Tending to Endings (fifty-eight)
These things happen…the soul’s bliss
and suffering are bound together
like the grasses…
–Jane Kenyon, “Twilight After Haying”
A woman in a ponytail offers to take John’s and my photo if we’ll take a family portrait for them, the family still tumbling out of the van at a pull-out along Going to the Sun Road in Glacier. John and I pose in front of the rocky peak that cradles traces of ice, and then five girls, also freckled and ponytailed and looking like various-size versions of Mom, assemble with their parents on the edge of wilderness.
I snap the photo, we pull together to talk about our adventures. The girls laugh and shiver in their sweatshirts even though it is 70 degrees out and will soon get up to 90. “We’re fresh from the humidity of Alabama in July,” dad explains. Two of the girls rattle off the parks in a duet. So far they’d been to Badlands and Mt. Rushmore, and next will be Yellowstone and Grand Teton.
Usually when John and I travel to wild places, we search for the most remote spot to camp. But on this trip—our first to Glacier— we decided to stay in a park lodge on either end of the park and take, what John dubbed, The Funnel Tour. Which means, we drove from one end of the park to the other stopping where everyone did, and we ran into a lot of families.
Honestly it was fun after so many months in segregated quarters during which time all the families with young children never got a break, and the rest of us went long months without hearing endless knock-knock jokes or the spontaneity of kid laughter.
We lunch along McDonald Creek and meet two little boys from Colorado standing ankle deep between their parents, mesmerized by the colorful stones in the clear water. I feel my spirit lift, much like when we spotted a moose standing in St. Mary’s Lake, or the mule deer in velvet who posed for photos.
When the boys open their palms to show off their finds, John shows them how to hold each stone in order to get the perfect spin. They practice and look to us and their parents to make sure we are appropriately impressed whenever a stone gets three hops. And we are!
“There are so many sweet kids here,” John says as we climbed back to the car.
And I know what he means. Where I expect whining and eye rolls, kids and parents seem lighthearted with one another. Teenagers play card games with their parents on the lodge porch as the sun goes down. One boy, I guess to be in middle school, shouts from the lake, “Mom, I found you the perfect rock! You are going to love this one.” And—rather than shaking her head and yelling back, “No more rocks!”—she wades out to admire his find.
I don’t mean to make this sound overly idyllic–I heard complaints, even tears. Something was just slightly different. Family members seemed connected, not in a clingy way, but by some invisible thread joining one to another.
Was it that eighteen months without a vacation made everyone more grateful? Or that a year and a half of togetherness forced us all into a choice between utter boredom or learning to enjoy one another?
I thought about the gentle shifts in my own relationship with John, the way both times of solitude and togetherness seem more natural. We are more in tune with each other than we were at the beginning of COVID.
Does it still irritate me when the box of granola looks like a grizzly opened it first? Well, yes, but now I’m apt to laugh as I attempt to perform surgery to make it pour correctly. We tend to give each other a little more grace.
And this year, we didn’t let our anniversary just slide by, instead following the tradition we always meant to which started deep in the Grand Canyon on our honeymoon: to always celebrate by doing something outdoors together in a place we had never gone before. There have been years where in the busy-ness of life, it did not seem all that important to honor that tradition. This year, while John and I hiked to St. Mary’s Falls and kayaked rapids on the Flathead River, I was so grateful we could.
I’ve come to understand that for me, the question of getting through the hardest times is not how to survive them, but rather, how to get through them without tuning out or shutting down. Which might sound like an aspirational platitude. But, about a quarter of a century ago, that choice arrived in a very physical and immediate way when I went into preterm labor during the second trimester of my twin pregnancy.
It is a story I return to often, including here, because of how it it changed me. Up until that point, shutting down in the face of potential loss seemed a valid, even a wise choice! But the dilemma while on bedrest and medication and as contractions continued to roll through my uterus was that this might be all I had of motherhood. These kicks beneath my palm, these squirms, these aches. Did I want to miss it?
And so I sang songs to my sons and read stories of the hundred acre wood and I told them secrets. Although I had not officially met them, had not yet looked into their eyes or heard even one knock-knock joke, I loved my sons. For seventy-seven days, our connection grew.
Gabe and Dylan lived to be born and they live still and that will always be my favorite story. It has meant twenty-six years of days to get to know and love them. And yet, I quickly learned, even good endings include loss, and parenthood gave me extra practice. One day they are no longer in your belly, and the next they want to build towers with their preschool friends instead of you, and if all goes well, they eventually move to Kentucky or Seattle and are too busy to call.
Now, as an entire planet of people begin to open our doors and come out to take stock of the events we have endured during the last eighteen months, I wonder if families with young children have a leg up on the rest of us. That maybe their hearts have remained a little bit more open to all we have been through, and thus they are a bit steadier in the midst of what feels to me a whole lot of vulnerability.
We lost friends and dreams and school years and sports seasons. Some relationships did not grow closer; some marriages did not survive. We are finally beginning to hold the funerals.
No time reminded me so much of those days in preterm labor–where heartache and connection intertwined–as the months I spent with my mother during her dying.
