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April 24, 2020June 14, 2020

The Marrow

Attention is the beginning of devotion. –Mary Oliver, Upstream.

Tending to Endings (seventeen)

Last Saturday my twin sons turned twenty-five. I don’t think about my pregnancy story as often as I used to, but during this time of isolation and uncertainty when most of us not on the front lines have orders to stay home (which feels both difficult and not very heroic), it has certainly come to mind.

The boys were due on May 17 of 1995 and I went into preterm labor on January 29, far too early. Their father, my husband at the time, drove me to the hospital, and I was admitted and placed on an IV of magnesium sulfate, a drug that relaxed every muscle in my body to the point where it took effort to lift my hand or move my leg. Only my brain remained unaffected. I stayed aware, worried.

The nurses kept upping the dosage until I could no longer open and close my jaw, until it took effort to make myself blink. Until, finally, the contractions slowed. I watched the sluggish heartbeats of my sons, also affected by the drug, marking slow time on the monitor. I could not take my eyes off of this evidence of life.

It was early in February when I was assigned a home healthcare nurse and sent home with a pump to administer a different medication and orders to to stay in bed full-time. I had been a teacher and a coach and a triathlete. I rode hundreds of miles a week and and ran in the hills for fun. I stayed up late grading papers and planning lessons and creating events for my high school students. In those days, my self-esteem was very much defined by productivity and achievement. Staying in motion was my mental health strategy, the way I managed fear. Now, my babies’ lives were at stake and all I could do to help was to be still and drink water. I would’ve been far more comfortable being ordered to climb Mt. Everest.

I have thought about that time a lot during our Stay-at-Home order, which in Boise is in its 30th day. How impossible it seemed in 1995 to be still during a time that was so wrought with uncertainty. How necessary it was. How much I gained that I didn’t even know would be part of the package. I think of Thoreau, who, in Walden, writes about seeking that kind of clarity:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms,…

Sometimes the woods come to us. In fact, in my case spiritual growth almost always shows up looking more like crisis or upheaval than like a pilgrimage or a quest. More like preterm labor or a pandemic.

Not that my days on the couch looked spiritual or productive. In many ways, I was a wreck. I couldn’t think of anything serious or important. I started and abandoned craft projects. I watched reruns of Northern Exposure and made it through most of alphabet-titled detective novels. I spent a lot of time trying not to worry.

But I also loved on my sons knowing this might be all we had. We counted off days waiting for hearts, brains, and lungs to fully form.

Each day, I lived on the couch with my palm on my belly. I held it there for reassurance that they were still with me and also because it was the closest I could get to holding them. I waited for them to kick and watched evidence of limbs move across my expanding skin. I told my sons stories and secrets and I sang them songs. I wanted them to hear my voice as well as my heartbeat. I wanted my sons to feel loved.

I think about the community I had surrounding me even in that isolation. The boys’ dad brought me news from work and pints of Haagen-Dazs. Friends would drop off groceries and piles of books. My mom flew in from Chicago for a few weeks and we played Scrabble nonstop. The kindness of others provided a lifeline from the outer world while I was preoccupied with this inner one. The womb of the living room, the womb beneath my palm. The babies and I, we were all gestating.

We made it 77 days. At 36-weeks, I was able to turn off the medication, and go for my first walk in three months, along the canal bank. It was a brisk sunny day, the cherry trees were blooming, and I was dizzy with the freedom of being outside. Also my belly was unbelievably huge.

That night, April 18, 1995, Gabe and Dylan were born and I was finally able to hold my sons in my arms. They had hearts and lungs and deep brown eyes and souls I already knew. They were able to come home with us.

I know no other way to get to the marrow without also tasting the fact of death. I don’t mean in the way of daredevils. I don’t need to brush up against danger to know life isn’t permanent. I need only to remember. And to pay attention.

Today my sons are twenty-five and I am fifty-five and all of us are here. Today, I hike up the hill behind my house and pull a deep breath into my lungs. I know that, in the words of Jane Kenyon, one day it will be otherwise. It will be cancer or Covid or Alzheimer’s or something completely unexpected. But today, I hold my palm to the earth. I am here.

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April 17, 2020June 14, 2020

Touching Ground

Tending to Endings (sixteen)

Last week, on the first anniversary of my mom’s death, my sisters and dad and I planned to meet by Zoom. Like many, my family has taken our grief online. The digital world has made incredible things possible during the pandemic. John Prine dies and we are able to hear Brandi Carlile pay tribute from her home in Washington. Doctors and nurses help patients near death say goodbye to loved ones over FaceTime. And families gather in separate living rooms and grieve via video conferences. While it isn’t the same as holding and hugging, it is a form of connection, something more than we would’ve had, say, during the Influenza epidemic of 1918.

