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March 20, 2020June 14, 2020

Welcome

Tending to Endings (twelve)

It may sound strange to be comforted by a book about death during a pandemic, but I have been reading Frank Ostaseski’s The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach us about Living Fully. I have returned to it morning and night during this last week when so many of us find our lives changing, and it has given me direction and comfort and hope.

The principles will not be new to anyone who has practiced Buddhism or a Twelve-Step program of recovery or studied Brene Brown’s research on vulnerability and whole-hearted living or who knows the tenets of acceptance, humility, and love from a wide variety of traditions.

What Ostaseski does is give generous personal context to the practices, using story to show how they hold even in dire conditions. He takes the hard stuff head-on and gives such relevant, poignant examples that I end up trusting his perspective and being reassured.

Ostaseski began his work with hospice patients in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic. He founded the Zen Hospice Center in California, where he worked for thirty years. More recently, began the Metta Institute which provides education on spirituality in dying. Over many years, he sat with thousands of people as they approached death.

He writes, “I am not romantic about dying. It is hard work. Maybe the hardest work we will ever do in this life. It doesn’t always turn out well. It can be sad, cruel, messy, beautiful, and mysterious. Most of all it is normal. We all go through it.”

Death is normal.

This week I intended to write about hospice, but like so many things, visits have been halted where I have been training to volunteer.

The stories of loss that have been getting to me most lately have been the ones about care facilities on lock-down and the many people who cannot be near their spouses or family or friends. It has been reading about people in Italy who died in isolation and whose families cannot yet come together to honor and grieve them.

My impulse to write this blog and to pay attention to endings myself has in part come from my sense that it is important to be present for people during their final months and days on earth. To bear witness and to share those times. To usher people out of this world lovingly the way we usher them in upon birth.

But even births hardly ever go as planned. Dying, too, involves a great deal we cannot control. Ostaseski’s book offers a window into how to proceed with an open heart anyway.

I have underlined a great deal throughout the whole book, but it is the second invitation, Welcome Everything, Push Nothing Away, that feels most relevant to me this week. Ostaseski explains, “I cannot be free if I am rejecting any part of my experience.”

His personal stories are of his brother’s alcoholism and death, his own triple heart bypass surgery, being sexually abuse as a young teen. So, he really does mean everything. Or, more specifically, everything that already is.

Welcoming what is, as it is, we move toward reality. We may not like or agree with all that we encounter. However, when we argue with reality, we lose every time. We wast our energy and exhaust ourselves with the insistence that life be otherwise…Acceptance is not resignation. It is an opening to possibility. And openness is the basis for a skillful response to life.

In 2001, when anthrax was showing up in the mail and in the headlines, which happened about a month after the World Trade Center bombings, which happened soon after my divorce while I was still grieving and helping my young sons grieve, I had a teaching job that involved traveling to Southern Utah for a backpacking trip with a group of seventh graders. My own kids, kindergarteners at the time, were at home with their dad and I would be out of contact with them for five days. As we drove away from Boise in the vans, I felt vulnerable and uncertain and like the world might really be coming to an end.

At the trailhead, the teachers—four of us—cinched packs on awkward, seventh-grade shoulders, and the heaviest over our own. We walked into the desert among juniper and yucca, over red earth and beneath the clear blue sky.

The first night we slept on the rim of Dark Canyon, where we told stories from our sleeping bags and watched bright Orionids slip across the night sky. The next day, we found springs to refill our water bottles. We were in wilderness, so we took care to watch out for ourselves and each other and the organisms in cryptobiotic soil.

A couple of days into our trip while exploring Mule Canyon, we came upon the dwellings of ancient Puebloans, curved stone shelters shaped by people living more than a thousand years ago. It was impossible not to consider that these people, too, lived and drank from the spring and climbed the towers and slept beneath Pleiades. That the clay and the canyon and the sky had outlasted them, and would outlast us too.

