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Looking, Learning

Tending to Endings (twenty-seven)

Thank you for the thoughtful ideas and questions you sent in during these last couple weeks! In response to the survey, readers have asked for more about caregiving, grief, and living with Alzheimer’s. Readers said they would like to read about the importance of friendships and other support systems, and more about how various cultures approach death.

From your emails, I’ve gathered some great questions to explore:

Why do people often feel guilty when someone dies, like they could have prevented or changed someone’s death?

What cultural forces have made death a taboo topic and what resources are there to help turn that around?

How do we make friends with death rather than fearing it?

How can we let go of preconceived ideas about a loved one’s death, so we can be present for how it actually unfolds?

These and the other wise questions energize and also humble me. How will I ever learn enough to write the post on making friends with death?! What if I get it wrong? And then I remember this is about being a learner not an expert. (I’ll never title a post, Five ways to die with dignity!) But I will explore and share experiences, insights, and resources I find along the way.

It sometimes seems a low bar for a yearlong blog, paying attention to endings. But when I think of how rare it is to comfortably discuss death in our culture, even among close friends or family, it suddenly seems a year isn’t long enough.

It is an expedition that inspires me, not only because of the big questions contained within the mystery of death. But also because there are small, everyday gifts there. I believe there is life in every nook and cranny of life, including the last moments of breath. And it is life that I do not want to miss.

I hope you will continue to send your ideas and questions my way. Please also consider sending me resources that you find if you think they would be helpful for others.

Workshops

I only had a few takers on the various online workshops I suggested. I think maybe the timing isn’t right for that. We have a plethora of online courses and events to choose from these days! With summer in full swing, many of us are longing for less screen time and more outdoor time.

I also know that not everyone is comfortable with online videoconferencing. Just for your information, the platform I use for meetings is Zoom which is easy to learn, and I have privacy settings selected so that participant information is not recorded or saved. I will check back in later in the year to see if there is more interest.

More Voices

In the meantime, I do want to include more voices in the blog. I’ll continue to share books and online resources, and I also plan to do more phone interviews with people who work in the field of hospice care or grief counseling or ministry. Since Covid-19 is currently on the upswing in Boise, my more experiential research is likely to remain on hold for awhile.

I also plan to include more stories from people who do not work in the field. The thing I hear over and over from friends who have done hospice work is that every death is unique. This again reminds me of birth stories and how paying attention to each others stories not only give us more information, but also offers ways to connect during one of the most profound experiences of life.

One way I hope to gather some of these diverse experiences will be to pose a question and a call for stories every now and again, starting this week.

Call for Stories

Sandy, Uncle Lawrence, Laura, Aunt Gen…Jane, circa 1968

Questions #1: What was your first experience learning about death?

For me it was my Aunt Gen when I was four or five years old. I loved my aunt who was a large woman with white hair and glasses with rhinestones that glistened. She came to my nursery school concert one afternoon where I played the the triangle and it made me feel important that she was there. I eventually chose my first pair of glasses after hers, choosing a light blue pair with sparkly stones in the corner though mom tried to talk me into tortoise shell frames.

One evening I heard my parents talking about something serious in the kitchen. When I entered the room, they told me that Aunt Gen was very sick in the hospital. She had cancer. I asked to see her and my mom told me kids weren’t allowed but that maybe they could make a special exception. Maybe I could visit her from the hallway. This part of my memory doesn’t make much sense to me, and I may be remembering it wrong. I was very young after all. But soon after, I had a dream that I got to wave to my aunt Gen who was standing at the end of a long corridor.

In real life, I did not get to see Aunt Gen again. She died soon after that kitchen conversation, and I felt utterly betrayed. My response was an epic tantrum full of anger and endless tears that became part of family lore. It was a story my mom would use to describe my personality, Laura feels things deeply. It was recalled each time I would have to leave a friend I’d made camping and would sob all the way home.