I’m so grateful for digital opportunities to see one another and talk, and yet, it is not enough. Too many senses are missing, particularly touch. And, timing, too, that delay, the fraction of lost time that affects laughter and eye contact and the ease of anything in unison. No one ever says jinx, you owe me a soda on Zoom. You cannot say a prayer aloud in unison. You cannot feel the music come through your own chest as someone sings, or the warmth of a shoulder near yours, or the clasp of another’s hand.

And then there is the leaving. The way loved ones are there one minute and then gone and their absence is so complete, the screen making clear they were only an apparition. I now am aware that when humans leave a room, their warmth, their scent, the echo of their movements remain awhile. People linger. After video chat, there is only the loneliness of the computer screen.

And so, as grateful as I am for the chance to see and converse with loved ones, sometimes, video conferences leave me feeling not quite grounded, missing something, off kilter. I’ve learned to balance digital time with earthier things.

The morning of April 9, a few hours before our meeting time, I turned off the news and closed my computer and began collecting items that belonged to my mom. Mom had a saying in our house—no shrines—to which she meant our bedroom was not going to be our bedroom after we left. Mine was quickly made into an office with sailboat pictures where my swim team ribbons used to hang. So a shrine isn’t exactly in line with Mom’s personality. I can hear her laughing, saying, What, you think I’m holy? Some kind of saint?

Still, it felt right to hold the objects she held. A pewter plate from her collection and the sugar bowl from her tea set that was always in our living room, the books she read until the bindings went soft. I included one of the stuffed bears she brought to the hospital when my the boys were born and Scrabble tiles arranged in the names of her grandchildren. I brought fresh cut flowers from the yard and found a photo of her with a classic Jane expression and her arms reaching towards the sky.

As the table came together, I decided, she would’ve appreciated my creation which was more along the lines of a Day of the Dead Altar than a shrine, a collection of things that she enjoyed here on earth. In any case, I loved it, and it felt good to hold things she held dear.

Once the day warmed, I went for a walk on the trails wearing Mom’s jacket. And when I returned, I knelt in the grass and planted iris bulbs and her favorite, lily of the valley. It felt good to have earth in my hands. I thought about all the days I came home from school and found my mom sitting in her garden, happily working in the dirt. These small acts of doing made me smile.

I know I’m not alone in my longing for tactile experiences during these days marked by collective and personal grief. Homeschoolers leave love notes on trails in the form of painted stones. Friends post photos of knitting creations and one mails me a paper crane and a letter penned on stationary. We find solace in sensory experiences: dancing, holding, making, planting, breathing.

Once it was late enough to text to Maui without waking Dad, I sent photos of the altar to him and my sisters and aunt and uncle. Amy followed with a photo of a tree her family will plant in their yard, a Jane Magnolia. And Sandy sent a photo Loa, born to my brother-in-law’s cousin and his wife that very morning. A new baby in the family. Mom would love that best of all.

Sometimes when I make room for grief, joy slips in. Grief is such an unpredictable force, isn’t it? Just when I think I know what is coming, it shifts again into something new.

April 9 was a beautiful day in Boise, and at three o’clock I sat on the back patio and opened my laptop so I could gather with my sisters and my dad via Zoom. We talked about our current lives, and how all our kids were doing. We considered what Jane would think of all of this, sure she would be philosophical and positive. She would be sending people book recommendations for saving the world and talking on the phone with friends. “She definitely would be supporting all of the restaurants by ordering carryout every night,” Sandy said. We all laughed.

“She would want to gather, though,” Amy said. And we knew, then, that Mom wouldn’t let a pandemic keep her from doing so. This is a woman who, in the 1980s set up live link via satellite in our basement (years before Dish network or internet) so that neighbors near our home in Chicago could attend Beyond War meetings with people in Palo Alto. (My dad notes that she did need some help with installation from him and Tim Kelly down the block).

In 1988 Beyond War awarded a peace prize to Reagan and Gorbachev for their work on ending the Cold War, and Mom helped organize an event in Evanston so hundreds of people could participate in the ceremony that linked the groups on different continents by what they called a space-bridge, and what we would now call video conferencing.

Mom would’ve found Zoom before any of us.

