that John tells it.

One of the hardest things for me to accept about my mom’s Alzheimer’s was that her voice changed. She became quieter, less certain about whatever she had to say. She stopped calling me. When I called her, she wanted to get off the phone quickly.

I eventually learned more about the disease and found ways to be close to my mom throughout the changes. But at first, all I could notice was what was gone.

One of the first times I noticed the change in her voice was when we were heading to my nephew’s football game. I made some joke about how she ended up with a grandson who played football, and she said, “It’s so nice, isn’t it?”

I looked to see if she was being facetious. She wasn’t. Instead, my mom who was not a fan of competition and especially not violent sports was quietly following my dad up to the bleachers.

My mom loved her grandchildren beyond measure. She may well have gone to that game pre-Alzheimer’s, but it would not have been without comment or without laughing at herself for ending up at a football game for her grandson.

I missed my mom’s edginess. The way she made sure we knew how she saw the world.

Voices are how I remember people most. I do not know if this is a weird Laura thing, or whether this is true for others as well. But the tone and the rhythm of a person’s voice is much of what I miss when they are gone. The way words lift on certain syllables and fall on others. Where they land the funny parts. Where their voice cracks with sadness or anger or truth or glee.

I remember how my friend Pat, who died in February of 2015, would say my name on a voice message, “Laura!” drawing out the two syllables like some enthusiastic song. “I’m so sorry I missed your call!” In one short message, I could feel her love.

I still have my friend Susan’s last voicemail she left in April of 2016 while she was waiting to learn whether she was going to return to the Children’s School, a job she subsequently got, but did not begin because she died that summer from a brain aneurysm. I saved it not because of the content, but because of the Susan-ness I hear in her voice.

Yeah this has been an interesting process and maybe I’ll get my old job back and maybe I won’t. And if I don’t, that will be ok, too. But, still uncertain. And I’m fine. And, I’m going to be hatching chicks this month so that’s going on and life is good! And so, happy Friday dear, thanks for thinking of me today. Take care. Bye.

Mostly, I don’t need the recordings. Voice contains so much of us. It carries with it the places we are from and the quirks from our own parents and traces of books we have read. Voice is breath shaped by thoughts and experience and larynx and lungs.

A friend in Boise once introduced me to her friend, a man in his sixties visiting from Brooklyn. As soon as the man started telling a story, I heard my grandfather. I realized only then that the voice I knew so well as my Grandpa’s was heavily rooted in the place he was born.

I can still hear my grandmother’s voice as she read Madeline to me, my favorite book as a child. I remember the cadence and the tone and the way she would speed up the pace when Miss Clavel, afraid of a disaster, ran fast and faster. And something else in her voice, too, that I know now (but didn’t know then) was irony. She knew what was coming.

I knew many things about my grandma. She cooked our favorite meals but didn’t eat much. She was a worrier. She loved being a grandma. She volunteered at the hospital so she could carry newborns to car when it came time for them to go home.

But today when I think of my grandma, it is her intelligence I recognize first in her voice. My grandma saw flaws inherent in the human condition and she was drawn satire and wit. She talked about books and politics and words and people.

Though I was a child when my grandma was alive (she died when I was 18), I somehow feel closer to her now than I did then, and I believe this is because as I have grown I have understood her more, something that is only possible because I remember her voice.

It was last fall when a friend of mine asked me to write the story of her two daughters, born after a long series of trials and losses and then, finally, two beautiful births. In the past I had always taken notes by hand when writing a story. But I had recently discovered how easy it was to use the voice memo feature on my phone.

Once Darcy’s husband Mike started talking, I was so glad I had done that. I never would’ve remembered his wording exactly:

I think the story starts on our first date. Where we ended up at the fricken’ animal hospital. Dog ate a bottle of the Boxer’s pee pills. But at the end of that night, we drove up to the top of Quail Ridge and were looking at Christmas lights in Boise. That’s when Darcy said, “Just so you know. I want a kid.”