I would love to hear your stories about your first remembered experience with death. Send them however is easiest for you: email laura@laurastavoe.com; post in the blog comments section or even to the blog link on my Facebook page; send a voice file from your phone if you don’t want to write it down. Seriously, whatever is easiest! Feel free to include a photo if you have one. 

Your memory can be a few sentences or a full page. I am just looking for a variety of experiences to reflect on and possible share in a future column. I will respond to you individually, and I will ask before using your words in a post.

This Independence Day, I wish for you a sense of connection and unity and purpose as we reflect on and celebrate the ideals of our country. Thank you for being here! Have a wonderful holiday weekend. 

This holiday, I wish for you a sense of connection and unity and purpose as we reflect on and celebrate the ideals of our country. Thank you for being here! Have a wonderful holiday weekend.

Laura

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Your Thoughts

Tending to Endings (twenty-five)

First, thank you for being here! I am grateful for the small, growing readership and the feedback I’ve received from emails and comments that have let me know that people are finding this project helpful.

My plan for Tending to Endings was to write once a week for a year on topics pertaining to end-of-life matters. Since next week marks the halfway point of 2020, it seems wise to pause to reflect and ask for some input.

There are currently 114 subscribers to Tending to Endings and about another 50 people access it online each week. Given the demands on everyone’s attention these days, I am thrilled people keep returning. Early on I figured as I had a handful of readers, I would keep posting. So, thank you! It is so much less lonely with all of you here!

Not everything has gone as planned. In my first column, I described this as a gentle expedition and I intended on exploring resources in my community like I did when I attended the Death Café early on in the series. Much of the fieldwork has been on hold due to Covid-19 restrictions, and I have often relied instead on reflections from my own experiences alongside links to print and online resources.

I enjoy personal narrative as a form, but of course my own experience is limited. My hope is that I will be able to get out in the field again soon so that I can include more perspectives and voices. If you have ideas you would particularly like to learn about, I’d love to know. I’d also be interested to know which resources you have found helpful.

The platform for commenting is a little clunkier than I hoped. I am interested in hearing more about the comments feature and whether you would like a more active comments section. I am also exploring some ideas for more real-time interaction opportunities through online workshops.  

In case you are interested in perusing past installments, I recently added tags to each post so you can more easily find posts on the topics of interest. I will temporarily tag this post with all themes so that you can easily find essays on topics you might have missed. Look for the hashtag (#) followed by this list below at the bottom of the post: Alzheimers, Caregiving, Community, End-of-life Planning, Relationship Work, Spirituality, Story, Talking about Death. Each link will bring you to a collection of posts related to that topic.

Whether you are a new reader or have been following from the beginning, I would love to know your thoughts as I begin planning for posts for the second half of 2020.

Please cut and paste the questions below into an email laura@laurastavoe.com

Write as much or as little as you want to each question below. I would love to have these back by Monday, June 22 but will appreciate them whenever they get here. I will not share your info with anyone.

Please tell me something about yourself and why you read Tending to Endings.

How would you complete the following statements?

  • I would like to read more posts on the topic of…
  • Some things that would improve Tending to Endings or make it more relevant for me would include…
  • One thing I hope will not change about Tending to Endings…

Do you have any thoughts on any of the following?

  • Comments Feature
  • Links to Resources
  • Length of posts
  • Photos
  • Format and Organization

Would you participate in any of the following options assuming they are offered at a time that worked for you at no cost using an easy-to-learn online conferencing tool?

Please rate your interest with 5 = I can’t wait for this to start!, 3= I might be interested, and 1 = This is not for me. (Feel free to include other thoughts, comments, ideas.)

  • An online weekly story circle where participants share their own stories on end-of-life topics. Four meetings. 1.5 hours each. Limit 12 participants.
  • An online writing workshop with the focus of writing about endings. Every other week. Four meetings. 2 hours each. Limit 12 participants.
  • A once-a-month online book club on books related to end-of-life matters. One 2-hour meeting per month. Limit 20 participants.

Anything else you want me to know?

