Tag: Community

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Living On

Tending to Endings (forty-five)

Legacy has always seemed to me a weighty word, reserved for the powerful or wealthy or famous. People who get buildings and scholarships and highways named after them. To think or write about my own legacy would seem pretentious and related to image or ego.

And then I think of Marian Pritchett who I met in the late 1990s, at what was then known as Booth Memorial School for Pregnant and Parenting Teens. The school was housed in a brick building in Boise’s leafy north end. Teenagers who were pregnant or new parents could learn child development along with algebra at a school with onsite day care, and guidance on college applications.

I was going to visit the school once a week through a relatively new nonprofit arts program called Writers in the Schools. I was enthused about this assignment. I had twin toddlers myself, and I knew how pregnancy and birth opened a huge opportunity for creativity.

But my enthusiasm was no match for Marian’s whose eyes lit up at our planning meeting when I told her about writing poetry with the students and putting together a book at the end of the semester. She smiled widely and said she was just sure the program was going to be wonderful. She couldn’t wait for me to meet her students.

What I thought next was that Marian must be a new teacher.  All that positive energy and no shadow of skepticism or the edgy humor I was used to in veteran teachers, even the most caring.  Teenagers have a way of breaking your heart, after all.

When I was getting ready to leave, I asked Marian how long she had taught at Booth. “This is my twentieth year,” she said, “Before that I was at Boise High.” Marian, it turns out, was also the school principal.

The school was named after Marian Pritchett in 2002. Photo Credit: Chris Butler, Idaho Statesman.

Over the next few years I visited Booth every Wednesday, and the students and Marian and I all wrote together. I learned that Marian’s enthusiasm was not just demeanor. She backed it up with unwavering support for her students. She showed up for them whether they were showing up for themselves or not. She called them when they didn’t make it to class. She sat with them as they filled out college applications. When they read their poems aloud after our writing time, her eyes often glistened with tears and pride. Marian consistently reflected back to her students their own intelligence, and strength, worth.

I was writing for parenting magazines during that time, and I worked with one of the young moms who had graduated from Booth to write her story for American Baby Magazine. Jaimie Skinner wrote about the transformation that happened after she arrived at the school:

One of the awful things about being a pregnant teen is that just when you’re feeling the worst about yourself–guilty, ashamed, afraid–people tend to confirm that view…

After almost being expelled for poor attendance and very low grades, I transferred to Booth Memorial High School. I was even having regular thoughts of suicide. It’s ironic that a woman can feel most isolated when she’s carrying a life inside of her, but pregnancy is lonely when it’s not celebrated by the people around you.

The head teacher at Booth, Marian Pritchett, called my house every morning to make sure I was heading in…I spent a lot of time with Marian, who understood what I was going through. As I began to care about myself, I also started feeling compassion for my baby.

Marian’s death in 2002 of a brain aneurysm was unexpected and devastating for her family and her students and all of us who knew her. I attended her funeral still heavy with shock and grief. When I entered the church, it was already full of so many young women with children by their side, and some not so young anymore. The crowd grew and grew–her family and her students and former students and their families and her colleagues and leaders in the community–until people could no longer squeeze into the pews.

I do not remember much of what was said at that service almost two decades ago, but I remember all those babies on all those laps and the way their coos and their cries lifted us. It was the first time I had that strange sensation at funeral or memorial service, of grief being matched with gratitude. How empty the loss and how full the love left behind.

Later that year, the school name was changed to Marian Pritchett High School, and teachers continued to help many young women and eventually young fathers, too, to continue their education after becoming parents.

Last year, the campus was sold and after some attempts at moving the school the district instead combined it with another alternative high school. It was a heartbreaking loss for the community. But I will always think of Marian’s legacy not as any building or school but as all those women and their children and the lives they are living.

To me, this is the most profound form of legacy, the way we become a part of each other’s stories. On this count, Marian outdid herself.

Jaimie and Marian

I reached out again to Jaimie, when I started working on this post. We hadn’t talked since we met at a coffee shop all those years ago to plan the story. She is now mom to two daughters and two sons. The daughter she wrote about in the magazine article has recently graduated college. Jaimie is a teacher having worked for five years overseas and now back at a high school in Boise where she teaches English to new immigrants including refugees who have resettled here.

Last year, she and her husband founded Rising Phoenix a youth leadership organization with an international service-learning focus. They sponsor children in Rwanda and the Congo.