As soon as I got home and listened to the recording, I knew I was going to write the story in their voices. It would not just be what happened, but how their parents would tell the story that would matter someday to those girls.

In May of 2018, I received a message over FaceBook from a stranger that I almost deleted but then read.

“I live in a house you used to live in on Devonwood. I found a box of your things up in the crawl space. Memorabilia you might want, like photos and poetry.”

Devonwood was where I lived before John and I moved up to Elkhaven. It had been fifteen years since I lived there. Curious, I drove over to pick up the box.

I rifled through papers while still parked outside that house where my sons had spent their first years of life. There were high school year books and binders full of poetry from my teenage years. I could’ve lived without all of it.

Until I found envelopes in my mother’s handwriting, letters she wrote when I moved to California. One written just after I started graduate school:

I hope that someday you have more of what I have, the joy of reading and learning for the joy of reading and learning. This fall, however, excess time would only allow you to pay more attention to the Presidential elections and they aren’t much fun. I will cast my vote (for Dukakis) but beyond that I believe whoever get in, the people are going to begin to prevail. I’m going to encourage everyone to write the President often with feedback, suggestions, demands, etc.

I held the packet of letters to my chest. There it was, my mother’s voice.

It is memorial day weekend, and many will be remembering the stories of those who are gone. I’ve been thinking lately about how often we focus on the stories we haven’t heard yet. The war stories that someone might take to the grave. The things parents didn’t tell us about their own childhood. And those stories no doubt have great value.

But lately I’ve been thinking too, about the stories I’ve heard over and over. Maybe I have even had the thought, not this one again. Only these days, I may reach for a pen or ask if I can turn on the recorder. These days, I’m more apt to listen. Maybe at first because I recognize this person could be gone. But then, then, because they are here.

More Resources

Normally I’ve been including links here, but this week I want to recommend the voice memo feature that comes standard on most phones if you haven’t already found it it. On the iPhone it is usually grouped with utilities like the calculator.

It makes for a very easy way to collect family stories whether people are apart or together. Just push one button and you can audio record a short or long story that will be saved in an audio file to your phone and can be sent to loved ones via email or text attachment.

For inspiration listen to Story Corp podcasts.

Grandma Jean holding her newest grandchild, Ryan, and with new mom, my Aunt Gail.

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May 15, 2020June 14, 2020

Like This

Tending to Endings (twenty)

This post will not be funny. This will not be funny because like many of you, I have been living in relative seclusion for I-lost-count-of-how-many days and I have learned things about myself. For instance, I have learned that I am relatively disciplined when it comes to writing and moderate exercise and cleaning the kitchen every day. But regarding laughter and playfulness and lightheartedness? For that, I apparently require the village.

I have even found myself envying friends who are quarantining with kids. Yes, they have to figure out how to attend video work meetings while simultaneously homeschooling and keeping an infant alive. But there is a chance that in the middle of an endless day when things feel heavy and uncertain, a couple toddlers will show up in a viking cap and ski goggles.

Once my kids got older and moved out, it was often my co-workers who helped save me from myself on a regular basis by making me laugh. People often say the favorite thing about their work are the people, and it was certainly true for me. During some of the most stressful weeks of the semester, faculty would pull out an art project or make crepes in the kitchen or launch a game of Telephone Pictionary.

My friends at the college still help give me perspective. Because, while I can’t force funny, I can put myself in a place where it is more likely to happen. For instance, anywhere in the vicinity of my friend Maia who has a talent for being hilarious. While I’m complaining about the clunkiness of relation-shipping on Zoom, Maia is busy amusing herself, her math students, and an ever growing audience of Facebook followers with her daily Zoom wardrobe and scene changes.

My mom was funny. In fact, her sense of humor was one of the things that got me through during those difficult times towards the end of her life. I remember a moment when we were first bringing in hospice care and we were participating in the intake interview which basically meant that our nurse, Noelle would ask questions, and my mom would look to my dad and I to answer. Alzheimer’s had made even simple questions difficult.