I don’t know why humility reassures me during difficult times, but it does. What I felt in that moment was not that I was insignificant, but that I was connected, part of something vast and beautiful and whole.

When it came time to leave the canyon and we drove to the first small town where there was a gas station and convenience store, we saw the headline on the New York Times, “Twenty-one Senate Employees Test Positive for Anthrax.” It was jarring, but it was not everything anymore. Like the florescent light of the store, it outshone the sun due to proximity, not power.

Like most of us right now, I am unsure of many things. And maybe that is why it helpful to read something that reminds me good can come from not knowing. Ostaseski writes, “The energizing quality of mature hope helps us to remain open to the possibility that while life may not turn out the way we first thought, opportunities we never imagined may also arise.”

All five sections of the book have been compelling, useful: Don’t Wait; Welcome Everything Push Nothing Away; Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience; Find a Place of Rest in the Middle of Things; Cultivate Don’t Know Mind. They have been an antidote to fear and a reminder that humility is not weakness. It is a way towards openness and possibility.

With love,

Laura

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March 13, 2020June 14, 2020

Tell Me More

Tending to Endings (eleven)

I generally don’t focus on regrets. My mom taught me that. There is no point to stewing over what you can’t change, she would say, unless you like to feel bad. And she’d give her small knowing smile. But sometimes the moments I wish I acted differently provide a helpful contrast, a non-example we would call it in education lesson planning.

There was a morning about five Christmases ago when my sisters and their families and mine met in Maui for the holiday. My mom, 75 at the time, did not seem elderly. She walked a couple miles each day. She was very involved with friends and community and life. But there were noticeable memory lapses, more than grasping for a word or mixing up grandchildren’s names.

On this morning, one of my nephews— I will call him Chris here—joined Mom and I in the elevator and was looking at his phone on the ride down to the lobby. When the doors opened, he said, goodbye to us. After he left, my mom said, “Chris didn’t even say good morning. You’d think he didn’t appreciate that we brought everyone here to be together.” I heard hurt and anger in her voice.

I was confused and a little defensive on Chris’s behalf. Mom didn’t believe in using guilt. The sentence didn’t sound like her. Also, we had just had a really good conversation with Chris. He had come to see her first thing that morning.

“I don’t think that’s how he feels,” I said, “We were just talking to him in the condo. He said good morning then.”

My mom stopped walking. “We did? I don’t remember that.” I could tell from her worried look that she really did not remember the conversation we’d had only about twenty minutes earlier.

“Yes, remember, we talked about walking to breakfast tomorrow morning.”

“I’m losing my mind,” my mom said. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

“You’re ok, mom. You just forgot.”

“I don’t feel ok.”

I don’t remember everything I said, but it was along those same lines. We all forget things sometimes. You are fine!

What I wish I was able to say in that moment instead is: Tell me more about what that feels like. It sounds like it might be scary and I don’t want you to feel alone.

Today I see that my own fears got in the way of being able to hear what my mom was saying. I couldn’t see the opportunity, that she was reaching out to me.

It was a year before my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and even longer before I learned to not try to correct or adjust her perspective and instead listen to her feelings. (Something that has proven incredibly valuable in other circumstances if I remember to do it!)

Sometimes I think Alzheimer’s is going to be the thing that finally helps us to turn into a more compassionate culture—compassion for those with cognitive differences, compassion for caregivers and families, compassion for ourselves. One in three seniors dies with Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia. And with more and more of us living to old age, the number of people living with Alzheimer’s is likely to almost triple by 2050. Chances are high that each of us will at some point be close to someone who is affected.

Loving someone with Alzheimer’s means drawing close to a person who is undergoing profound loss. It is a heartbreaking disease that makes everyday life unpredictable. It is difficult to not let fear take over.

But not everything was as bad as I feared. I may regret moments, but I am so very grateful for all of the time that I did have with my mom and all that I learned. I found patience and open-mindedness and compassion are incredibly helpful. So is community. So is self-forgiveness.

