Alzheimers – Laura Stavoe

December 26, 2021December 26, 2021

Choices

It is common in creative writing classes to begin an assignment by giving students constraints. Write a story in which a lemon, a large body of water, and a gas station all appear. Write a poem where each line starts with the letter J. Write a scene where a man on a job interview accidentally locks himself in a bathroom. One gift of constraints is they keep my analytical mind occupied so something more creative and serendipitous can sneak in the side door.

Life gives us constraints. Some unique to us or to our community and many shared. A dependency on fuel sources that are destroying human habitat. A new variant when everyone is weary. The fact that each of us will die though we don’t know how or when.

My mom lived her life as though her constraints were challenges giving her the opportunity to engage her creative acumen. When she gained weight after quitting smoking, I remember laughing with her on the phone when she said, “It finally occurred to me I could buy bigger clothes!” That was classic Jane. More than positive thinking–though there was that–Mom found her own way through things by looking for where she had choices.

The end game was always for her to be happy in her life so she could continue to be a positive force in the world. She was a giver who did not believe in martyrdom. Which means she found ways to want to do a lot of things that were good for her community and her family and the world.

Dad with Mom on her last trip to Idaho, August 2018

The hardest thing for me to accept about my mom’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s was that she would not be able to finish her own story. Towards the end of her life the constraints grew exponentially, and her cognitive skills diminished just as quickly making it hard for her to see her way through. Still, she continued to look.

Given the expansiveness of my mom’s life as a teacher and peace activist and poet and gardener and friend, watching her work so hard to find purchase was heartbreaking. Often when my dad would offer her a wedge of pineapple, she would receive it with glee. Once, when she was more pensive I asked her, “What are you thinking, mom?” And she looked up with a small smile said, “I’m thinking how lucky I am that I can swallow.”

Seeing her Jane-ness emerge from around the constraint of Alzheimer’s, that was painful, and also, gold. “These things happen…” Jane Kenyon writes, “the soul’s bliss / and suffering are bound together / like grasses.”

One of the things that has occurred to me while writing a blog called Tending to Endings is that we often don’t know during a health crises (or any other hard time) whether we are near the end or enduring a very hard middle, or on the cusp of a comeback. I look at those two photos of my mom only seven months apart and see that what felt like an era in the life of our family was really one half of a year.

During that last visit to Idaho, my mom’s health wasn’t good. She suffered from radiation wounds from cancer therapy and the Alzheimer’s was wreaking havoc on her short-term memory. But she could still play a mean game of Scrabble; and she knew the mechanics of getting in and out of the car; and when she was picking up her prescription of Aricept and the pharmacist would ask for her birthdate, Mom could still recite it before adding, “You know this is for my memory, right?”

That she would not see another summer? I did not know that. The pandemic has already lasted far longer my mom’s final bout with cancer.

As I’ve listened to more and more friends, family, colleagues, students who are walking through serious health events with their parents or spouses, I’ve realized that they often think the truth they need to accept or get others to accept is that the end is near. But what has often been truer for me is that I don’t know where I am in the story, that the future is uncertain, and the decisions need to be made in unfamiliar and shifting terrain. Sometimes they need to be made on someone else’s behalf which can feel nearly impossible to get right.

Last year I had the privilege of interviewing Chaplain Norm Shrumm about talking to our families about end-of-life wishes, ours and theirs. The holidays seems a good time to revisit the conversation. The whole interview is full of compassionate wisdom, and these words in particular have continued to help me:

And to the point you bring up about dementia like in the case of your mom, it can help to remind ourselves what that role of health surrogate entails. You are being asked to make decisions on a pretty high level emotionally and ethically. There isn’t any trickery there. I think that is what we sign on for: In the event I cannot make decisions for myself because I’m unconscious or because I no longer understand the complexity of the situation or its implications—my health surrogate will make those decisions.

I don’t argue against the guilt because I don’t think that helps. We have guilt because we are in moral distress and there is ambiguity. It is not a slam dunk decision. So, we just need to do this alongside of the guilt.

And what you are being asked to do is to draw on all your love for this person to make the decision on behalf of this person that she is unable to make. You landed in this role for this very reason. And so the moral weight of deciding on her behalf what would be the best death—remembering there is no option available to not have a death—rests with you. You’re being asked to clear the path towards the gentlest death, a soft landing.