At one point during the visit my Noelle asked how long my parents had been married and my dad answered they had been happily married for fifty-four years.

“Hasn’t it been fifty-five?” I asked.

“Well, fifty-four of them were happy,” my mom interjected. “There was that one.”

That moment helped Noelle get to know my mom more than any of her other questions, and they became quick friends.

One of the greatest gifts of spending six months living with my parents was discovering that they were truly in love. I could tell because they could still make each other laugh and they did so often and for their own amusement. They sang old drinking songs from college and had a patter with each other that was improvisational yet familiar.

One evening my parents and I were on the lanai watching the sun put on a particularly spectacular show, turning the ocean and sky bright gold.

“This is heaven,” mom said.

Which I took as an opportunity for a serious conversation. My mom was approaching the end of her life, after all, and it was difficult to discuss death especially with the confusion of her disease.

“What do you think heaven is like, really?” I asked.

And she looked at me and my father and spread her hands open to the sky and said, “Like this.”

Never one to let go of a goal easily, and also, because I was curious, I asked, “What about people who died before you like your mom? Do you think you see them?”

She looked at me, nodded,”Yes, I think so.”

“What about people you didn’t like very much?” my dad teased.

Well, they are there, but you don’t have to talk to them.” Her half-smile let me know she knew she was funny.

These moments were gifts not only because they made me laugh, but also because they told me my mom was still herself.

Tuesday my friend Patty and I went for our weekly walk which her husband calls our anti-social walk now that we keep space between us (even my friend’s spouses are funny). This time we decide to hit the trails and on the way up it starts to drizzle. I explain how I planned this whole blog about humor and playfulness. I thought I would be great fun to play all week as research, but then I couldn’t even think of anything fun to do, which was really depressing.

Patty laughed, which was exactly the right response, and I continued to describe my angst about not being able to lighten up enough to write about lightening up. Loudly because we were antisocial distance walking and all. Plus, the rain was getting stronger.

And as we reached the top of the ridge, and I could see the mountains in the distance, I noticed a peculiar green tint to the clouds that I hadn’t seen earlier and not very often at all in Boise. Then the skies opened up and just dumped on us.

We stood there a minute at the top of the ridge stunned by rain and its intensity. Even the the mountain bikers seemed impressed straddling their bikes on a knoll above us and staring upward as the sky let loose.

Then lightening flashed and brightened whole sky and Patty said, “Whoa,” and we began our way down. I counted in my my head like I did as a child during midwestern summer storms. One one-thousand, two and then the thunder cracked and Patty and I quickened our pace to a brisk walk-jog, rain pelting down drenching our clothes and our selves, both of us laughing.

Yes, I thought, like this.

More Resources

In case you, too, need some help lightening up, here are some recent links that made me laugh.

An article about Maia Zooming Her Best Life.

For those who don’t have enough kid humor in you lives already, this collection of funniest parent tweets reminded me.

If you haven’t yet watched John Krasinski’s Some Good News series, here is the most recent episode that includes a reunion of The Office cast.

And if you have a large quarantine household or are motivated to figure out how to do this on Zoom, here are simple instructions to Telephone Pictionary. Instructions are straightforward but the game itself promises silly fun.

Tending to endings aims to build community and conversation around end-of-life matters. If you would like to subscribe, please leave your name and email below. It is cost-free and ad-free. I will not share you email. If you would like to leave comments and you don’t the comment box below, click here.

May 8, 2020June 14, 2020

Not Knowing

Tending to Endings (nineteen)

It’s been strange these past couple months because while on one hand I have been reeling with everyone else with the rapid fire pace of Covid-19 and how it has dismantled much of everyday life, on the other hand, some of it feels familiar and like an extension of what started for me on November 6, 2018 when I took leave from my very busy job at a community college to go to Chicago to help my dad care for my mom.

