Tending to Endings (seventy-two)
I mentioned to a friend that I’ve been trying to wrangle my next Tending to Endings and have been struggling, not because I have nothing to write, but because I have so many things! Between Chaplaincy School and the surprise Liver Transplant Practicum that fate enrolled me in over this past year and a half, I have a firehose of material related to end-of-life and the other topics I focus on here—caregiving, storytelling, grief, aging, talking about hard things! Also, community, community, community! (I will write more on community soon).
My favorite Tendings to write are those where a short true-life narrative leads into a topic that might actually be useful to others! I’ve started about twelve of those recently and they each seem to unravel into too many threads. Which I know just means that I’m too close to it all to write it here. As you may have recognized by now, I don’t mind sharing the details, but I like to have a clear purpose in doings so. It takes me awhile to know what might be most relevant and helpful to others.
So, I figured I’d start here, with a few resources I have found especially powerful and resonant, all written by people who already have their thoughts in order! They write to many of the topics I’ve been drawn to lately. This gives me hope that there is a cultural shift or at least the potential for one that will offer more support, more freedom, more honesty, and more loving community during end-of-life care and other stories of upheaval.
Speaking of which, I want to let those of you who have following since John’s liver cancer diagnosis to know that he is doing great! We both are really! At his six-month post-transplant appointment, we learned there are no signs of cancer. John will be on anti-rejection meds for the rest of his life, but right now they don’t seem to be causing any problems and he feels healthy and is back to full activity including (of course) almost daily tennis. We are both forever changed by this experience (which is part of what I’m finding my way towards writing about) and it is such a gift to be on the other side of transplant!
I appreciate you being here very much!
More Resources
Alzheimer’s Society, UK
I want to begin by thanking everyone who posted about aging and Alzheimer’s care on the website last month: Diane, Janet, Lorelei, Wendy, Tom, Amy, Katie, Jana. I have new books on order!
I also wanted to mention that the national UK Alzheimer’s Society has a community care focus for their website that I find helpful and that is very different from the US ALZ.org site which is more research and fundraising focused. To me it seems both are essential as so many people are currently impacted.
To Be a Healer, Interview with Vivek Murthy
Did you know we in the U.S. have a Surgeon General who investigates loneliness as a public health issue and can lead an amazing group meditation? I did not. Here is his conversation with Krista Tippet that aired a couple weeks ago on the On Being podcast.
The Light of the World, Elizabeth Alexander
Elizabeth Alexander is a poet who write with wisdom and beauty about the unexpected death of her husband, Ficre. Here is how the memoir opens:
This story seems to begin with catastrophe but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story. Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love. “The queen died and then the king died” is a plot, wrote E.M. Forester in The art of the Novel, but “The queen died and then the king died of grief” is a story.
Later she writes about her mother-in-law’s death which occurred before her husband died. (This memoir elegantly meanders forward and back and time):
When my mother-in-law was dying, she faced illness with tremendous equanimity. She did not want pain—and luckily, medicine could take care of that—but she was not afraid of dying. We never saw her flinch in its face. I had always been afraid of death, waking from nightmares of its imminence even in my childhood. Much to my surprise, I was able to be present and useful and near to her as death approached near. I was surprised to learn I could sit by the side of death. I was grateful to be able to help this great woman who by example showed me so much of what it meant to be a matriarch. By letting me near, she showed me I was much stronger than I’d known I was.
So often spiritual thoughts and questions arise when people die and one of the things I love about this book is the natural, fluid way Alexander lets us in on those moments where she notices and questions mystery:
My mother-in-law’s last night on earth, a fox crossed our path in Branford, Connecticut, as we left the hospice. We knew somehow that it was her, as I no know the ravenous hawk came to take Ficre. Do I believe that? Yes, I do. I do not believe she was a fox. But I believe the fox was a harbinger. I believe that it was a strange enough occurrence that it should be heeded. Zemesh Berhe, the quick, red fox, soon passed from this life to the next.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, adrienne maree browne
There are many things I love about this book. For instance, browne builds on prophetic work of Joanna Macy, Octavia Butler, and Grace Boggs to offer a way to envision and enact social transformation. One reason it speaks to me is that browne gives attention to the set-backs and losses and range of emotions that occur along the way in any collective movement:
Transformation doesn’t happen in a linear way, at least not one we can always track. It happens in cycles, convergences, explosions. If we release the framework of failure, we can realize that we are in iterative cycles, and we can keep asking ourselves—how do I learn from this? Emotional growth is nonlinear. It feels really important to me to include pieces on grief and emotions in this book because, as people participating in movements, we are faced with so much loss, and because we have to learn to give each other more time to feel, to be in our humanity
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, Caitlin Doughty
Before my mom died, I was often one of many people referring to the body as “just a vessel.” That bodies, might be rather important vessels (even after death) given that they carried the people we loved throughout their lives was not something I pondered much. Since then I have come to believe that spending some time considering, honoring, caring for the body after death can be helpful to many throughout those early days of grief.
Caitlin Doughty is a mortician who does a deep dive into learning how bodies are considered, tended to, honored, celebrated, grieved over, and dispensed of in various countries. Like most good travel stories, this one helps Doughty also see her own culture’s death practices in a new light. She also investigates some newer (still rare) US options such as composting in Washington and open air funeral pyres in Colorado. Her book is not an argument for a particular way, but rather a look at what elements of death care are tended to in different communities.
This is a quote gives a view into her overarching thesis:
In America, where I live, death has been big business since the turn of the twentieth century. A century has proven the perfect amount of time for its citizens to forget what funerals once were; family-and-community-run affairs. In the nineteenth century no one would have questioned Josephine’s daughter preparing her mother’s body–it would have seemed strange if she didn’t. No one would have questioned a wife washing and dressing the body of her husband or a father carrying his son to the grave in a homemade coffin. In an impressively short time, America’s funeral industry has become more expensive, more corporate, and more bureaucratic than any other funeral industry on Earth. If we can be called best at anything, it would be at keeping our grieving families separated from their dead.
For those who are newer to Tending to Endings, Body of Grief is an earlier essay post related to this topic about being surprised at how important some of the death care rituals were to me after my mom’s death.
Instructions on Not Giving Up, Ada Limón
And finally, I want to leave you with a poem someone mentioned in my writing group last week that seems just perfect for spring during complicated times. By U.S. Poet Laureate, Ada Limón.
I love hearing from you! If you have resources you want to share or questions or feedback about Tending to Endings please leave comments below. You can also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com. If you would like to subscribe (for free!) to Tending to Endings, please leave your name and email. Also, in case you are wondering about those photogenic goats! They live next door and are quite neighborly!
Laura
“From Here to Eternity,” yeah, I’m on that ride alright.