Thank you so much for reading Tending to Endings and being willing to share your thoughts. Have a beautiful weekend.

In gratitude,

Laura

photo of Laura

Please leave your name and email below to receive Tending to Endings each Friday. Tending to Endings is ad free and cost free and I will not share your info. Its aim is to build community and conversation around end-of-life matters.

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Like This

Tending to Endings (twenty)

This post will not be funny. This will not be funny because like many of you, I have been living in relative seclusion for I-lost-count-of-how-many days and I have learned things about myself. For instance, I have learned that I am relatively disciplined when it comes to writing and moderate exercise and cleaning the kitchen every day. But regarding laughter and playfulness and lightheartedness? For that, I apparently require the village.

I have even found myself envying friends who are quarantining with kids. Yes, they have to figure out how to attend video work meetings while simultaneously homeschooling and keeping an infant alive. But there is a chance that in the middle of an endless day when things feel heavy and uncertain, a couple toddlers will show up in a viking cap and ski goggles.

Once my kids got older and moved out, it was often my co-workers who helped save me from myself on a regular basis by making me laugh. People often say the favorite thing about their work are the people, and it was certainly true for me. During some of the most stressful weeks of the semester, faculty would pull out an art project or make crepes in the kitchen or launch a game of Telephone Pictionary.

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My friends at the college still help give me perspective. Because, while I can’t force funny, I can put myself in a place where it is more likely to happen. For instance, anywhere in the vicinity of my friend Maia who has a talent for being hilarious. While I’m complaining about the clunkiness of relation-shipping on Zoom, Maia is busy amusing herself, her math students, and an ever growing audience of Facebook followers with her daily Zoom wardrobe and scene changes.

My mom was funny. In fact, her sense of humor was one of the things that got me through during those difficult times towards the end of her life. I remember a moment when we were first bringing in hospice care and we were participating in the intake interview which basically meant that our nurse, Noelle would ask questions, and my mom would look to my dad and I to answer. Alzheimer’s had made even simple questions difficult.

At one point during the visit my Noelle asked how long my parents had been married and my dad answered they had been happily married for fifty-four years.

“Hasn’t it been fifty-five?” I asked.

“Well, fifty-four of them were happy,” my mom interjected. “There was that one.”

That moment helped Noelle get to know my mom more than any of her other questions, and they became quick friends.

One of the greatest gifts of spending six months living with my parents was discovering that they were truly in love. I could tell because they could still make each other laugh and they did so often and for their own amusement. They sang old drinking songs from college and had a patter with each other that was improvisational yet familiar.

One evening my parents and I were on the lanai watching the sun put on a particularly spectacular show, turning the ocean and sky bright gold.

“This is heaven,” mom said.

Which I took as an opportunity for a serious conversation. My mom was approaching the end of her life, after all, and it was difficult to discuss death especially with the confusion of her disease.

“What do you think heaven is like, really?” I asked.

And she looked at me and my father and spread her hands open to the sky and said, “Like this.”

Never one to let go of a goal easily, and also, because I was curious, I asked, “What about people who died before you like your mom? Do you think you see them?”

She looked at me, nodded,”Yes, I think so.”

“What about people you didn’t like very much?” my dad teased.

Well, they are there, but you don’t have to talk to them.” Her half-smile let me know she knew she was funny.

These moments were gifts not only because they made me laugh, but also because they told me my mom was still herself.

Tuesday my friend Patty and I went for our weekly walk which her husband calls our anti-social walk now that we keep space between us (even my friend’s spouses are funny). This time we decide to hit the trails and on the way up it starts to drizzle. I explain how I planned this whole blog about humor and playfulness. I thought I would be great fun to play all week as research, but then I couldn’t even think of anything fun to do, which was really depressing.

Patty laughed, which was exactly the right response, and I continued to describe my angst about not being able to lighten up enough to write about lightening up. Loudly because we were antisocial distance walking and all. Plus, the rain was getting stronger.