Sometimes we get to help people finish their stories. I won’t have all the information I need any more than I know all the variables in my own life.

There was a time after my mom was on hospice care. This was after she had lost the ability to know how to sit down in a chair and had stopped using the whiteboard to find out what day it was and instead would just look to me or my dad for reassurance that all was well. She was no longer the first one up every morning, the way she had been for most of my life. Except on that morning, I woke up before dawn and came into the kitchen to find my mom studying the calendar.

“Would you like coffee, Mom?”

“That would be wonderful,” she answered, and her voice sounded like her old self. I inhaled deeply, noticed she was wearing her robe and glasses. She looked up and her blue eyes met mine.

“Laura, I woke up knowing that I haven’t been right. It’s as though I’m suddenly aware that it has been me who is crazy and not everyone else. I don’t know if this will last, but right now, it feels so good to understand. It’s like I’ve been gone and I am back.”

She was back, and I wanted to crawl in her arms and beg her to stay.

We sat on the couch each holding our mugs. She took long sips from the cup she often requested but, these days, usually let sit before her growing cold. We talked like we had on so many dark mornings throughout my life.

“I am here,” she said, “I am in Maui having a good conversation with my oldest daughter, Laura. I wish I could write it all down. I don’t know how long this will last.” Then she said, “If I wrote a book you know what it would be called?”

“What?”

“Choices. My life really started once I knew I had choices,” and she looked up at the ceiling like she so often would when thinking, and then to me. “It wasn’t which choices, or that I had choices. It was me knowing I had them.”

I too, wished I could write it all down. Wished I had brought my phone into the living room so I could turn on the recorder. Wished she could stay.

That was the last time we were in our rightful roles: mother, daughter. By the time the pastel glow of morning revealed a daytime moon, the fog of Alzheimer’s returned. But the living continued and we made our ways somehow through those final months together. And my mom, Jane Stavoe, shapes my story, still.

More Resources

While teaching the community college course this semester, I put together a list for my students. These are the books and podcasts and films that I find myself returning to often. You can now find that in-progress list at the Laura Library link on my website.

Three recent podcast episodes that I loved and may be of interest are “70 Sounds Young To Me,” a 70 over 70 interview with Diane Meier, a pioneer in palliative care medicine; “The Fullness of Things,” an On Being episode with poet and Zen monk, Jane Hirshfield; and George Saunder’s on Longform, which may be slightly off topic for this blog, but he has been one of the people who have helped me stay more grounded, hopeful, and (I think) kinder during the pandemic. He is a fiction writer, writing teacher, and wise soul.

If you would like to receive Tending to Endings when it publishes, please leave your name and email below. I plan to continue to post once or twice each month in 2022, though not necessarily on a regular schedule. I hope you’ll continue to find it useful. May your last days of 2021 be restorative and full of love.

October 30, 2020October 30, 2020

Devotion

Tending to Endings (forty-three)

This week I’m including a short passage from the book I’ve been working on these past two years. It explores many of the themes I’ve written about it Tending to Endings, but from a perspective closer to the experience, before I knew all that would happen with my mom.

Readers occasionally ask for more about living with Alzheimer’s, and so I chose this excerpt from November 2018, a few weeks after I went to stay with my parents (near Chicago) and a few weeks before we learned the cancer had returned. Mom was also receiving daily treatments in the hyperbaric oxygen chamber for pain associated with radiation wounds from her previous cancer treatment.

Excerpted from “Chamber,” Band of Brightness

My dad has written “Laura’s Birthday” on the whiteboard we keep on the kitchen counter to help my mom know what is happening each day. He has drawn balloons and a smiley face along with the two other agenda items: Oxygen Therapy and Sandy and Bill bring dinner.

“It’s Laura’s birthday,” mom says when she stands over the counter staring at the whiteboard. By her tone, I know she is taking in this information.

“Happy Birthday,” she says because she still knows what to say. In one of the books I read about Alzheimer’s, I learned that social skills are often strong even after memory and other communication skills fail because they are habit. My mom has always been very good with social skills. She is from the Midwest. Also, she knows a smile can connect people and it is important to her to make people feel welcome and liked. She has practiced a lifetime at smiling at children and homeless people and new mothers and the old woman on the bus. She still does this now that she is that old woman.