Earlier this week a friend and I were talking about how before you know the disease of Alzheimer’s intimately, you think your loved one not remembering you would be the worst thing. It’s what people often ask—Did your mom know you? It was a question I didn’t even know how to accurately answer.

One afternoon my mom’s friend Pat came to visit. My mom wasn’t eating or drinking much. Pat had brought egg salad which had always been a favorite and mom ate spoonfuls from the bowl and groaned at how good it was.

Pat sat close to my mom who was reclining on the chaise lounge on the lanai.

Mom said, “We’ve had a lot of special times together, haven’t we?” I could tell she was searching. Mom had learned over the years to prompt people into giving more context.

Pat held my mom’s hands and looked into her eyes. “Yes, remember our parenting group when all of our kids were small? We’d gather in your kitchen.”

“Oh, I remember that,” my mom said. And I could tell from the glint in her eyes she did.

“And then later we used to come here to Maui and sit out on the lawn of Mahana and talk about books and try and solve all of the world’s problems!”

Mom laughed. “We have a ways to go on that one, don’t we!”

Dave and Pat Partlow and Jane and Ron Stavoe circa 1978

After awhile, Pat had to go, and I walked her to the door. When I returned to the lanai, my mom was staring at the empty chair where Pat had been, and continuing the conversation. “Pat, how are your children doing?” she said, staring intently at the empty chair. I slipped into it and smiled back. I held her hands. I answered as though I was Pat. My mom remained animated, happy. We talked and talked.

I remember that moment as a joyful one. It turns out, my worst fear was not that my mom wouldn’t remember me. It was that my mom would feel afraid and alone at the end of her life. I knew my mom had a very good life, and I didn’t want her ending to be tragic.

My mom had many challenges and difficulties at the end, but it was not tragic. She was surrounded by love and she knew it.

One morning a couple months before her death, my mom and I sat where we had shared coffee so many mornings. We looked out on the Pacific Ocean, the water and the sky still gray in the early light. She said, “It is so beautiful.”

“Isn’t it? Aren’t we lucky?” I said. And when she turned toward me, I could see from the searching look in her eyes, she wasn’t sure who I was.

“It’s ok if you don’t remember this—you have an illness that jumbles up time and place sometimes—but I am your daughter.”

“Really?” she said. “I don’t remember, but you feel familiar.” She smiled. “I have a warm feeling toward you.”

We sat, then, with our arms touching watching the surfers on their boards waiting for waves, watching the sky turn pale, then pink, then blue.

I think now about how close I felt in that moment to my mom, a woman who did not remember that she birthed me, yet knew me still.

For those in the Boise Area, the spring Death Cafe has been cancelled. You can find more info about upcoming related events on the Boise Death Cafe Fb page.

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March 6, 2020June 14, 2020

Early and Often

Tending to Endings (ten)

There is an internet meme that includes some version of the question, What would you do today if you knew you were going to die next week?

Sometimes I think our collective denial about death is so deep that we could just as easily say, What would you do differently if you knew you were going to die?

Eventually. Someday. Ever.

My own denial rears its head in interesting ways. As I’ve launched this project to study end-of-life matters and explore resources in my community, I occasionally worry that by paying attention to death I will somehow call it to me early. Plus, won’t people start thinking of me as that weirdo who is always wanting to talk about dying?

I believe in living for the day. I believe in putting energy into that which we can positively change. Why focus on the ending when there is so much that comes before?

The truth is I do believe there are times when blinders are helpful. One of the hardest things about being a caregiver to a loved one in serious decline is having to navigate our own grief while helping a person who is struggling as their body and brain give way. It is common to tell those caring for loved ones with Alzheimers not read ahead in the books about the disease because it will be too disturbing.

I can’t say I always disagree. At times I went into survival mode just so I had the energy to cope, knowing there will be time to process the myriad of emotions later.

But what if we didn’t wait until the end–or until we were in crisis mode over someone else’s ending–before we accepted that there would be one?