During all of this, Jane would be Jane—the woman who hates cooking and supports local business and more than anything wants peace on earth and good will toward all. Mom always knew the world could be (has always been) a heartbreaking place. Her response was to build bridges. To put her energy into whatever she could do.

On the anniversary of my mom’s death, most of what I felt was grateful, happy even, to have my sisters and father all together, and my mom, too, in whatever way is possible. When our call came to a close and we expressed our love and said goodbye, I shut off Zoom and felt the sun warm on my skin, watched birds flit from branch to branch. Our laughter lingered still.

More Resources

Some of my motivation for this column came from a video Creating Tactile experiences to grieve death in the time of Covid and also an article, Funerals and Dying in Abstentia, by Sarah Chavez, executive director of The Order of the Good Death. The article offers both digital and tangible ways of honoring loss in the time of Covid-19.

The full collection of resources where I found these can be accessed at Pandemic Resources for End of Life in a newsletter published by the National Home Funeral Alliance.

Last week I included an episode of Unlocking Us on grief. David Kessler also has a website devoted to online grief support grief.com

If you have any resources or ideas about how to honor loss during a pandemic, please feel free to share them in the comments section. (If you don’t see a place to leave comments, click here.)

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April 10, 2020June 14, 2020

Your Words

I feel lucky these days to be a word person. Even though I miss physical closeness, writing and storytelling have always been important forms of connection for me, too.

When I was a kid, my Aunt Carol would send us letters from Colorado and my family would sit around the kitchen table while my mom read them aloud. My aunt’s letters were newsy and insightful and funny. Reading them gave us a sense of intimacy—different than when we were all together with my cousins in the same room—but just as true.

Books, too, have provided me with a feeling of closeness that is difficult to explain. To this day it is hard to believe that Laura Ingalls Wilder or Beverly Cleary or Mary Oliver or Toni Morrison never knew me. Their writing seems to suggest otherwise. Not because the details of our lives were the same (they weren’t), but because the intimacy of their writing made me feel understood. Known.

Your letters did that for me this week, too, gave me opportunities to connect.

Next week, I plan to write about resources people have found or created to tend to end-of-life matters in the time of coronavirus. Like every other area of life, distancing measures have upended our normal ways of caregiving, mourning, and honoring end-of-life.

I want to share one with you this week that number of friends sent my way, Brene’ Brown’s podcast, Unlocking Us with grief expert David Kessler. Kessler speaks to why story sharing is so often part of our grief process:

Each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesn’t mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining.

Your stories about your loved ones were gifts this week. Thank you. And thank you for bearing witness.

It’s coming up on the 1st Anniversary of my 16-year-old nephew’s death by suicide followed 10 days later by my Auntie’s death of alcoholism. I’m experiencing, in hospice terminology, intense anticipatory grief. The quarantine is making it so much harder because I want to be near my cousins at this time to hug. Grief needs human touch.
Mindy Franssen

I lost my husband at age 52 to cancer and it shattered the nicely constructed future that included retirement, travel, and artistic growth. Every summer, both before Rob died and after, my parents would come from Kansas to visit and stay for a week or so. We would always plan a big pool party with family and friends. Over the years it became a noisy annual bash that we all looked forward to.
Three years after Rob’s death, we had our summer party. As we were gathering dishes and putting things away, I stopped in my tracks and started crying. My tears were triggered by a wonderful and horrible mix of emotions. I was stung by the realization that I hadn’t thought of Rob at all. I hadn’t said to myself “Rob would have loved this. I’m miss him so much”.
The realization that my life was moving on and I was making progress was a GOOD thing. But the realization that I had forgotten him during this event was also devastating. He had been such a big part of it: cooking, socializing, and celebrating. The pain came rushing up, full strength and unbound, a mixture of pride and sorrow. I had reached a turning point, a milestone, in a messy process that still continues, sixteen years later.
Susie Fisher

My Nonie (maternal grandmother) is forever the voice in my head. It is her wisdom I lean on when I don’t know what to do, and if I’m lost or need advice I always think “What would Nonie say?” Since she went home, I have missed her physical presence, but because she was such a big part of my upbringing (she was more a mother to me than my mom – she truly cared and would show up when I needed her) I knew what she would say at any given moment. I don’t necessarily mark the anniversary of her passing, but I honor her and include her at every moment when I need her and her wisdom – thus honoring her beyond the anniversary of her death.
Here are some Nonie sayings that stay with me:
They’ve got the same pants to get glad in that they got mad in.
Let’s not go borrowing trouble from tomorrow.
If I see something I’ve never seen before, I’ll throw my hat at it.
Let’s buy some gum so we can have something to chonk on.
And my favorite:
I love you Hessie Annie – to the moon and back.
Leslie