Even with her broad smile, I can see questions in her gray-blue eyes. How old? Are we doing anything special today? Did I get you a present? Are you my child? I can feel my mother’s anxiety because I am her daughter and, also, I am practiced at fear. I wonder how to reassure her.

We are careful to not ask her questions because then she feels put on the spot. But it is hard to know how to bridge the gulf between us. She is so very aware of condescension. It feels wrong to assume she doesn’t know things and just ramble on all the answers for questions she hasn’t asked. Also, she can only process so much information at once, so giving her a long stream of facts can overwhelm her.

I say, “Thank you for giving birth to me, Mom. Thank you for taking such good care of me while I was a baby and ever since, for fifty-four years now!”

“Wow, fifty-four,” she says. “How did that happen?”

It is my birthday and I am here in the town where I grew up with my mother and my father who brought me into this world, a place I left at age 19 in 1984. Amy, my youngest sister, takes me out to lunch. My sister Sandy, two years younger, brings Szechwan shrimp for dinner. Friends from Boise send texts and cards in the mail. My dad assures my mom that they gave me my birthday check. I preorder Michelle Obama’s as a present to myself. Becoming.

This birthday more than anything else, I think about the vulnerability of being born. We don’t choose it. We just become. And at first, we are not able to do a damn thing to take care of ourselves. I remember watching my sons just after they were born and thinking— they cannot pull the blanket up if they are cold because even their arms are not yet under their control. Their need was so great it made me ache for them and love them more than my own heart.

There was a swath of time in my early adulthood that I took issue with my mom for not being as nurturing as I would’ve liked or in the ways I preferred. I was an emotional daughter and we had different ways of coping with emotion.

But today all I can think of is how much she loved me and how dependent I was on that love. It’s not the work of mothering or the pain of childbirth that awes me, it is the devotion. During that time when I could not live without care, my mother made sure I got from one hour to the next, first in her womb and then here on earth. Of course that is enough. That is everything.

Before dinner, I brave the early winter and cross the parking lot for the 4:30 hot yoga class. I stand on my mat in the heated room with other yogis and feel this body —this fifty-four-year-old body—that still moves that still breathes that still works pretty well. Yes, there is a pain in my sacroiliac joint that makes backbends difficult. But I am here, connected to earth, breathing.

At some point, the only logical response to birthdays is gratitude. I have lost friends my own age. My own mother is leaving or shedding her own self or some other process I do not understand, a little every day. The opposite of becoming.

I am here. I can do sun salutations and humble warrior and, on a good day, standing bow. I can relax into pigeon pose and feel those hips that have birthed twins open and stretch. I can breathe through savasana and sense my connection to the other yogis in the room and my sisters and my children and the tree outside the studio and the trail outside my writing room all the way in Idaho. I can sense my connection to my mom, the woman who carried this body into this world.

Thank you for reading Tending to Endings. Next week I will be posting something about legacies. If you would like to subscribe so you don’t miss these weekly posts, please leave your name and email below.

June 12, 2020July 16, 2020

Mending

Tending to Endings (twenty-four)

In November of 2016 I visited my Mom and Dad in Maui. One evening I asked them if I could read a letter:

In recent years, I’ve become more aware of how some of my actions in the past were hurtful. You have always been so generous and loving to me that it didn’t even register how unthinking I was sometimes, even well into my adulthood.

When I pull that letter up from my computer now, I have a number of responses to the timing. One is that I can’t believe it took me so long to see how some of my actions affected my parents. The things I wrote about in the letter were more than fifteen years old in 2016. They weren’t secrets to them or me, I just had not discussed them directly.

Secondly, I am struck by the timing because any further hesitation and I would’ve been too late. My mom’s cognitive abilities were declining, something that happened slowly at first, but accelerated after her second cancer surgery. Had I waited even one more year, my mom would not have been able to receive the information without it causing confusion and probably distress.

Life prompted me to do this work. My summer had been marked by loss. My friends Susan and Ellen had each died unexpectedly in July, Susan of a brain aneurysm and Ellen a two days later of an infection. These deaths of friends who were near my age and who I was very close to brought my own mortality into focus. They also gave me insight into particulars of death related to relationships.