And as we reached the top of the ridge, and I could see the mountains in the distance, I noticed a peculiar green tint to the clouds that I hadn’t seen earlier and not very often at all in Boise. Then the skies opened up and just dumped on us.

We stood there a minute at the top of the ridge stunned by rain and its intensity. Even the the mountain bikers seemed impressed straddling their bikes on a knoll above us and staring upward as the sky let loose.

Then lightening flashed and brightened whole sky and Patty said, “Whoa,” and we began our way down. I counted in my my head like I did as a child during midwestern summer storms. One one-thousand, two and then the thunder cracked and Patty and I quickened our pace to a brisk walk-jog, rain pelting down drenching our clothes and our selves, both of us laughing.

Yes, I thought, like this.

More Resources

In case you, too, need some help lightening up, here are some recent links that made me laugh.

An article about Maia Zooming Her Best Life.

For those who don’t have enough kid humor in you lives already, this collection of funniest parent tweets reminded me.

If you haven’t yet watched John Krasinski’s Some Good News series, here is the most recent episode that includes a reunion of The Office cast.

And if you have a large quarantine household or are motivated to figure out how to do this on Zoom, here are simple instructions to Telephone Pictionary. Instructions are straightforward but the game itself promises silly fun.

Tending to endings aims to build community and conversation around end-of-life matters. If you would like to subscribe, please leave your name and email below. It is cost-free and ad-free. I will not share you email. If you would like to leave comments and you don’t the comment box below, click here.

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The Marrow

Attention is the beginning of devotion. –Mary Oliver, Upstream.

Tending to Endings (seventeen)

Last Saturday my twin sons turned twenty-five. I don’t think about my pregnancy story as often as I used to, but during this time of isolation and uncertainty when most of us not on the front lines have orders to stay home (which feels both difficult and not very heroic), it has certainly come to mind.

The boys were due on May 17 of 1995 and I went into preterm labor on January 29, far too early. Their father, my husband at the time, drove me to the hospital, and I was admitted and placed on an IV of magnesium sulfate, a drug that relaxed every muscle in my body to the point where it took effort to lift my hand or move my leg. Only my brain remained unaffected. I stayed aware, worried.

The nurses kept upping the dosage until I could no longer open and close my jaw, until it took effort to make myself blink. Until, finally, the contractions slowed. I watched the sluggish heartbeats of my sons, also affected by the drug, marking slow time on the monitor. I could not take my eyes off of this evidence of life.

It was early in February when I was assigned a home healthcare nurse and sent home with a pump to administer a different medication and orders to to stay in bed full-time. I had been a teacher and a coach and a triathlete. I rode hundreds of miles a week and and ran in the hills for fun. I stayed up late grading papers and planning lessons and creating events for my high school students. In those days, my self-esteem was very much defined by productivity and achievement. Staying in motion was my mental health strategy, the way I managed fear. Now, my babies’ lives were at stake and all I could do to help was to be still and drink water. I would’ve been far more comfortable being ordered to climb Mt. Everest.

I have thought about that time a lot during our Stay-at-Home order, which in Boise is in its 30th day. How impossible it seemed in 1995 to be still during a time that was so wrought with uncertainty. How necessary it was. How much I gained that I didn’t even know would be part of the package. I think of Thoreau, who, in Walden, writes about seeking that kind of clarity:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms,…

Sometimes the woods come to us. In fact, in my case spiritual growth almost always shows up looking more like crisis or upheaval than like a pilgrimage or a quest. More like preterm labor or a pandemic.

Not that my days on the couch looked spiritual or productive. In many ways, I was a wreck. I couldn’t think of anything serious or important. I started and abandoned craft projects. I watched reruns of Northern Exposure and made it through most of alphabet-titled detective novels. I spent a lot of time trying not to worry.

But I also loved on my sons knowing this might be all we had. We counted off days waiting for hearts, brains, and lungs to fully form.