Jaimie and I talked about Marian and how she influences us still. She talked about the idea of legacy:

I don’t really care if I’m remembered, but I want to make a difference in my student’s lives. I talk about Marian to my students all the time. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t had someone like that in my life at that time. In that way I want to continue her legacy.

And maybe that is why remembering people matters. Not so much to give credit, which I doubt would have mattered to Marian. But so that we remember what they have given us that we can now carry forward.

Marian, who was never officially my teacher, may have influenced my teaching more than anyone else over the next twenty years. Through her example, she gave me permission to enthusiastically believe in my students even when the odds might not seem in their favor. She lived the adage that love is a verb by showing up for students each day in big and small ways. If I ever questioned the effectiveness of this philosophy, all I had to do was think back to that afternoon in that church and that strong beautiful community who gathered to say thank you and goodbye.

Tending to Endings aims to build conversation and community around end-of-life matters. You may subscribe or comment below. You can also reach me at Laura@laurastavoe.com. Tending to Endings runs each Friday and is ad-free and cost free. I will not share your info.

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Giving Care

Tending to Endings (forty-one)

On Monday, John had bilateral knee replacement surgery. It’s COVID times and so this means I pulled up to the circular drive of the small hospital and hugged him at the curb like I was dropping him off at the airport. Only this time, rather than luggage, he walked through the sliding glass doors carrying a collapsible walker and an Iceman cooler pack.

Then I drove home and watched the phone.

It was an hour before the nurse called me to let me know he had gone into surgery. “We know you can’t come see him, so you can expect a call from the surgeon in about two and a half hours, maybe a bit longer since it’s both knees.”

Sitting in hospital waiting rooms has never been my thing, and yet now that my husband was in surgery, I felt something important was being kept from me. It’s what we do when we can’t do anything to help a person suspended between life and death—we wait as close by as possible to hear news.

My wording may sound dramatic, I realize. They weren’t doing a heart transplant, after all, only replacing his knees. Still, certain experiences remind me of our vulnerability more than others and surgery is one of them. I admit to feeling a similar sensation each time I am on a plane, and my sons have received many texts over the years: The plane is about to take off! I love you very much!

This is not John’s first knee surgery. That happened nineteen years ago, during the first months of our relationship when John skied into the trees looking like the expert powder hound that he is and emerged, much later than expected on one ski, the other leg dangling limply behind.

“I forgot I wasn’t 18,” he said, with a look of despair. He had taken a jump and landed on the side of his ski and busted an ACL.

When John’s surgery was scheduled about a month later, he asked whether I would help him during recovery. We weren’t living together at this time, and this would mean him staying at my house for a few days.

Sometimes people send me nice notes about this blog and tell me how empathetic I am. Sometimes, I start to believe it. And then I remember that my first reaction to anyone needing anything from me is so often self-centered. This seems particularly true of nursing opportunities. On occasion, for instance, I would attempt to talk my kids out of being sick when they were young. Once—as my sons are fond of reminding me—this resulted in Gabe throwing up on the bus on the way to school and me having to come get him in the nurse’s office.

When John asked if I would help him post surgery, I said, “Sure!” It seemed the right thing to say.

But what I felt was very reluctant. I wasn’t even sure we were at the pick-each-other-up from the airport stage in our relationship. The weekends when my kids were at their dads was supposed to time to catch up with my own life and work and to have some semblance of social life. I liked John, but my priorities were my kids and healing myself, not a serious relationship.

My counselor pointed out that helping someone post-surgery did not actually mean we were at any particular point in our relationship. It could just mean I was helping out a friend. That seemed slightly more realistic than my perspective which considered helpfulness as a sort of gateway drug that could result in my ending up accidentally married again.

And so, after John’s surgery, the boys stayed at their dad’s for couple days, and John stayed at my house. I don’t remember having to do all that much nursing. Mostly I remember having a relaxing weekend and making it through couple seasons of the Sopranos that someone loaned us in box set.

Top: Our wedding guests included our parents, our kids, and my friend, Jen, who married us. Bottom: For our honeymoon we floated the Colorado for 18 days with a world class string quartet (but no showers) through the Grand Canyon.

All this comes back to me in a rush of memories as I try to do simple chores while I waiting for the surgeon to call. Much has changed. John and I are married, something we did very much on purpose about four years after that first knee surgery. He has helped raise my kids and I’ve gotten to share in the joy when two of his daughters each brought a beautiful, new human into the world.