Of course we know we will die. But many of us have had that experience of knowing mortality differently, more deeply, after we brush close to death for one reason or another. I think my question is this–Would we benefit from rubbing up against death earlier and more often?

A few months after my mom died, I soaked in the hot springs in the mountains with my friends Mary Ellen and Malia, both of whom had also recently lost loved ones. We needed healing and a chance to talk with others who wouldn’t think it strange or shocking, all the details of death.

“We should get this information about dying much earlier,” I said. “It’s a lot, when you are grieving and making decisions about where to have your mother’s body cremated and finalizing insurance claims, to also come face-to-face with your own mortality.”

Mary Ellen’s eyes brightened, “Maybe it could come in an owner’s manual you receive upon birth: You are a mortal being. This body will breakdown at some point. Here are some helpful instructions! We could include a packet with advanced directives and options for what you’d like done to the body when you are through with it!”

I laughed. “Or maybe there should be a class in junior high?”

I think we sometimes assume we must have a major life altering event or a cancer scare in order to face our own mortality. And yes, that often works. But there are many cultures in which death is a presumed part of life.

A special issue of Yes! Magazine explores death and includes and overview of rituals and traditions of immigrants who bring the reality of death into everyday life. And as recently as a hundred years ago, family members of all ages had more opportunity to interact with those close to death even here in the U.S. because most people still died at home.

Krista Tippett, host of OnBeing recently was interviewed on Preach, and she spoke about attending Ram Dass’s final retreat in Hawaii a couple months before he died. Ram Dass had been living with the effects of a stroke for the last twenty years that interfered with his ability to move and speak. But he still ran retreats twice a year at his home, and these always included people who were chronically ill and near death. Tippett talked about why it was a profound experience for her to be with people who were actively dying:

It sounds strange to say, but it is incredibly life giving to have the fact that we will all die very openly in our midst, which just led to this really intense dwelling with what life is. And the other thing about this retreat that felt spiritually nourishing to me is that it was a really intergenerational gathering.

This intergenerational aspect is interesting to me because wouldn’t that be one way for all of us to overcome the collective denial of illness and death? To be around people who are near death at different stages of our lives.

There has been movement towards this in Alzheimer’s care. Some of the recent research about the mutual good of relationships between toddlers and Alzheimer’s patients has given rise to programs integrating nursery schools into memory care facilities.

Alive Inside, the documentary that won People’s Choice at Sundance in 2014, also has inspired a host of youth projects including pairing high schools with care centers for experiential based service learning. I’ve included a link to the trailer below, and I highly recommend the entire film.

I do believe we have something to gain in shedding our denial and making peace with death over a whole lifetime rather than seeing it as a task assigned upon getting a terminal diagnosis. In one of my favorite books covering this topic, Anam Cara, John O’Donahue makes a case for just that.

To continually transfigure the faces of your own death ensures that, at the end of your life, your physical death will be no stranger, robbing you against your will of the life the you have had; you will know its face intimately. Since you have overcome your fear, your death will be a meeting with a lifelong friend from the deepest side of your own nature.

One thing I know for sure having drawn close to my mother during her illness and her final days is that I am less afraid of death and more excited about life than I have been in a long time. This is not what I expected, but it is true. I love life more, and I’m less afraid.

Because of course even endings aren’t all bad. Once we learn we can stand them, we see a whole lot more, including the person we love, including beauty and life and grace, even in this.

Thank you for reading,

Laura

If you would like to receive Tending for Endings each Friday, please leave your email address below. It is ad free and cost free and I will not share your information. My aim is to help build community and conversation around end-of-life matters so we can better support one another. If you would like to leave comments and you don’t see a place to do so below, click here. You may also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com.

February 28, 2020June 14, 2020

Body of Grief

We have become death and grief illiterate, Sarah Chavez.