For example, Susan’s husband and daughter were incredibly welcoming to friends and colleagues and extended family when Susan was in a hospital on life support. The time there was very difficult because we were losing Susan, but I also witnessed an ease in the relationships among those who came to help help and to express their love and to say goodbye. When Susan was removed from life support, she was surrounded by friends, colleagues, step-children, her daughter and son-in-law, her husband, and her ex-husband, Katie’s father.

Susan and I had been friends for many years, and I knew what I was witnessing was a result of her commitment to the work of nurturing and mending relationships. Even the medical staff commented on how rare it was to have so many caring people lending support.

Susan had lost her own mother to cancer when she was in her twenties. And in that hospital room in Portland, I knew that the single most important thing to Susan that day and going forward would be that Katie had her dad by her side and a circle of strong support around her.

This experience prompted me to take stock in a more deliberate way. What I needed to tell my parents was that the distance I had put between us during hard times in my life was never because of them but because of me. For much of my young adult life, I made a habit of pulling up stakes and starting something new whenever things got too painful. I would leave jobs, relationships, whole states behind and then throw all of my attention into something new.

I would talk to my parents about these changes after everything was back together again, and I felt on stable ground. Or, on those occasions when things were so bad that I needed their help, something they always graciously and lovingly provided. This pattern continued until 1999 when I was going through a second divorce at the age of 34.

I had many relationships to mend after that and a lot of work to do. Certainly in the fifteen years between that time and my amends, my relationship with my parents had already grown much closer due to those changes.

Still, I had never directly acknowledged how the distance I created hurt them. My mom had made a practice of never guilting us about anything, and it was fairly easy for me to remain in my self-centered haze. But now I had adult children of my own. I was freshly aware of how difficult that time of distance must’ve been for my parents, when they knew their daughter was struggling.

I am deeply grateful for the nudge that prompted me to write and read that letter. I was able to tell my parents that I saw how much they loved me all along and that they had always made it easy for me to come home. I told them that their loving support made all the difference in my life when I finally was ready to grow. I told them thank you.

My mom told me she knew all that and that she loved me and that I was a beautiful writer, which is exactly what my mom would say. My dad folded the letter and thanked me and told me he was going to keep it in the nightstand to read again. I could tell that it mattered to him that my mom got to hear my words.

Often my amends lately have been recognizing and receiving love, sometimes belatedly. Many people besides my parents have been good to me throughout my life, and I at times have been too self-centered to notice the depth of their care. I think of my friend Louise who I only recently reconnected with about two years ago after having lost touch in 1991 when I moved from San Diego to Idaho.

When I was going through my first divorce, I was in a great deal of pain and fear. I was also in graduate school and pretty much avoiding feelings by staying very busy taking 22 units and student teaching and commuting on the weekends between San Diego and Los Angeles.

Louise knew I was struggling and that I was more isolated than usual, and so she mailed me a letter every week that I received at my rented room in Los Angeles. I only remembered this now because while going through boxes during quarantine time a few weeks ago, I found piles of handwritten cards and letters and artwork she had mailed me. One for every single week of the year I was away. I am someone who resents having to find a stamp and envelope when bill arrives that I can’t pay online, so I was impressed by her commitment!

I’m sure I appreciated Louise’s notes at the time, but I hadn’t even remembered this act of love. I was so glad I found them and that we are in touch again so that I can say thank you for reminding me during that time that I wasn’t alone.

Laura and Louise 2017. Letters from Louise, 1989.

This work of righting wrongs of course takes many forms in spiritual and religious traditions as well as programs for addiction recovery, counseling practices, and justice groups. Sometimes it is called reckoning or reparations or amends, all of which imply an admission of wrongdoing, an attempt to repair, and a commitment to doing better going forward.

Going forward, I made that commitment to remain open and available to my parents. I became more actively engaged in their lives, and I showed up when I could be helpful. Which of course ended up being the greatest gift of all for me. I was able to be present during the years when my parents needed me most and to be by my mom’s side when she died.

Frank Ostaseski writes in The Five Invitations, “as people come closer to death, I have found that only two questions really matter to them: Am I loved? and Did I love well?”