One afternoon when things were particularly intense with my mom’s cancer and Alzheimer’s, I went for a walk and ended up at Whaler’s Village, an outdoor shopping area in Maui. I watched the people walking in and out of stores and felt entirely out of place.
Finally, I sat on a concrete planter and texted a friend of mine back in Boise whose husband had died from Alzheimer’s: Sometimes I feel that what is going on is so heavy that I am not fit for public interaction. I either feel fake because I’m staying on the surface, or, if I try to explain, there is just too much and I would overwhelm people.
Today I know that gap I felt had as much to do with the connection and tenderness towards my mom as it did the trauma. It is not only the pain of hard circumstances that makes me clumsy in the face of everyday life. Sometimes it is the intimacy.
And maybe that is why this opening at times feels stranger and more awkward than the shut down. We hesitate at the threshold because we don’t know what to expect of ourselves or each other or how to explain all we have been through. And maybe even because there are things from this experience we don’t want to lose.
At Glacier, smoke from distant wildfires shrouds the view and sometimes makes it painful to pull a deep breath into my lungs. On the drive home, a newscaster informs us of new fires in Idaho and variants of the virus wreaking havoc in other countries and our own.
There will be more endings. And beginnings, too.
My struggle seems to be—this day, every day—to consider both worthy of devotion, woven as they are with suffering, with love, with bliss.
More Resources
Three Books I’m Reading Now
No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering, Thich Nhat Hanh
Nothing can survive without food, including happiness; your happiness can die if you don’t know how to nourish it. … We can condition our bodies and minds to happiness with the five practices of letting go, inviting positive seeds, mindfulness, concentration, and insight.
When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi
Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon, English major, scientist, and husband who wrote a memoir about his own illness that was published after his death from metastatic lung cancer:
I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.
Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care, Edited by Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast
This book includes writing by pioneers in hospice care like Dame Cicely Saunders and Elizabeth Kubler Ross, contemporary practitioners like Frank Ostasekski and Rachel Naomi Remen, and poets like Mark Doty and Marie Howe. There is an intimacy to this collection alluded to in the introduction:
There are pieces here to wake you up in the morning and pieces to tuck you in when it’s time for bed, pieces to hold your hand through long sleepless nights and pieces to watch with you when you don’t know what you’re watching for. There are poems to cry with you when you’re sad, and poems to lift you up when you need lifting up. This is a book to keep you company as you make your way to the bedside, and this is a book to comfort and console you as you make your way back home.
Three Kid’s Books
Tear Soup: A Recipe for Healing After Loss, by Pat Schwiebert and Chuck DeKlyen
A book about allowing grief to have its season:
Some people thought that the neighbor was eating too much tear soup. So Grandy, being an old and somewhat wise woman, called and invited her to a special soup gathering where it’s not bad manners to cry in your soup or have second helpings.
Drawing on Walls: A Story of Keith Haring, by Matthew Burgess
A biography about the mural artist from childhood to his death from AIDS at 31. The story focuses on Haring’s dedication to the creative spirit and public art.
After watching Keith work, a kid came up to him and said, “I can tell, by the way you paint, that you really love life.”
Frederick, by Leo Lionni
A story about the role of a poet during hard times.
“Close your eyes,” said Frederick, as he climbed on a big stone. “Now I send you the rays of the sun. Do you feel how their golden glow…” And as Frederick spoke of the sun the four little mice began to feel warmer.
Three Poems
Twilight: After Haying, Jane Kenyon
From her book, Otherwise, here are the opening lines to the poem quoted in the post:
Yes, long shadows go out / from the bales; and yes, the soul / must part from the body: / what else could it do?
A Ritual to Read to Each Other, by William Stafford
An old favorite I pull out during hard times as a comfort and a reminder to stay the course:
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, / a remote important region in all who talk; / though we could fool each other, we should consider–lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
The Affliction, By Marie Howe
I first came to know Marie Howe’s poetry from a book my friend Mary Ellen sent me after two friends died called What the Living Do. It is excellent and probably would appeal to many who read Tending to Endings. “The Affliction” is from a more recent collection, Magdalene captures the experience of presence after being, as Howe describes it, “outside–watching…as if I were someone else…”
Three Listens
The Thing I’m Getting Over, This American Life
All of the stories on last week’s episode about being in that place where you are in recovery but not recovered, are poignant and engaging. The last one, “Shot Girl, Summer in the City,” is related most directly to the idea of opening up post COVID precautions, and the strange awkwardness and changed-ness that seems to follow us as we rub our eyes and wander back out into the streets.
Conversation on Chödrön’s The Things that Will Not Die
Krista Tippett recently launched an app that contains conversations and coursework on spiritual topics. This short conversation with Devendra Banhart focuses on a passage from Pema Chödrön’s Things Fall Apart about practicing Tonglen:
This kinship with the suffering of others, this inability to continue to regard it from afar, is the discovery of our soft spot, the discovery of bodhichitta. Bodhichitta is a Sanskrit word that means “noble or awakened heart.” It is said to be present in all beings. Just as butter is inherent in milk and oil is inherent in a sesame seed, this soft spot is inherent in you and me.
When I Get to Heaven by John Prine
A poem, a song, a conversation, all in one. Enjoy!
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