Each day, I lived on the couch with my palm on my belly. I held it there for reassurance that they were still with me and also because it was the closest I could get to holding them. I waited for them to kick and watched evidence of limbs move across my expanding skin. I told my sons stories and secrets and I sang them songs. I wanted them to hear my voice as well as my heartbeat. I wanted my sons to feel loved.  

I think about the community I had surrounding me even in that isolation. The boys’ dad brought me news from work and pints of Haagen-Dazs. Friends would drop off groceries and piles of books. My mom flew in from Chicago for a few weeks and we played Scrabble nonstop. The kindness of others provided a lifeline from the outer world while I was preoccupied with this inner one. The womb of the living room, the womb beneath my palm. The babies and I, we were all gestating.

We made it 77 days. At 36-weeks, I was able to turn off the medication, and go for my first walk in three months, along the canal bank. It was a brisk sunny day, the cherry trees were blooming, and I was dizzy with the freedom of being outside. Also my belly was unbelievably huge.

That night, April 18, 1995, Gabe and Dylan were born and I was finally able to hold my sons in my arms. They had hearts and lungs and deep brown eyes and souls I already knew. They were able to come home with us.

I know no other way to get to the marrow without also tasting the fact of death. I don’t mean in the way of daredevils. I don’t need to brush up against danger to know life isn’t permanent. I need only to remember. And to pay attention.

Today my sons are twenty-five and I am fifty-five and all of us are here. Today, I hike up the hill behind my house and pull a deep breath into my lungs. I know that, in the words of Jane Kenyon, one day it will be otherwise. It will be cancer or Covid or Alzheimer’s or something completely unexpected. But today, I hold my palm to the earth. I am here.

Thank you so much for reading. If you would like to receive Tending to Endings each Friday, please consider subscribing by leaving your name and email below. Thank you!

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Touching Ground

Tending to Endings (sixteen)

Last week, on the first anniversary of my mom’s death, my sisters and dad and I planned to meet by Zoom. Like many, my family has taken our grief online. The digital world has made incredible things possible during the pandemic. John Prine dies and we are able to hear Brandi Carlile pay tribute from her home in Washington. Doctors and nurses help patients near death say goodbye to loved ones over FaceTime. And families gather in separate living rooms and grieve via video conferences. While it isn’t the same as holding and hugging, it is a form of connection, something more than we would’ve had, say, during the Influenza epidemic of 1918.

I’m so grateful for digital opportunities to see one another and talk, and yet, it is not enough. Too many senses are missing, particularly touch. And, timing, too, that delay, the fraction of lost time that affects laughter and eye contact and the ease of anything in unison. No one ever says jinx, you owe me a soda on Zoom. You cannot say a prayer aloud in unison. You cannot feel the music come through your own chest as someone sings, or the warmth of a shoulder near yours, or the clasp of another’s hand. 

And then there is the leaving. The way loved ones are there one minute and then gone and their absence is so complete, the screen making clear they were only an apparition.  I now am aware that when humans leave a room, their warmth, their scent, the echo of their movements remain awhile. People linger. After video chat, there is only the loneliness of the computer screen.

And so, as grateful as I am for the chance to see and converse with loved ones, sometimes, video conferences leave me feeling not quite grounded, missing something, off kilter. I’ve learned to balance digital time with earthier things.

The morning of April 9, a few hours before our meeting time, I turned off the news and closed my computer and began collecting items that belonged to my mom. Mom had a saying in our house—no shrines—to which she meant our bedroom was not going to be our bedroom after we left. Mine was quickly made into an office with sailboat pictures where my swim team ribbons used to hang. So a shrine isn’t exactly in line with Mom’s personality. I can hear her laughing, saying, What, you think I’m holy? Some kind of saint?

Still, it felt right to hold the objects she held. A pewter plate from her collection and the sugar bowl from her tea set that was always in our living room, the books she read until the bindings went soft. I included one of the stuffed bears she brought to the hospital when my the boys were born and Scrabble tiles arranged in the names of her grandchildren. I brought fresh cut flowers from the yard and found a photo of her with a classic Jane expression and her arms reaching towards the sky.