Tending to Endings (nine)

Last week, my sisters and father and my mom’s siblings gathered in Maui, which was the second place she wanted her ashes spread, the first being her garden at home near Chicago. My father said it was strategic on my mom’s part. She wanted all of us to have an excuse for another trip to Maui together. I am certain this is true—I can imagine my mom’s smile as she added this to the will, her giddiness.

I also know that Maui truly is sacred ground to my mom. Mom was very loyal to her true loves: my father for almost sixty years, Maui since their first visit in 1976, the color blue for life.

A lot happened during that trip that may be relevant for Tending to Endings. We had a second celebration of life for Maui Ohana that truly felt celebratory. People reminded us of Mom’s commitment to the children of the island and I thought a lot about legacy and about family, too, and how death reshapes relationships, deepens them.

But when I think about what might be most helpful to share, what I didn’t know ahead of time, it has to do with my mother’s remains.

Honestly, I did not expect the ashes to be much of a thing for me. I guess I thought they would be symbolic. I knew my mother was not experiencing whatever happened to her body after death. I had not given much thought to what happens to my own body after death, planning for cremation because it was affordable and would get the unpleasantness over with quickly.

And so it has been a surprise to me that after my mother died some of my most intense experiences of grief and disappointment and healing have had to do with her body.

In April when my father and I went to Nakamura mortuary, the attendant placed the cardboard box containing my mother’s ashes into my arms, and I was stopped short by the heaviness of the moment.

Grief was no stranger by then. I had been missing my mother ever since the Alzheimer’s took hold. It had been two years since I’d been able to call her to find out the name of name of a flower or to get her take on a book I was reading, or her advice on what to do next with my life. But this grief was different. It came on like the flu, so sudden and severe it made my bones and teeth hurt.

I cradled the box as we walked out to my dad’s convertible and I stood at the passenger door, not knowing where to place her. Not the trunk. The back seat? Should I belt her in?

Finally, I sat and held the box on my lap as my father drove us around the island following the shoreline my mother loved, looking out at the big blue sea, her absence resting against my womb.

I thought it was just her body. But, of course, it was my mother’s body.

The first time my father and sisters gathered to spread my mother’s ashes was four months later on what would’ve been my mom’s 80th birthday. Dad invited us to their Chicago home for hamburgers out on the terrace. After dinner, Dad brought out the cardboard box which contained the plastic container approved for air travel and a plastic bag with the remnants of my mother’s body. It was a lot of packaging to unravel.

My sister Amy asked if we should Facetime my aunt in Colorado. None of us was sure how to proceed. We wanted her to be part of things, but was it wrong to have a camera on the event? Amy shrugged and we called.

I suggested we find a hand trowel so we could till ashes into the soil, and then felt guilty for the suggestion. Was it uncouth to use a shovel? Was I just trying to avoid having to touch the ashes?

We stood in front of geraniums beneath the pear tree. We each took a turn, my sister walked around with the iPhone narrating for my aunt. I silently grew impatient with people for tossing but not tilling. My aunt suggested finding the patch of blue flowers for her scoop since blue was my mother’s favorite color. That seemed right, and I wished I’d done the same.

After we each took a turn, my dad put the box away. We went inside for dessert and my dad and my brothers-in-law talked about the World Series over beers.

When everyone had left, I asked my dad how he felt about the evening. “It was fine,” he said. “I guess I thought we would talk about your mom more than we did.”

Which was exactly how I felt, not that there was anything wrong with the process, but it had not felt all that connected to my mother.

Ash scattering is one more aspect of dying process that we tend not to talk about beyond logistics. What is often missing then is ritual or ceremony, and also the ease that comes when we are comfortable with an occasion. All of these can provide opportunities for connection. Most of us have attended a number of memorials and funerals and celebrations of life before we lose our parents. Most of us have not attended many (if any) ash scatterings or burials before we are responsible for conducting one.