There has been a little sickness, but so far, mostly health. And ’til death is a more of a comfort to me these days than it used to be when it brought on a sensation akin to vertigo. Admittedly this may be in part because our life expectancy suggests only two to three decades to go. But also, I know I have a pretty sweet deal.

And I’ve learned some things the long, hard way. Caregiving, it turns out, is not one-sided. The times I’ve been needed the most—with my sons at the beginning of their life and with my mom at the end of hers—have been the most profound experiences of my life.

The prayer wheel at the Sawtooth Botanical Garden where we married contained 10,000 prayers of Tibetan monks and the blessing of the Dalai Lama. We and our guests went around three times to release blessings: once for our closest loves, once for our community, and once for all beings on earth.

Of course we need each other. We need family members or friends to nurse us back to health and a midwife to welcome the baby and the pilot to fly us over the ocean to be with our dying parent. During COVID times we need staff at hospitals to say reassuring things to our loved ones as they go into surgery.

And we need the surgeon to call. Which he finally does after a little more than three hours, by which time I have stopped doing my half-hearted chores and am instead putting all my energy into staring at the phone and trying to remember to breathe.

“It went really well,” the doctor says, “And, wow those knees were worn out. Some of the worst I’ve ever seen!” I know this will please John, both because it confirms his rugged lifestyle, and because it means we didn’t waste time, pain, and money on unnecessary surgery.

I text his daughters and my sons and all the other people in our life who made me promise to let them know how surgery went. And then I go into the kitchen and my own knees buckle a bit, and I weep. This surprises me. Of course it is relief, I’m feeling, and also a recognition of all those blessings circling in the breeze. Of so much love.

Reader Question

I’m planning and upcoming post on resources for those who are primary caregivers for family members. If you have resources to share that have helped you through the day-to-day experience of being a caregiver, please email them to Laura@Laurastavoe.com. These can be books, podcasts, films, groups, websites, or even stories of your own experiences. I’m also interested to know whether COVID protocols have changed caregiving for you and how are you getting through. And as always, I’m interested to hear thoughts, questions or suggestions about Tending to Endings either by email or in the comments below.

If you would like to receive Tending to Endings each Friday, please leave your email here. Thank you for your interest!

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No Time at All

Tending to Endings (thirty-eight)

It is true our lives

will betray us in the end

but life knows where it is going. 

—Linda Hogan, Parting

My first reaction upon hearing from my sister on Friday night that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died was noooooooo. It was resistance to the tumult and chaos that was about to ensue, still six weeks before the election. So many of us wanted her to hold on. She so wanted to hold on. My first reaction was self-centered fear.

But I have walked close to death recently and so it didn’t take but a minute to pull myself back, to pause and remember what this is. To whisper to the night: Thank you. Safe Passage. Much love. You were brilliant. Go in peace knowing what you gave us was more than enough. For, don’t we all deserve to be sent off on a wave of love? I want to be that love.

And then, what I knew next–RBG is still with us. We haven’t lost what matters most, so long as we pay attention.

I recently listened to a friend’s story of caring for her mother. Cat’s mother died only a few weeks ago and I got to sit on the bank of the Snake River in Hagerman and listen to her story of the long, hard illness and the quiet moments during caregiving, and the magic that happened between them in the days leading up to her mom’s death.

Cat said, “People keep asking if I’m alright, and my heart is actually OK. Grief is quickly followed by comfort and my relationship with my mom has grown even stronger. When I find that very quiet space inside of myself that’s where I can find her.”

And I knew what she meant. I do grieve the loss of being able to call my mom and talk through the election or the last book or whether the plant that surprised me in my yard is a flower or a weed. I miss being able to sit with her or travel with her or play a game of Scrabble.

But, also, I feel as close to my mom as I ever have. She is with me. So is my friend Susan and my mentor Pat and my grandma Jean. When I go to that quiet place within me, these soul friends welcome me. I rely on them.

It always feels tricky to write about things of the spirit that happen in such interior spaces. I worry it will sound like I’m trying to talk people into a particular belief, which is not my aim. So I’ll just say that my experience of death has changed as I’ve spent more time with those who are dying and especially since the death of my mom. One of the things I carry with me is that my relationship with my mom or my friend Pat or my friend Susan or my grandmother are transformed, but not ended.