Now that I have perspective on the arc of that story, I tend to forget that I saw my trip as fairly defined when I left Idaho for Chicago. Mom’s health was deteriorating due to Alzheimer’s, and she had painful wounds from radiation after her second bout with vulvar cancer. My dad and my sisters had taken her to specialists and the wounds still were not healing. She had even ended up at the emergency room. Also, my dad was recovering from hip replacement surgery.

My plan was to stay with my parents until they were both well enough to travel to their winter home in Maui, and then I’d help them get settled there and return home. I had a goal and twelve weeks of family medical leave if needed.

Just before I arrived, a doctor recommended a hyperbaric oxygen therapy for my mom that sometimes helps treat radiation wounds. I arrived just in time. My assignment involved waking up at 5:15 each morning and driving to the hospital and talking a woman with Alzheimer’s into sitting in a large metal tube for two hours. The therapy would take 20-30 sessions, depending.

My dad and I do well with goals, and we proceeded like we were training for a marathon. We marked each treatment on the calendar and sent each other high-five emojis from the hospital when Mom was safely in the chamber, the oxygen hissing into the capsule.

We overcame obstacles. An early snowstorm and icy roads closed the schools and kept all of the other patients and many hospital staff home one morning. But we made it, and waited for plows to free the chamber’s exhaust system from piles of snow so my mom could get her treatment. One morning my mom who was in pain didn’t want to get out of the tub, and my dad and I pleaded and bargained with her at the door until she finally said, “Fine, I know how important this is to the two of you.” And I helped her into her green scrubs while my dad brought the car around to the front of their condo building so we could make it just in the nick of time.

Weekend mornings we would stand over the calendar and calculate our progress. One day we saw were on target for making it to Maui before Christmas.

Only, my Mom’s pain wasn’t going away. Recently it had begun to seem worse. Her doctor prescribed stronger pain medication. Then, twenty-three treatments in and just after Thanksgiving, we took her to another specialist where we learned the cancer was back. My dad and I were deflated, defeated.

I’ve been thinking a lot about an essay I read recently by Elizabeth Outka published in the Paris Review about the literature of pandemics and particularly Kathrine Anne Porter’s, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, set during World War I and the influenza pandemic of 1918. The essay grapples with the questions of uncertainty the characters face in an ever changing situation. Outka writes,

The past is always another country, but the speed at which knowledge becomes outdated, naivete turns to realization, and basic truths change is dizzying during a pandemic. In “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Porter wove her own paradigm-altering experience into a broader meditation on the vertigo induced by such shifts…
One’s reality doesn’t simply shift in a pandemic; it becomes radically uncertain—indeed, uncertainty is the reality. The unpredictability of the COVID-19 virus and all we don’t know about it means we have no idea where we are in the story or even what story we are in. Is this the first wave of something even deadlier to come? Have we reached the top of the curve? What’s the scope of the tragedy? Is the economy the real story? What do we think we know now that may prove fatally wrong? The narrative of uncertainty causes many of us to turn to genre fiction and predictable movies (even if they are about disaster)—they allow us to pull down another story like a shade and sit in a place where we already know the ending.

I don’t know if being a writer makes me more prone to wanting to figure out the whole story when I’m still in the middle, or whether it is just being human. Caregiving it seems is particularly prone to this state of not knowing. And my tendency in the middle of it all is to grasp at meaning, to try and see the whole picture, as though in figuring out the story, I will know how I will be able to stand it.

My mom’s story shifted many times over the next six months, and mine did too. I remember for a while after we had made it to Hawaii and my mom was on hospice care, there was a stretch of time when she was not sleeping well. She would wake up in the middle of the night and feel like she couldn’t get air. The nurse brought an oxygen machine and ordered anti-anxiety medication and Dad and I took turns staying up, walking around the condo with my mom holding her so she wouldn’t fall. None of it felt ok and we were low on sleep and we didn’t know if she would ever be able to rest again.

“It is not like a marathon,” I told my dad, “because in a marathon you always know what mile you are on.”

Caregiving is more like being in an open water ocean swim with no shore in sight. It is disorienting to not know how far you have to swim or how to pace yourself. You can’t even hope for the shore to come into view because when that happens, it also means, you will no longer have your mother.

