Tending to Endings (sixty)
The first Friday of October snuck up on me! I thought of postponing Tending to Endings. I have many ideas to write about. Just less time to go through my rather organic process, which begins with a big sprawl of words and ideas and tangents and then slowly over a number of days becomes shaped into something that others might be interested in and able to read!
Writing Tending to Endings also feels weighty this month. Death is a relevant and painful topic in Boise and much of Idaho. The ICUs are overwhelmed with COVID patients and the coroners and hospital leaders are past pleading. They are in despair.
If the models are correct, cases will not peak until mid October. I am frightened by the trauma so many in our community have had to face, especially our healthcare professionals. I don’t understand the mental rift that has happened in my own community, and I don’t yet know how to write about it other than to say please get vaccinated if you have not already.
I am so very sad about the unnecessary deaths, and how many have occurred isolated from family and friends because of COVID. And I am worried about how these experiences are going to affect the people on the front lines who have been carrying so much of the weight for eighteen months and are now facing the worst conditions yet. I have nothing wise or helpful or new to say about this, but it felt wrong to not say something.
I knew you’d understand if I postponed. I feel like I have the kindest readers on the planet.
But then my students started turning in one of their assignments for my Aspects of Death and Dying class this week, and I have to say it felt a little like magic. I gave them a simple assignment: sit down with three people they know (one at a time) and ask each to tell an experience about a time they learned something about death. I asked students to record their conversations and turn in recordings between five and fifteen minutes each.
To provide a model for my students, I asked John to tell a story about an experience where he learned something about death.
As soon as I began listening to what my students turned in, I realized that it was fulfilling a little dream of mine. They talked to their parents and neighbors and classmates and their own children about some of their most important stories.
I often include a tagline at the end of my post: Tending to Endings aims to build community and conversation around end-of-life matters. Yet I admit, mostly this blog has been a lot of l me talking! Comments features are clunky and asynchronous. We have been more isolated than usual. It’s hard to actually find ways to converse. But I suppose my hope is that what you read here might help you open conversations with those who are in your daily life.
Along those lines, I want to invite you to this assignment, and I hope you’ll dive in! It is not a new idea, of course. Story Corp has been capturing conversations for decades now, and they have helpful info on their website.
But, as I reminded my students, those stories are edited and produced and aired, whereas their recordings have the aim of opening a conversation and saving it for their own purposes. Stumbles and backtracking are fine. All they really need is a person to talk to and recording device, which these days usually means a smart phone.
The results so far have been beautiful. When I listened to my students’ stories, I knew they were hearing things they might not have heard if not for this assignment.
Or maybe they would have. I have talked with John about his mom’s death many times during the twenty years we have been together, after all. But this conversation and the others I’ve recorded have felt different. As though setting the record button to on is a way of marking sacred space. We speak and listen more intently. I listen again. We tend to this story, and find it worth saving.
More Resources
For you, there are no requirements or deadlines! But if you want to know the details or where this is going, here they are. (You’ll have to expand the text if your eyes are like mine).
I’d love to hear any feedback from you about how your own conversations went!
Thank you for reading Tending to Endings. If you would like to subscribe, please leave your name and email below and you will receive it by email on the first Friday of every month. Tending to Endings aims to build community and conversation around end-of-life matters.