The second question in particular was one my mom asked in different ways during the last weeks of her life. Had she given enough? Had she shown enough love? My dad and my sisters and I took turns reminding her of all of her grandchildren she nurtured, the children she taught, the daughters she’d raised. We read to her all of the stories her friends had sent about her teaching and activism and book groups and gardening. My mom was a sharer of ideas and enthusiasm and love. What a gift to be able to crawl in bed beside my mom during those last days and whisper to her about all of the ways she loved us.

More Resources

Most books I’ve read recently about death and dying spend at least some time on addressing the topic of unfinished relationship work. One that went into more depth and approached the work from a variety of interesting contexts is The American Book of Living and Dying: Lessons in Healing Spiritual Pain, by Richard F. Groves and Henriette Anne Klauser.

I also want to mention that one of the reasons this topic came to mind this week is because like many, I have been reading antiracism scholars including Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo both of whom speak powerfully to different facets of antiracism work. One thing DiAngelo’s White Fragility offers related to amends are examples of ways to acknowledge and take responsibility for times we fall short in a way that does not put more pressure on the recipient or do more harm.

If you would like to subscribe to Tending to Endings each Friday, please leave your name and email below. Thank you!

May 29, 2020July 16, 2020

Drawing Near

Tending to Endings (twenty-two)

It was an expedition to get down to the pool. Mom hadn’t left the condo for a couple weeks, but that morning she wanted to go outside.

We moved slowly. My mom was forgetting how to walk, so I had to help keep the momentum going by gently pulling the walker. We inched along. I didn’t care how long it took, except that if she changed her mind, it would be the same production to get her back and she might not be happy about it.

But we made it to the lounge chairs and then there was the process of helping her to sit. She no longer understood the mechanics of sitting, and she found the process of letting herself down onto the chair unsettling. If I held her around her waist in a hug and bent my knees she would sometimes follow my lead. We tried this and after a long awkward dance she was in the chair and I was able to raise her feet and turn her towards the pool and to the blue ocean water and the sky. She squinted in the sun.

And then I looked up and saw that the small groups of others in the pool area were watching us. Kindly. One woman put her hand on her chest as she made eye contact with me. Her eyes were teary. And I realized, my mother and I were a story. I was the daughter taking care of my elderly mother with tenderness. I was that special kind of person. They weren’t sure they could do it.

Or that is how I might’ve seen the story in the past, before I went to live with my parents for six months. There are certain kinds of people who have an extra something and are able to show patience and compassion for caregiving. These special people are good at such things, saints really.

One of my biggest insights about being a caregiver is that it meant feeling like a failure (not a saint) most of the time. I certainly couldn’t cure cancer or Alzheimer’s and very few decisions seemed clear cut. Even things I had thought I was clear on like honesty and autonomy were thrust into a gray zone. It was very difficult to get my bearings.

What worked one day, changed the next, and much of the time I didn’t know what to do to help my mom on a day to day basis. More pain medication or less? Do we bring in extra nursing help she doesn’t want? Do we tell her she has cancer every time she forgets? Is it time for hospice yet? Do we bring her to another doctor appointment where she will experience pain on the off chance he’ll be able to help? Do we talk her into going on walks? Eating less ice cream? Does it matter? Are we giving up if we say it doesn’t matter?

Sometimes I felt like my main accomplishment was being there so my father didn’t have to bear all these confusing decisions alone. I didn’t have clear answers for him, but at least we could be confused together which meant less loneliness, and I think maybe less guilt. I could reassure him that no matter what decision we made it was going to feel wrong.

My time as a full-time caregiver was short compared to the time put in by many others including my father. I had his support and also, often, my sisters and my aunt. Even with a crew it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Probably the hardest. I didn’t always do it gracefully or well.

Yes, it made a difference to my parents that I was there. But more than that, I think it helped me. It helped me process and accept and let go and love in a way that I believe would’ve been more complicated otherwise.

If I hadn’t drawn close, I would only have known the trauma of Alzheimer’s and cancer, which are horrible even from a distance. But I would have missed seeing my mom wake up each day and drink her coffee and talk with my dad. I would have missed her laughing when she spotted egrets. I would’ve missed our Scrabble games.

And those rare moments she sounded just like herself again through the fog of Alzheimer’s. Like the day I had to explain to her once again that she had cancer because she forgot and didn’t understand why she was in such intense pain. She must’ve heard a sadness in my voice because she looked me straight in the eye and said, “Oh, Laura. I’ve had such a good life. Things aren’t doled out fairly you know, and I have gotten far more than my share. I’m not going to let a little pain in my bottom make me forget that.”