One thing that helped me then and helps me now is admitting that my current job is not to try to figure out the whole story. It’s not, as my mind always initially tells me, to fix the catastrophe, whether it is a pandemic or cancer or Alzheimer’s. Maybe that should be obvious, but as soon as I am afraid for someone or something I love, old habits tend to rear their head.

Sometimes I think humility is the sleeper of superpowers. When I let go of the thing I cannot control and give into the reality of not knowing, I can ask the question: Ok, I guess my role here isn’t to fix or even to steer the whole global situation, so what is it?

Always I find something in front of me I can do with my particular skills and sphere of influence. Invariably, it feels too small for the conditions. Still, I can begin. Finding purpose buoys me, and I can swim.

I think now about my mom and I during one of those sleepless nights. It was 3:11 am when I awoke to the safety alarm and found her standing next to her bed, too agitated to sit much less sleep. She wasn’t having any of my reassurances. She wanted to go home (she was home). She wanted me to let her put on her shoes (we did, then undid). We leaned against each other, walking like two drunks around the condo, her balance gone due to dementia and me, groggy, and exhausted, but the more sober friend, holding her up.

I talked about the ocean and the moon. I rattled off stories from her childhood and hoped the medication would kick in. She asked me again and again to take her home. It was almost dawn when she was willing to sit on my bed and we talked about the house she grew up in, each adding details about the different rooms until finally, we slept.

That night, I was there for her to lean against. For that small thing.

More Resources:

Comfortable with Uncertainty, by Pema Chodran

Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Anne Porter

“How Pandemics Seep into Literature,” Elizabeth Outka, Paris Review, April 8, 2020.

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May 1, 2020June 14, 2020

Imperfect Plans

Tending to Endings (eighteen)

A friend recently sent me a link to an end-of-life planning guide, a checklist her daughter had passed along to her. It came to her the way these things often do—because her daughter had lost someone and then had to try to retrieve all of the necessary information to take care of loose ends which involved figuring out accounts and passwords and estate paperwork and utility providers. It is often a daunting project full of frustration.

It made me think of that question asked on medical dramas: Are your affairs in order? To which even after all my talking and writing about tending to endings, I can still only answer, some of them.

I was grateful for the list. A stay-at-home order during a global pandemic seemed a very good time for end-of-life planning. I didn’t want our kids to have to wade through everything or guess at what we would want.

Then, I opened up the webpage and saw twenty-six different templates, most requiring me to gather information from various locations. I looked at the cabinets in my office and thought of the information stored on various bank and institutional websites or in boxes in the garage. I looked at the blinking curser on the fillable form and then I closed the file.

This isn’t the first time I’ve begun this project. In fact, last year when my mom was sick it started to seem rather important. None of it more so than my will, which I had not revised since I was a single parent 18 years ago, which means I’ve blown past at least five of the suggested times experts say you revise your will.

I had coffee with a friend who is a lawyer, “Do John and I need a lawyer, or can we just write out what we want?” I asked. “We don’t have much.”

“Have you and John adopted each other’s kids?” she asked.

“In our hearts, we have.” Which is pretty much how I like to do things, with all of my heart and saving the pesky legal details for last. John and I didn’t even wed until five years together. By then our lives and families were very much married in by practicalities and commitment and love.

“You need a will,” she said. And then she described a scenario that involved a car accident in which one of us dies and the other is in a coma and then dies a week or two later. The point being, without a good will, we run the risk of inadvertently disinheriting one set of kids.

That seemed pretty important. I went home and told John, and we talked about it and agreed we needed to get on it. Then another year passed.

There is something about having to distill life’s most emotional transitions into legal language that stumps me. These feel like sacred decisions that for the sake of legal clarity have to be worded as though we are in a courtroom.

And some of my trouble has to do with how I work and think. When writing, for example, I lean towards what some would call an organic process. Others might call it a mess.

