Library of Love

Tending to Endings (fifty-four)

When my sisters and I left home, my mom turned our childhood bedroom into what she called the Resource Room. She wanted a place to keep books and videos she liked to loan out to people, usually about gardening or other cultures or parenting or world peace.

The shelves included titles by her favorite authors Aldo Leopold, Parker Palmer, Annie Dillard, and Marian Wright Edelman. A case within kid reach held books by Mem Fox, Shel Silverstein, and Beverly Cleary. She had the full series of the Little House books and her own childhood favorites about Betsy, Tacy and Tib.

Kids could also find bags of blocks and bins full of Legos in the Resource Room, or an African sun harp, a ukulele, and a shoebox full of kazoos. There were fresh magic markers, piles of paper, and sometimes even finger paint.

After the grandchildren had grown, neighbor kids came over and could almost always talk my mom into sitting on the floor with them to build a tower.

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More than a resource room, mom had an enthusiasm room. Sometimes we talk about teachers as people motivated by self-sacrifice, but I don’t think my mom saw it that way. She shared knowledge because it spilled out from her and needed somewhere to go. She wanted you to have the same opportunities for epiphanies and creativity she did. Shared learning was her favorite way to connect. In today’s lingo, learning was my mom’s love language.

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Last weekend my son Dylan came by to install a late birthday present and an early Mother’s Day gift, surprising me with the little library we had talked about last fall. I thought it would be fun to put one on the trail behind our backyard where people often hike past to enter the trail system.

Dylan built it in the colors and fashion of our old Elkhaven house in the mountains we lived in during the boys grade school years. I loved the idea of it surprising people on their hike, though it puts some faith in people’s willingness to carry a book a short ways down the hill!

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I have certainly inherited my mom’s enthusiasm for sharing whatever I’m learning at the exact moment I’m learning it. It’s one of the reasons writing this blog has been rewarding for me. And I expect I will soon have more learning to share, as next week I’m beginning a class towards certification as an end-of-life doula through INELDA (The International End-of-Life Doula Association).

I don’t know if doula is the role I’m after, exactly. But I am open and excited to learn. I’m also grateful to each of you for reading along. I have missed writing a post weekly, and I think of things to tell you all month long! It turns out, shared learning is my love language, too. Well, that and really good coffee.

More Resources

Someday when I decide how to organize it, I will resurrect my resource page on the website. In the meantime, here are a few new finds on the theme of endings.

A Tale for The Time Being. A Novel by Ruth Ozeki.

It’s not often that I read a book twice because there is just so much to read! But recently I’ve returned to two books that I have wanted to continue to carry with me. One was Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which I wrote about last summer.

A Tale for the Time Being, the second, is fiction told through multiple characters and voices. It offers meditations on the meaning of life and death across cultures and generations; on climate change and technology and bullying; on losing a parent or a child; on the wisdom and the blind spots of elders, and the wisdom and blind spots of the young; on suicide and endangered species and trees. On the power of words to transcend time and place. 

I’m not sure how Ozeki fit so much thought into a book. or how she did so in a way that is artful and engaging even when the topics are disturbing or complicated. I found the book ultimately hopeful, creative, and reassuring.  Ozeki’s site has a short video about the book.

When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice. A Memoir by Terry Tempest Williams

I taught a workshop and took a writing workshop last month and in both courses someone recommended Terry Tempest William’s book published in 2013, which I took as a sign.

When Williams’ mom was dying of cancer, she asked her to take her journals home with her, but to not read them until she was gone. There were three shelves full of journals, and Williams did as her mother asked. After her mother’s death, Williams opened each of the journals and discovered every page of every book was blank.

The fifty-four short chapters that follow are reflections born of those empty pages. It is a beautiful, poignant book, and it especially spoke to me now as I have become aware of the blank spaces that are inevitable after any loss. Mom and I were close, and still there are so many stories she never told me, so many questions I never thought to ask. Williams book is about loss, but also, it is about different ways of knowing, and different forms of strength. It is about how sometimes silence can be a powerful choice.

Dick Johnson is Dead. A Film by Kirstin Johnson.

When I was only a third of the way into the documentary Dick Johnson Is Dead, I was already reaching out to my sisters and friends over text asking—Have you seen this yet? They all came back, No, should I? And I answered, Not sure yet.

Now I’m sure. This film is in turns, creative, heart-hurting, funny, weird, sad, ethically complicated, beautiful, and so very true to the experience of Alzheimer’s. Or at least, for me, the experience of being a daughter watching a parent (in my case my mother) affected by Alzheimer’s.

There are many moments when Johnson was filming her dad and I saw something so very familiar. Probably most poignant was watching how Dick Johnson maintained his wit and charm, long after he lost the ability to understand or feel that joy behind it. He was charming by rote, by habit. The fact that this happened to another besides my mom seemed both a sadness and a salve.

If you aren’t sure about this one, you may want to start with an interview with Kirsten Johnson on Fresh Air in which she speaks to the challenges including ethical questions around the making the film.

Departures. A Film Directed by Yojiro Takita.

My cousin, Kevin recommended the film Departures after following my posts, and I’m so glad he did! It is a film that won an Academy Award best foreign language film in 2009, and there are many things that make it an excellent film: the music, the filming, the engaging story that took unexpected turns. But I think what it brought into focus for me most was how rituals and traditions around tending to the body of a loved one after death, can help us through all the other more nebulous parts of loss–the grief, the unanswered questions, the denial, the fear.

Saving a Language You’re Learning to Speak. Interview with Larry Kimura

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As soon as I listened to this episode of Code Switch, I sent it to all of my family members, and I wished I could share it with my mom. Hawai’i is sacred ground for my mom, and she considered it a privilege to spend time on the islands and to work with students at the grade school in Lahaina each week. She would’ve loved this hopeful story born of one man’s passion to keep the Hawaiian language and culture alive.

He Mele Aloha No Ka Niu. A Poem by Brandy Nālani McDougall

He Mele Aloha no ka Niu is one of many beautiful poems included in When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, edited by Joy Harjo. This poet first caught my eye because she is from Kula in Maui’s upcountry, another place my mom loved. Like Kimura’s work, McDougall’s poems also speak to the theme of language and culture, lost and sometimes found.

Eagle Poem by Joy Harjo

And then I’ll leave you with one more short poem by Joy Harjo that felt like a gift this morning when I happened upon it. You can read or listen to Eagle Poem at The Poetry Foundation.

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Mahalo,

Laura

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