Because I was not comfortable talking about what happened to my mother’s body, I was surprised by the intensity of emotion surrounding each encounter with her ashes. My mother’s body was not just a body. It was the body I had known as long as my own. It was the body that gestated and birthed and held and fed and bathed me. It was the body I eventually bathed. It was the body of my mother for 79 years. Her ashes are evidence of great loss.

Today I believe how we cared for that body at the end of my mother’s life and after she died when the hospice nurse came and we washed and and dressed her one last time and how we eventually came together around those ashes once again in Maui, all helped me and my family to mourn.

One of the things I did before the second trip to Maui was I talked to friends about their ash ceremonies. A friend of mine who recently lost her husband said she and her kids each wrote a letter to their dad and read them before scattering his ashes. This sounded helpful, like it would provide some opportunity for meaning making without being overly structured. My sisters and father agreed.

And then, when my sisters and father and I came together again in Maui, just like my mother planned, we talked about what we wanted, what we would do. It was a loose plan. My mom was not one for formalities.

The night before we discussed the pros and cons of various containers we found in the condo. My sister Sandy landed on a wedge wood blue vase made by one of my mom’s favorite artists on the island. We discussed the best way to get the ashes from the Ziploc baggies my dad used this time for travel through the narrow neck of the vase. Dad cut the corner of the bag to create a funnel and Sandy worked it like a pastry bag. She was very careful. We made jokes about how mom—who couldn’t stand cooking or any domestic chores—would never forgive us if she had to spend eternity in the grout of the kitchen tile.

In the morning, we walk to the shore before sunrise. The sky and the water are the pastel blue of a day about to open. Waves lap at our ankles. We read our love notes to my mom or recite what comes to our hearts. We laugh at my mom’s sense of humor when my aunt’s phone spontaneously begins jangling, playing “Happy,” by Pharrell Williams.

My voice cracks when it comes my turn to tell Mom, Thank you. Thank you for this father this family this life. My sisters reach around my shoulders, hold me. The sand of my mother mixes with my tears mixes with the sand of the sea. We are together, and I know, my mother has gotten her wish.

If you would like to receiving Tendings to Endings each Friday, please leave your name and email below. It is cost free, ad-free, and I will not share your info. My hope is to help build community and conversation around end of life matters. Please feel free to leave comments below or send your thoughts to laura@lauratavoe.com.

February 21, 2020June 14, 2020

Findings

Tending to Endings (eight)

This week I am with my dad and sisters in Hawaii where we are holding a second Celebration of Life for my mom for her Maui friends in a place she considered, as my aunt Carol says, holy ground.

Rather than skip a posting, I figured it was a good opportunity to share a few recent finds by others who are paying attention to endings.

The first two come from a recent issue of Brainpickings, a gorgeous collection of wisdom curated by Maria Popova each week. The link includes both a text and audio version of the poem Cold Solace by Anna Belle Kaufman. [90 sec]

https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/02/03/emily-levine-cold-solace-anna-belle-kaufman/?mc_cid=c72a568675&mc_eid=445b891313

And then below is a Ted Talk by philosopher, writer and comedian Emily Levine that she gave after she was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. [16 min]

Frank Ostaseki began the Zen Hospice Project in 1987, the first Zen Buddhist hospice center in America. Inviting the Wisdom of Death into Life [23 min.]

In this episode of On Being, Krista Tippet and poet and editor Christian Wiman discuss a variety of topics related to death including living with a terminal diagnosis. [52 min]

Christian Wiman — How Does One Remember God?

Finally, on the plane over here I listened to an episode of the new podcast Poetry Unbound about a poem by Marie Howe, My Mother’s Body. [8 min]

https://onbeing.org/programs/a-poem-for-what-comes-with-age/

Thank you for reading, and welcome to the many new subscribers this week! If you want to peruse earlier posts, you can get to them here. You may subscribe or leave comments or suggestions below. I can also be reached by email at Laura@laurastavoe.com

I look forward to returning with a regularTending to Endings on February 28.

Have a lovely week,

Laura

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