My mom and dad died five months apart to the day in 2001 in June and November. I was happy my mom missed 9/11 and that my dad was so out of it by then, that he basically missed it too. My mom died of lymphoma and my dad of pancreatic cancer. To this day I miss them both, but especially my mom. I never realized how very much I loved her until she wasn’t here anymore. However, with time, the pain fades and I remember the good times and I smile. I sometimes dream about my parents. In the dream they are much younger than when they died, and it is always a happy occasion.
My mother’s birthday is May 22. My best friend’s mother’s birthday is May 23. She is also deceased. Around the time of their birthday, the two of us always go out for a special lunch honoring our mothers. We have a lovely time together and reminisce for a few hours.
Carol Y

What I remember about July 24, 1956 is walking into our back porch to meet my sister who told me our mother died. I was coming home from my summer job with Pepsi Cola and had just completed my junior year in high school. I do remember thinking that this cannot be. I knew Mom had not been well, but everyone told me she would get better. Times were different in 1956. We did not talk about the possibility of losing one’s mother to cancer.
The following morning, I got up and went to work only to be met by the executive who also was our neighbor. He told me I should go home. No one had told me how to act in that situation, that you didn’t go to work the day after your mom died. The rest of my loss process is a blur, though I know there was a service and gathering at the cemetery.
The part I held onto for a long time was I wish I had told mom how kind she was. Not just to me but to everyone who knew her. How proud I was that she was my mother and her part in making our home a happy place.
Ron Stavoe

The last eight of my 62 years have included many losses. Just as I get to calm water and whoosh, here comes another loss. All along the way there have been loved ones and dear friends by my side. One of my favorite things I heard from a friend years ago and I like to share with others is “God is Fancy.”
I always think of my mom in the spring. She died on the first day of spring and her birthday was May 12, so spring flowers always remind me of her. Irises were one of her favorites. Not long before she died, I transplanted some of my mom’s iris into my yard in Montana.
A few years ago, I went through a very painful divorce. I left Montana and moved back to Boise in the middle of winter. I was heartbroken because the iris bulbs were buried in snow, so I couldn’t take them with me.
Eventually, as I rebuilt my life in Boise, I was able to buy a beautiful little cottage. That first spring when blossoms began to appear, I discovered the house was surrounded by purple iris. God is fancy.
Just yesterday I was out planting some flower seeds and enjoying the daffodils that are growing and the tulips are about to bloom. And I talked with my mom. I told her I wished she could see my beautiful yard and walk around with me and see all the beautiful flowers. And then I thought, silly me, she is right her with me. Alas, the purple iris, I can feel her winking at me.
Teresa Best McDonald

Thank you for reading Tending to Endings. I would love to read more of your stories! Please consider adding them in the comments section. (If you don’t see a place for comments, click here.) I hope you will also consider subscribing by leaving your name and your email below.

April 3, 2020June 14, 2020

All of It

Tending to Endings (fourteen)

Lately, it has been impossible for me to not think about last year this time. I imagine with a pandemic going on, many of us are more reflective. We likely have more alone time, for one, save those who are front-line workers or parents of young children in which case, thank you, thank you, thank you for showing up each day in these harrowing conditions.

I am pretty sure I am not the only one missing their mom at this time, too. Or missing someone who helped hold them steady who is no longer reachable by phone or zoom.

I alternate between feeling my mom’s absence profoundly, and then, maybe even simultaneously, feeling relieved that she didn’t have to experience this in her fragile state at the end of her life. All of us in my family were at our limit last spring. I cannot imagine adding a pandemic into the situation.

And it occurs to me that a year later, even with Covid-19 begging every minute of our collective attention, my mom’s death is here sitting in the room with me.

There was a time when I would’ve said I would rather honor my mom’s birthday rather than the day she died. And, well, yes, that sounds positive, and logical. In the long run, August 28 will be the day to celebrate all Jane Stavoe brought to this world.

But apparently that does not mean that when April 9 comes around, my heart or my bones will let the anniversary be ignored. I didn’t think about that part.

I know many readers have also gone through the death of someone very close and have more perspective than I do on anniversaries. For next week’s Tending to Endings, I’d like to include some collective wisdom. If you have a story or experience about a death anniversary, I would love to hear from you. I’ve included more details at the end of this post.