As the table came together, I decided, she would’ve appreciated my creation which was more along the lines of a Day of the Dead Altar than a shrine, a collection of things that she enjoyed here on earth. In any case, I loved it, and it felt good to hold things she held dear.

Once the day warmed, I went for a walk on the trails wearing Mom’s jacket. And when I returned, I knelt in the grass and planted iris bulbs and her favorite, lily of the valley. It felt good to have earth in my hands. I thought about all the days I came home from school and found my mom sitting in her garden, happily working in the dirt. These small acts of doing made me smile.

I know I’m not alone in my longing for tactile experiences during these days marked by collective and personal grief. Homeschoolers leave love notes on trails in the form of painted stones. Friends post photos of knitting creations and one mails me a paper crane and a letter penned on stationary. We find solace in sensory experiences: dancing, holding, making, planting, breathing.

Once it was late enough to text to Maui without waking Dad, I sent photos of the altar to him and my sisters and aunt and uncle. Amy followed with a photo of a tree her family will plant in their yard, a Jane Magnolia. And Sandy sent a photo Loa, born to my brother-in-law’s cousin and his wife that very morning. A new baby in the family. Mom would love that best of all.

Sometimes when I make room for grief, joy slips in. Grief is such an unpredictable force, isn’t it? Just when I think I know what is coming, it shifts again into something new.

April 9 was a beautiful day in Boise, and at three o’clock I sat on the back patio and opened my laptop so I could gather with my sisters and my dad via Zoom. We talked about our current lives, and how all our kids were doing. We considered what Jane would think of all of this, sure she would be philosophical and positive. She would be sending people book recommendations for saving the world and talking on the phone with friends. “She definitely would be supporting all of the restaurants by ordering carryout every night,” Sandy said. We all laughed.

“She would want to gather, though,” Amy said. And we knew, then, that Mom wouldn’t let a pandemic keep her from doing so. This is a woman who, in the 1980s set up live link via satellite in our basement (years before Dish network or internet) so that neighbors near our home in Chicago could attend Beyond War meetings with people in Palo Alto. (My dad notes that she did need some help with installation from him and Tim Kelly down the block).

In 1988 Beyond War awarded a peace prize to Reagan and Gorbachev for their work on ending the Cold War, and Mom helped organize an event in Evanston so hundreds of people could participate in the ceremony that linked the groups on different continents by what they called a space-bridge, and what we would now call video conferencing.

Mom would’ve found Zoom before any of us.

During all of this, Jane would be Jane—the woman who hates cooking and supports local business and more than anything wants peace on earth and good will toward all. Mom always knew the world could be (has always been) a heartbreaking place. Her response was to build bridges. To put her energy into whatever she could do. 

On the anniversary of my mom’s death, most of what I felt was grateful, happy even, to have my sisters and father all together, and my mom, too, in whatever way is possible. When our call came to a close and we expressed our love and said goodbye, I shut off Zoom and felt the sun warm on my skin, watched birds flit from branch to branch. Our laughter lingered still.

More Resources

Some of my motivation for this column came from a video Creating Tactile experiences to grieve death in the time of Covid and also an article, Funerals and Dying in Abstentia, by Sarah Chavez, executive director of The Order of the Good Death. The article offers both digital and tangible ways of honoring loss in the time of Covid-19.

The full collection of resources where I found these can be accessed at Pandemic Resources for End of Life in a newsletter published by the National Home Funeral Alliance.

Last week I included an episode of Unlocking Us on grief. David Kessler also has a website devoted to online grief support grief.com

If you have any resources or ideas about how to honor loss during a pandemic, please feel free to share them in the comments section. (If you don’t see a place to leave comments, click here.)

If you would like to receive Tending to Endings as an email newsletter each Friday, please subscribe below. It is cost free and ad free and I will not share your info. My aim is to help create conversation and community around end of life matters.

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