I don’t fully understand any this. Sometimes I wish I came from a culture where interaction with the souls of those who have departed is accepted in everyday life—where they show up in dreams and stories and across the dinner table—because I don’t always have the language to talk about these experiences.

But I know it is true that my mom helps me every day.

So why not RBG as well? True, I didn’t know her personally. But her work transformed our culture and the way many of us see ourselves and the world. She is with us.

Like many of us, I am troubled by the fact that we seem to be living out the plot to a dystopian novel lately. We are told we are polarized. And maybe we are. Or maybe the loudest voices are and we are living in a culture that has incentivized and thus magnified the extremes: those willing to take up arms, those seeking to confound rather than to understand. Or maybe sometimes the person we identify as the fringe is someone acting on impulse having a particularly bad day.

None of this is to say that we aren’t standing–collectively and individually–on a precipice or that things couldn’t tumble in a variety of directions. My own sense, though, is that the choice before us is ultimately not between left and right. And it is not about finding some happy middle. Instead, I suspect the radical choice that matters is whether we are going to dig deep and find the courage to choose love? Or are we going to let fear have the day?

Last week I included a link to a podcast of an interview between Krista Tippett and angel Kyoda williams, a Zen priest, activist, and author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace. During the interview, williams describes this kind of love that relies on internal work and action in a way that I found helpful:

It is developing our own capacity for spaciousness within ourselves to allow others to be as they are — that that is love. And that doesn’t mean that we don’t have hopes or wishes that things are changed or shifted, but that to come from a place of love is to be in acceptance of what is, even in the face of moving it towards something that is more whole, more just, more spacious for all of us. Its bigness. Its allowance. Its flexibility. It’s saying the thing that we talked about earlier, of “Oh, those police officers are trapped inside of a system, as well. They are subject to an enormous amount of suffering, as well.”

I think that those things are missed when we shortcut talking about King, or we shortcut talking about Gandhi. We leave out the aspects of their underlying motivation for moving things, and we make it about policies and advocacy, when really it is about expanding our capacity for love, as a species

Later in the interview, williams identifies the kind of action that comes from that place of love:

I think that if we can move our work, whatever work we’re up to, whatever kind of desire that we have for our own development in life, to be willing to face discomfort and receive it as opportunity for growth and expansion and a commentary about what is now more available to us, rather than what it is that is limiting us and taking something away from us, that we will — in no time at all, we will be a society that enhances the lives of all our species.

And that is the phrase that makes my heart catch: no time at all. Tippett comments on it, too, the hope inherent in that statement, and williams confirms it is exactly what she means.

…we are evolving at such a pace — even what we’re experiencing now in our society, we’re just cycling through it. We’re digesting the material of the misalignment. We’re digesting the material of how intolerable it is to be so intolerant. We’re digesting the material of 400, 500 years of historical context that we have decided to leave behind our heads, and we are choosing to turn over our shoulders and say: I must face this, because it is intolerable to live in any other way than a way that allows me to be in contact with my full, loving, human self.

My mom, too, believed in this kind of love and the power of it to transform. She might express it differently, at least to me, her daughter. For, when I bring my fretting about the election and about the supreme court seat to the quietest place in myself, Mom responds with her half smile and a glint in her eye, Oh, Laura, so you think the fate of equality and our nation rests on one 87 year old woman staying on the bench?

And she is not trying to diminish RBG’s work or the importance of this election or what follows. She is reminding me that strategy and politics will not be enough to save us. For that we need a Love that includes all of us.

A Question for Readers

Thank you for reading Tending to Endings. In a future issue I am planning to write about ways to begin conversations with parents about end-of-life planning. Have you had conversations with your parents that have gone well or not so well? What did you learn? Or, have your kids brought the discussion to you? How did it go?

If you are willing to share your experience or thoughts or questions on this topic, please send an email (or a voice memo file if that is easier) to Laura@laurastavoe.com.

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

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Slow Food

Tending to Endings (thirty-seven)

My teachers come in many forms—friends, apricot trees, students, neighbors, rivers, my own fears lifting. Some of the teachers I feel closest to are those I’ve never met except through their books. These authors have helped me see differently or more wholly, and sometimes their wisdom becomes foundational to my own thinking and writing.

As I’ve gotten older, I’m less concerned with being original in my writing and more concerned with being honest and precise. Each day brings new stories, new contexts. But the wisdom always belongs to the collective.