I don’t know yet what we will do if anything on April 9, but I know I will be thinking of my mom because I think of her every day. I think of when she was well and I could lean into her wisdom and strength because I can use all of it I can get right now. And I think of how she was at the end, too, having lost her bearings, her body fragile, and yet somehow still grateful and funny and determined to go out loving. I do not want to forget her ending. It has been one of my greatest lessons about love and strength and intimacy. My mom was always my teacher and always will be.

This time last year, my mom moved into a hospital bed in the condo full time. She was no longer able to eat or drink or spend time on the lanai, though the slider in her bedroom allowed a wide view of the ocean. Blue was always her favorite color, and I was grateful she was surrounded by sea and sky.

This time last year, we knew any hour might be Mom’s last. My sister Sandy had just spent her spring break by my mom’s side, and my youngest sister, Amy, was about to arrive. I wrote this in my journal:

I am in the guest room of the condo and I hear the click-click-clicking of Mom’s fancy walker coming from my parents’ room. For a second, I get excited, thinking my mom is up and about, heading towards my room. Then I realized that it is—of course—my dad pushing my mom’s walker. He is storing it in the hall out of the way.
There is a day when you are sad that your mom has to use a walker. And then there is a day when you consider the sound of your mom’s walker coming towards you something to be thrilled about. Last week she was able to use that walker, and today, she is not.
Enjoy all of it. I remind myself.
Or maybe, not enjoy exactly, but love. Love that tonight I can sit with my mom and hear her breathe. And that today when I told her I loved her she smiled and nodded. And that tonight my dad and I watched the sunset from the lanai and talked about how we are sad.
It’s quieter with Bill and Sandy gone; I can get pretty serious, and my sister is good at making me laugh. Today it is harder to not focus on the losses. But my mom is here. And I am here. And my dad is here. And Sandy and Bill are on a plane over the Pacific. And Amy is almost here. And so many friends and family are holding us in their hearts.

All of It is no small feat, and probably impossible. I didn’t love lots of things about my mom’s ending. But I am so very grateful for the long moments I sat listening to her breathe, loving her.

I hope you will consider sharing your experience with anniversaries, whether the death was last year or many years ago. These can be traditions, or stories, things that surprised you. Ways of honoring the day, or just surviving it. Maybe the anniversary didn’t bring the expected emotion, or maybe there are things you wish you’d done differently. I’m not looking for one particular thing, but rather a wide range of experiences (All of it!), which I think could be helpful to others.

A sentence or a few sentences or a few paragraphs are all fine. Email to Laura@laurastavoe.com. Please let me know if you want your name or initials used, or if you’d prefer anonymity. I don’t know how many I’ll get (I hope, a lot!) or how many I’ll be able to include, but I will respond to your email either way before the post runs next week.

So do not tarry! And please do not worry about saying it perfectly. (Trust me, I know how that goes.) I can help with editing if you would like, but I think your voice and honest thoughts will make them just right.

If you prefer, you can also leave your response in comments below; I may still use it in next week’s Tending to Endings so that more people will get to see it.

Thank you so much for being part of this community.

Much love and strength to you and yours,

Laura

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March 27, 2020June 14, 2020

Room for Grief

Tending to Endings (thirteen)

I welcome grief like it is some unknown beast growling on my front porch in the middle of the night. I lean hard against the door, wedge chairs beneath the handle, brace myself like my life depends on it. Grief slips beneath the kick plate, oozes in through the mailbox, enters my life and my body in ways I find confusing.

One afternoon after I returned from my mom’s Celebration of Life last spring, I met a friend at an Indian restaurant. Over the six months prior I had left my job of ten years, lived apart from my husband and close friends, and cared for my mom during her final months of life.

Even I knew grief was in order. But that doesn’t mean it showed up in ways that made sense.

At the restaurant, we had just made our way to the buffet line when a family joined us. Under normal circumstances, I would grin at the two-year-old who was hopping up and down in front of the naan making her shoes blink. I am a kid person.

But on this day I shot a look at the mom, expecting her to save me from plowing over the toddler. She remained oblivious, traveling back and forth in a very disorganized fashion narrating entrees to the older children who also moved every which way in front of the buffet. Then her husband jumped in line in front of me reaching over his daughter to grab his own bread and moving on.

I carried my empty plate back to the booth to wait so I would not yell at a two-year-old or her parents. It was not empathy that stopped me, but some niggling suspicion that if I unloaded, I would eventually feel embarrassed.

People grieve differently. Some people hike the Camino de Santiago or wail along a wall or build a huge sculpture in the desert.