I would not have known that being a caregiver isn’t a role but a relationship. Which means I also receive. Which means I also irritate, and laugh with, and know this other person. A knowing in this case that was full of loss, but also full of intimacy. It was a time we experienced together.

I would not have known that after weeks of not wanting to leave the condo, my mom would suddenly one day look to me and say, “Why don’t we go outside and sit by the pool?” Or that when did our long dance to the chair, I wouldn’t think of it as anything other than spending time with my mother.

Thank you for reading Tending to Endings. If you would like to subscribe, please leave your name and email below. If you have questions or feedback, you can reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com. Tending to Endings is ad-free and cost free, and I will not share you email. My hope is to help build community and conversation around end-of-life matters.

May 22, 2020June 14, 2020

Hearing Voices

Tending to Endings (twenty-one)

The truck was overheating and I only had minutes. The A/C pump froze and now I’m trying to make Banner Summit so I can coast to where it’s a few degrees warmer and within hiking distance of a phone. It’s ten below and the Eve of New Year’s Eve, December 30, almost midnight and there hasn’t been a single car since Stanley. When I finally crest, I turn off the engine and hope I haven’t ruined the motor. I remember there is a flat spot a couple miles down. I keep hoping to get past it, closer to Grand Jean. But it’s cold and there’s black ice so I can only go so fast. Then the road flattens and the truck comes to a stop. It won’t start. It’s toast. I sit there and the world is as quiet as you’ve ever heard.

My husband, John, is telling the story which begins with the divorce and the ill-fated elk hunting trip and eventually leads to him building a house in the mountains, a project that takes eight years. The story of Elkhaven is family lore and any one his kids could chime in with details about how he raised the walls himself by riggin’ ropes and pulleys, or about George, the grouse who kept him company. I’ve heard the story many times, and I eventually lived in that house for six years before the boys hit driving age and we moved back to town.

Only this time, I have promised to write it down and so I’m sitting on the couch of our living room during quarantine time with the voice memo feature of my iPhone on. Also, I’m hearing the story as a woman who has recently lost her mother. Which means, I’m hearing the story with the ears of his grown children and I am so grateful I hit the record button. Because what really will matter to them someday when we are both gone, is not so much the story but the way that John tells it.

One of the hardest things for me to accept about my mom’s Alzheimer’s was that her voice changed. She became quieter, less certain about whatever she had to say. She stopped calling me. When I called her, she wanted to get off the phone quickly.

I eventually learned more about the disease and found ways to be close to my mom throughout the changes. But at first, all I could notice was what was gone.

One of the first times I noticed the change in her voice was when we were heading to my nephew’s football game. I made some joke about how she ended up with a grandson who played football, and she said, “It’s so nice, isn’t it?”

I looked to see if she was being facetious. She wasn’t. Instead, my mom who was not a fan of competition and especially not violent sports was quietly following my dad up to the bleachers.

My mom loved her grandchildren beyond measure. She may well have gone to that game pre-Alzheimer’s, but it would not have been without comment or without laughing at herself for ending up at a football game for her grandson.

I missed my mom’s edginess. The way she made sure we knew how she saw the world.

Voices are how I remember people most. I do not know if this is a weird Laura thing, or whether this is true for others as well. But the tone and the rhythm of a person’s voice is much of what I miss when they are gone. The way words lift on certain syllables and fall on others. Where they land the funny parts. Where their voice cracks with sadness or anger or truth or glee.

I remember how my friend Pat, who died in February of 2015, would say my name on a voice message, “Laura!” drawing out the two syllables like some enthusiastic song. “I’m so sorry I missed your call!” In one short message, I could feel her love.

I still have my friend Susan’s last voicemail she left in April of 2016 while she was waiting to learn whether she was going to return to the Children’s School, a job she subsequently got, but did not begin because she died that summer from a brain aneurysm. I saved it not because of the content, but because of the Susan-ness I hear in her voice.

Yeah this has been an interesting process and maybe I’ll get my old job back and maybe I won’t. And if I don’t, that will be ok, too. But, still uncertain. And I’m fine. And, I’m going to be hatching chicks this month so that’s going on and life is good! And so, happy Friday dear, thanks for thinking of me today. Take care. Bye.