For instance, it occurred to me recently that that the title—Tending to Endings—is probably rooted in a line I have carried with me since 2016 from Mary Oliver’s essay “Upstream”: Attention is the beginning of devotion. The line reminds me when I am overwhelmed by all I don’t know and don’t understand about something important—like grief or love—to begin by turning towards rather than away. To make peace with death, then, I might begin by paying it some attention.

Lately I have had more space in my life for not only the compulsive reading I always do—the skimming of articles to get the gist of things—but also for sinking into books composed thoughtfully, carefully, over time. Certain books require attention of mind and heart. For all the strangeness of the past year and a half of my life, I have been grateful it has allowed space for that kind of reading. These books feel like conversation more than consumption. They are books I can talk with on a long hike afterwards:  agreeing, questioning, turning things over in the light, welling up with recognition.

Below are just a few that have recently influenced my own thinking, probably my writing, and hopefully my living, too. These works contain too many nooks and crannies to do justice to in a summary or a critique. And so instead I am including a few quotes from each that have stayed with me long after I set the book down.

Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays.

Oliver converses with Poe, Emerson, Whitman, and Wordsworth in this collection of essays. And also, owls, turtles, her house, and the long dark nights of winter. Here are three quotes from her essay, “Winter Hours”:

We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of _____. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith—only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures. But probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than faith must be. Faith as I imagine it is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know is a fighter and a screamer. (147)

Through these woods I have walked thousands of times. For many years I felt more at home here than anywhere else, including our own house. Stepping out into the world, into the grass, on the path, was always a kind of relief. I was not escaping anything. I was returning to the arena of delight…Eventually I began to appreciate—I don’t say this lightly—that the great black oaks knew me. (151)

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves—we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny. (154)

Credit for owl photo: Patty Marks

Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World

Linda Hogan is fairly new to me. I’m currently reading her poems (Dark, Sweet.), fiction (People of the Whale), and this collection of essays, Dwellings. Through all her writing she weaves together science and spirit and story. Hogan does not hesitate to bring the hardest things about living in this world into the discussion, and she does so in a way that is specific and gorgeous and that offers guidance.

From her essay “A Different Yield”:

When I was a girl, I listened to the sounds of the corn plants. A breeze would begin in a remote corner of the field and move slowly toward the closest edge, whispering. (47)

When I first heard of Barbara McClintock, it confirmed what I thought to be true about the language of corn. McClintock is a biologist who received a Nobel Prize for her work on gene transposition in corn plants. Her method was to listen to what corn had to say, to translate what the plants spoke into a human tongue. (48)

In a time of such destruction, our lives depend on this listening. It may be that the earth speaks its symptoms to us. With the nuclear reactor accident in Chernobyl, Russia, it was not the authorities who told us that the accident had taken place. It was the wind. The wind told the story. It carried a tale of splitting, of atomic fission, to other countries and revealed the truth of the situation. The wind is a prophet, a scientist, a talker.

These voices of the world infuse our every act, as much as does our own ancestral DNA. They give us back ourselves, point a direction for salvation. (52-53)

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

I always thought I had read The Fire Next Time, but it turns out I had only felt like I had because I’d heard it referenced so many times. Last year, I finally did read the slim book of two essays written in the form of letters. The writing is beautiful and searing and precise. It pains me that it is still timely. I can’t help but wonder, would we even need books like White Fragility in 2020, if more of us had read and received what Baldwin gave us in 1962. These passages are from the second letter of the two in the book, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind.”:

There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them: they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed. (21-22)

What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements and transform them. The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro: it is not too much to say that he, who has been so long rejected, must now be embraced, and at no matter what psychic or social risk. He is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his. And the Negro recognizes this, in a negative way. Hence the question: Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house? (94)

Baldwin comes back to love in this essay, but like Oliver’s hope and Hogan’s listening this isn’t a soft, pastel love. Nor is the self-love he refers to about narcissism, but its opposite. This love is wedded to honesty:

All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. And I submit, then, that the racial tensions that menace Americans today have little to do with real antipathy—on the contrary, indeed—and are involved only symbolically with color. (95)

John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong

My favorite book by John O’Donohue is Anam Cara, and this one, too, is a close companion. There is a warmth to O’Donohue’s language that makes the whole concept of suffering as spiritual growth seem less lonely. The passages below are from the chapter “Suffering as the Dark Valley of Broken Belonging”:

When we learn to see our illness as a companion or friend, it really does change the way the illness is present. The illness changes from a horrible intruder to a companion who has something to teach us. When we see what we have to learn from an illness, then often the illness can gather itself and begin to depart. (174)

It is difficult to be gentle with yourself when you are suffering. Gentleness helps you to stop resisting the pain that is visiting you. When you stop resisting suffering, something else begins to happen. You begin slowly to allow your suffering to follow its own logic. The assumption here is that suffering does not visit you gratuitously. There is in suffering some hidden shadowed light. Destiny has a perspective on us and our pathway that we can never fully glimpse; it alone knows why suffering comes. (157)

Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

Christian Wiman is best known for his poetry, but he wrote this collection of essays while he faced an aggressive form of cancer in his thirties.

From the preface:

When my life broke open seven years ago, I knew very well that I believed in something. Exactly what I believed, however, was considerably less clear. So I set out to answer that question, though I have come to realize that the real question—the real difficulty—is how, not what. How do you answer that burn of being? What might it mean for your life—and for your death—to acknowledge that insistent, persistent ghost?

From his essay, “Tender Interiors”:

No, to die well, even for the religious, is to accept not only our own terror and sadness but the terrible holes we leave in the lives of others; at the same time, to die well, even for the atheist, is to believe that there is some way of dying into life rather than simply away from it, some form of survival that love makes possible. I don’t mean by survival merely persisting in the memory of others. I mean something deeper and more durable. If quantum entanglement is true, if related particles react in similar or opposite ways even when separated by tremendous distances, then it is obvious that the whole world is alive and communicating in ways we do not fully understand. And we are part of that life, part of that communication—even as, maybe even especially as, our atoms begin the long dispersal we call death. (35)

There’s been a lot of talk of elders lately, and often mine come in the form of books. These teachers, too, seem pull from some deep stream of knowing. They listen to wind and darkness and illness and love. They make clear, the thousand unbreakable links between us, even in the dark winter hours.

More Resources

If you have more time for listening to podcasts than reading, Kristin Tippett interviews three of these authors on various episodes of On Being.

Interview with John O’Donohue “The Inner Landscape of Beauty”

Interview with Mary Oliver “Listening to the World.”

Interview with Christian Wiman “How Does One Remember God?”


James Baldwin died before the era of podcasts, but these two recent interviews about race in America have given me grist and hope.

Interview with angel Kyodo williams “The World is Our Field of Practice”

Interview with Claudia Rankin (on Longform)

Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist, and playwright. She is the author of the new book, Just Us: An American Conversation.

If you would like to subscribe to Tending to Endings, please leave your name and email below. It is a two-part process to subscribe, so please check your junk mail if you do not receive confirmation in your inbox. You can also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com. Thank you for reading!

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Fear Itself

Tending to Endings (thirty-six)

On the morning of September 11, 2001 after I saw television coverage of a plane hitting the second tower of the World Trade Center and realized something horrible and big and very scary was happening in our country, I drove to work early. Normally I worked from home in the morning and taught middle and high school English in the afternoons at Riverstone International School in Boise. But on this morning, I got in the car and drove in early because my sons were in Ms. Rose’s first grade class at Riverstone. The first thing my fear wanted on the morning buildings were hit by planes was to be in the same building as my sons.

Fear has long been my nemesis. My parents would tell a story about how one summer while we were on vacation, they wanted me to overcome my fear of jumping into the swimming pool. They would count, one, two, three—and I would bend my knees in preparation for launch. But something stopped me each and every time. I think I was afraid of breaking my heels or anklebones on the bottom of the pool or water going up my nose and drowning or some invisible monster lurking in the deep end. I had an active imagination.

My parents promised me I would be fine. Then they promised me ice cream sundaes with two scoops, then three. Pretty soon —just to see how far this would go—mom promised a new bicycle, and eventually a Barbie Playhouse, which she was totally against. We weren’t allowed to have toys that were advertised on TV. Other families eventually joined in on cheering me on. Even with added peer pressure, I remained firmly on the concrete, my toes gripping the pool ledge.

On the drive home from Wisconsin, no one else in my family seemed overly concerned by my failure—it was a funny Laura story, as they told it—but what I remember feeling was despair.

It wasn’t only jumping into pools that scared me as a kid. I was afraid of dogs, being tickled, roller coasters, berries that might be poisonous, spent fireworks, being alone in our unfinished basement, and the way bubble bath suds would expand exponentially under the thump of the faucet. Bubbles may seem harmless to the average person, but after my bath I lay in bed imagining foam filling up the whole bathroom and moving down the hall towards the room where I slept.