I become petty and irritable. Or at least that is one sign that I am experiencing loss. Things that normally don’t bother me feel personal and important. Newly aware of the fragility and preciousness of life, I think I should be kind toward all. Instead am self-centered and afraid.

When the pandemic news began ramping up and we were beginning to recognize how our lives were changing, one of my friends posted on facebook, “Don’t forget to take time for yourself to ugly-stress cry.” I read it and thought, oh right, that.

We have lost jobs and school days and music festivals and sports seasons and symphonies and church and therapy and family vacations and retirement funds and graduations and weddings and funerals and coffee dates and the ability to go to the store without fear and hugs from grandchildren and a sense of security however illusionary it may be.

Of course, grief is in order. And it is in me, waiting.

A friend of mine often says, “Grief is not a character defect.” This is comforting and true. But sometimes my grief squeezes into shapes that look a lot like character defects.

I check the news obsessively though I know it makes me feel worse not better and it interferes with my ability to be present for people and for creative work. I am sharp with my husband even though he is a kind person and currently the only human I can hold hands with or sit next to or hug.

One upside of having just gone through a big life loss before this pandemic is that I became aware of my own grief cycle, or maybe more of an avoid-grief cycle. It looked something like this:

Do something productive, let’s say write a chapter of my book
Sense a wave of uncomfortable feelings arise
Pick up my phone and scroll through Twitter to distract myself from the feeling
Berate myself for being undisciplined and unfocused
Feel worse
Repeat

This happened a lot in the early months after my mom died. I was trying to write a book, and I knew time was short. At first I tried to fix steps 1-3, telling myself I needed to Be Present. Let myself feel. Maybe under normal, non-grief conditions that would work.

But not last year, and at some point I decided to just allow that my distractedness was part of my grief. Instead of focusing on being more disciplined, I decided to skip step four altogether. I would notice I was scrolling rather than writing, and I did not have to say one mean thing to myself about it!

In The Five Invitations, Frank Ostaseski writes about how we tend to think the inner critic is motivating us when it is actually getting in our way. He says, “It is neither a conscience nor a reliable moral guide, and it isn’t the voice of wisdom.”

When I skipped judging myself, I could also skip feeling worse. It turns out, four and five were very sticky steps. I got a lot more feeling and a lot more writing in when I let them go. Eventually I even finished a draft of my book.

My judgements–whether aimed at the toddler in a buffet line or my husband or myself–are almost always a futile attempt to regain control. Sometimes they are sneaky. When I say to myself, for instance, other people have it much worse (which is always true) it also carries an implication: Who are you to grieve? As though sadness is a limited resource with only so much to go around.

Today I am sad because my father is far away from family and close friends. The anniversary of my mom’s death is approaching and this is the first year in 57 that he does not have Jane by his side. We can’t fly to Hawaii because of pandemic measures and he shouldn’t return to Chicago until it is safer to do so. I am sad that my dad is alone during such a difficult time.

I have a friend who is caring for parents in much more dire circumstances than we are right now. I’m glad I know today that in order to be available for her, I must be willing to feel my own grief. It is the exact thing that helps me connect with others. It is the foundation of empathy.

Ostaseski writes,

The willingness to be with our suffering gives rise to an internal resourcefulness that we can carry forward into all areas of our lives. We learn that whatever we give space to can move.

Many years ago, my friend Debbie had just graduated from University of Arizona and was planning to join her beloved in Venezuela. She was saying goodbye to friends and packing while he had gone ahead to look for a place for them to live. Then Luis died in a car accident while helping his brother-in-law learn to drive.

Instead of going to Venezuela to begin a new life, Debbie flew there to meet Luis’s family and attend his funeral. As soon as she arrived relatives took shopping for black clothes. She dressed in black for the remainder of the trip. It was helpful, Debbie said, because no one expected her to be normal. Everyone treated her gently and gave her leeway, which was a relief amidst so much lost.

Everyone I know and everyone I don’t know these days is experiencing loss. We are not just in self-isolation, we are in mourning.

During these strange days I find myself walking on the trail with my heart full of love for the earth beneath my feet, for the hikers who smile when they pass, for the hawk circling over head. I am just so grateful to be here.

And ten steps later I want to swear at the runner who doesn’t say thank you when I move out of his way.

Then I begin the climb up the hill where I spot a stone that a child painted and left in a nest of grass. To Mom is penned in crooked letters, and I am standing next to bitterbrush weeping.

This is a lot to have and it is a lot to lose. I’m good with not being normal, for you too. No matter what shape grief comes, it seems wise to make room, to give grace.

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