There are writers who start with structure and then flesh out their ideas. They find outlines helpful. They think the academic five-paragraph-essay demystifies the writing process. They understand and actually use bullet journals. My journal, by comparison, is a combination of a computer file in Scrivener, a soft leather-bound book on my shelf, a spiral that also contains to-do lists, and index cards I carry when walking then fold and toss in a box (with thanks Anne Lamott).

I begin every project with far too much material and I have to write and write before I even know what I really want to say. Only then can I pare away what doesn’t belong and then rebuild again.

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. –William Stafford, A Way of Writing

And so a fillable form with its blinking boxes doesn’t really work as a starting point for me. Not for something important like a will or a death planning guide.

Instead, on the second week of our stay-home order during the coronavirus pandemic, I sat down with John to talk about what we wanted to happen to our estate if something happened to one of us. He is 64. I am 55. We have five grown children between us. The conversation was long overdue.

Each of us and all of our kids are are generous. We share well and we all prioritize many things above finances. John and I love and admire and respect the kids we brought into the world and the ones who became family later. We wanted things to be equal. Still, the more we talked the more we saw that even a goal of being fair isn’t always simple. Not from every angle or given every variable.

Our family lacks the symmetry of the Brady Bunch. My sons were six when John and I first got together, and John has helped to raise them. John’s daughters were adults and living very independently when John and I met. Karris, Amy, and Marcy are my family, but I didn’t parent them. Our kids love and admire and enjoy each other, but they were not all raised as siblings in the same home.

John and I talked through things and then drafted a letter that included not only information about property, but the basics of our advanced directives and who our executor would be and where we would keep more specific instructions. We created an In-Case-of-Death (ICOD) folder that is still in progress and that we will continue to add to. We included a section in the letter about how each of us felt about death. And life, too. It included quite a bit about how we felt about them.

We invited discussion. At first I worried. What if we explained something poorly, what if we offended someone, what if we had missed something, what if what we thought was fair seemed unfair to one or all of them? What if they thought we were weird for sending such a personal letter? What if it caused discord?

And then, of course, it came to me that any of those things would be fine. They would be fine because we are still here and we could listen and talk them through, which is so much better than having that response after one or both of us are gone.

Our plans are imperfect, and we are far from done. But I feel much, much better for having started the conversation and the paperwork. And really, can something called affairs, ever truly be in order? We call them that because they are in flux and hard to pin down with a better, more specific word. Our affairs don’t just mean the numbers, but the tasks undone and promises made and amends still owed and the details of our life which is still in progress.

At first what received back from our kids was crickets. At least for a couple days. Then, eventually, from each, sometimes with a bit of prodding, acknowledgement and appreciation for taking the time and being clear. And kindness.

When I talked to one of my sons, Dylan, he said, “Yes it all seems fine. It’s hard to think about, it seems a bit morbid. Maybe that’s not the right word.”

“I think of death as natural, though. It will happen to all of us.”

“Yes, I know. But just because it happens to everyone doesn’t mean it’s not serious.”

And I knew what he meant, and I was grateful even that he saw it that way. It is serious, maybe even sacred.

Sometimes I wonder if we avoid conversations about dying as much out of fear of intimacy as fear of death. Our wishes surrounding death and our anxieties, too, speak to what we hold most dear, what we don’t want to lose, what part of our heart we hope will continue to live.

More Resources:

If you are interested in the list of tools my friend sent to help organize end-of-life documents you can find them on the at livingsmartguides.

If you would like a more organic method of thinking through end-of-life matters, I found these questions helpful in getting started:

Who do I want to make decisions if I can’t make medical decisions for myself and what information do they need?
Do I have any unfinished relationship work? What to I want people to know?
Who will take responsibility of pets, children or other dependents.
What happens to the property when I die?
What happens to my body when I die?
Where is everything and how do people access it?
What spiritual practices or end-of-life services do I want?
Do I want a legacy project or memorial fund?

A book I’ve mentioned before that has helped me a great deal and that includes a planning guide is Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying, by Sallie Tisdale.

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