I did eventually jump in a pool and even became a competitive swimmer and a lifeguard. According to my mom this happened because I finally took lessons from Mr. Finny who was a bald man with a gruff, raspy voice and a huge belly. He would bark instructions from the pool deck. Mom said, I was more afraid of Gil Finny than the water.  It was a success of sorts, but I couldn’t count on Mr. Finny to be standing on deck every time I needed to do something scary.

I could write a book on all my methods of trying to manage fear. Much of my early life I tried the closed-eyes-and-try-not-to-think-about-it variety of getting through. Or I would vacillate between complete avoidance and immersion therapy, throwing myself into new situations before I had time to be afraid. Results varied.

I’ve never found FDR’s famous quote about nothing to fear but fear itself all that helpful. If I am afraid of the pool, or the new job, or the course of climate change, or the pandemic, and I fail at talking my way out of that fear, it means I actually do have something to fear. Maybe not the thing, but my fear. Which is kind of scary, right? It’s the bubbles expanding exponentially all over again.

Gabe and Dylan on the Main Salmon. Laura, Dylan, and Gabe on the Lower Owyhee. (circa 2002)

On September 11, 2001, I was afraid, but what made me get in that car and drive to school was a desire to make sure I was near my kids in case they needed me. This may not have been logical or noble. There wasn’t anything I really could do at school, and it wasn’t like I was running into a burning building. I just sat in the teacher prep room and talked with other teachers about what was happening and how we were going to help our students and our children and ourselves cope with the tragedy still unfolding.

But when I think back to the that day, the difference between that and many other frightening times in my life was that I was not thinking of myself.

I can take no credit for this impulse of course. It came with the kids, this freedom from self-centered fear. But the example has been more useful to me than advice from Nike ad campaigns or my own attempts at fear management.

I realize not everyone needs to become a parent to discover the power of love, but motherhood gave me a crash course in getting over myself. It was like a freebie view into what life can be like when I’m not buckling under the weight of self-centeredness. And it came without any effort on my part, like grace. Of course raising kids took work. But I never once had to talk myself into loving them.

Dylan on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, September 2020. (photo credit Ali Smith)

People talk about whether disaster bring out the best or the worst in people. And the answer for me is both, sometimes both in the same day or hour. Love doesn’t always come as easily as it did on a river of maternal hormones. Sometimes I think of how I can be helpful. Other times I sob or get snippy with the Verizon representative or have an anxiety attack or spend an afternoon in bed. Sometimes I have to remember to turn my attention to love and then to practice doing so again.

When I taught high school I learned that I could only teach well by loving my students. Other strategies failed because I was terrified to be up there in front of that class. There were so many variables to any given lesson plan, so much could go wrong interacting with 160 teenagers each day. If I was thinking about me and whether I was doing a good job, I’d never make it.

But if I was thinking about them, about who they were and what they needed and how I might help, well, then the fear lifted. I didn’t have to tell them I loved them, which would’ve been awkward and maybe unprofessional. What mattered was showing up with their wellbeing at the center. It meant listening to who they were and helping them find their way. The result was that teaching was a lot more rewarding and time consuming and fun. We formed a community.

Some call it service work, but it feels more reciprocal to me than that. I think of what I turned to on that day nineteen years ago. I wrote poems with my students and reached out to my one friend in New York and listened to those who were worried about loved ones they hadn’t yet heard from. I held my sons as much as they would let me and then played with them in the backyard before dinner.

When I asked others what they had done on the day of the attacks: they reached out to loved ones, gardened, played with the dog, went for a walk, baked bread. Acts of love.

It is another September full of loss. We do not know the extent or what will be left or what we will create anew. We are mid story in the pandemic, in the fire season, in the election, in the climate emergency, in the injustice still unreckoned. Fear is a seductive force and there are plenty of invitations to stoke it.

Or, I can show up for Love.

More Resources

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. Rebecca Solnit, (2009).


The study of disasters makes it clear that there are plural and contingent natures–but the prevalent human nature in disaster is resilient, resourceful, generous, empathic, and brave.–from the book’s prelude, Falling Together.

John Lewis: Good Trouble. A documentary film about the legendary civil rights leader who died in July, and definitely a story about love in action.

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