Mostly, I don’t need the recordings. Voice contains so much of us. It carries with it the places we are from and the quirks from our own parents and traces of books we have read. Voice is breath shaped by thoughts and experience and larynx and lungs.

A friend in Boise once introduced me to her friend, a man in his sixties visiting from Brooklyn. As soon as the man started telling a story, I heard my grandfather. I realized only then that the voice I knew so well as my Grandpa’s was heavily rooted in the place he was born.

I can still hear my grandmother’s voice as she read Madeline to me, my favorite book as a child. I remember the cadence and the tone and the way she would speed up the pace when Miss Clavel, afraid of a disaster, ran fast and faster. And something else in her voice, too, that I know now (but didn’t know then) was irony. She knew what was coming.

I knew many things about my grandma. She cooked our favorite meals but didn’t eat much. She was a worrier. She loved being a grandma. She volunteered at the hospital so she could carry newborns to car when it came time for them to go home.

But today when I think of my grandma, it is her intelligence I recognize first in her voice. My grandma saw flaws inherent in the human condition and she was drawn satire and wit. She talked about books and politics and words and people.

Though I was a child when my grandma was alive (she died when I was 18), I somehow feel closer to her now than I did then, and I believe this is because as I have grown I have understood her more, something that is only possible because I remember her voice.

It was last fall when a friend of mine asked me to write the story of her two daughters, born after a long series of trials and losses and then, finally, two beautiful births. In the past I had always taken notes by hand when writing a story. But I had recently discovered how easy it was to use the voice memo feature on my phone.

Once Darcy’s husband Mike started talking, I was so glad I had done that. I never would’ve remembered his wording exactly:

I think the story starts on our first date. Where we ended up at the fricken’ animal hospital. Dog ate a bottle of the Boxer’s pee pills. But at the end of that night, we drove up to the top of Quail Ridge and were looking at Christmas lights in Boise. That’s when Darcy said, “Just so you know. I want a kid.”

As soon as I got home and listened to the recording, I knew I was going to write the story in their voices. It would not just be what happened, but how their parents would tell the story that would matter someday to those girls.

In May of 2018, I received a message over FaceBook from a stranger that I almost deleted but then read.

“I live in a house you used to live in on Devonwood. I found a box of your things up in the crawl space. Memorabilia you might want, like photos and poetry.”

Devonwood was where I lived before John and I moved up to Elkhaven. It had been fifteen years since I lived there. Curious, I drove over to pick up the box.

I rifled through papers while still parked outside that house where my sons had spent their first years of life. There were high school year books and binders full of poetry from my teenage years. I could’ve lived without all of it.

Until I found envelopes in my mother’s handwriting, letters she wrote when I moved to California. One written just after I started graduate school:

I hope that someday you have more of what I have, the joy of reading and learning for the joy of reading and learning. This fall, however, excess time would only allow you to pay more attention to the Presidential elections and they aren’t much fun. I will cast my vote (for Dukakis) but beyond that I believe whoever get in, the people are going to begin to prevail. I’m going to encourage everyone to write the President often with feedback, suggestions, demands, etc.

I held the packet of letters to my chest. There it was, my mother’s voice.

It is memorial day weekend, and many will be remembering the stories of those who are gone. I’ve been thinking lately about how often we focus on the stories we haven’t heard yet. The war stories that someone might take to the grave. The things parents didn’t tell us about their own childhood. And those stories no doubt have great value.

But lately I’ve been thinking too, about the stories I’ve heard over and over. Maybe I have even had the thought, not this one again. Only these days, I may reach for a pen or ask if I can turn on the recorder. These days, I’m more apt to listen. Maybe at first because I recognize this person could be gone. But then, then, because they are here.

More Resources

Normally I’ve been including links here, but this week I want to recommend the voice memo feature that comes standard on most phones if you haven’t already found it it. On the iPhone it is usually grouped with utilities like the calculator.

It makes for a very easy way to collect family stories whether people are apart or together. Just push one button and you can audio record a short or long story that will be saved in an audio file to your phone and can be sent to loved ones via email or text attachment.

For inspiration listen to Story Corp podcasts.

Grandma Jean holding her newest grandchild, Ryan, and with new mom, my Aunt Gail.

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