Grief – Laura Stavoe

December 24, 2022December 24, 2022

Shades of Alone

Tending to Endings (seventy)

This year John and I are spending the holiday season pretty much the same way we have since his surgery on October 1, hunkering down away from the various viruses that are out and about this season; his immune system is still drawn down to make his body more hospitable to the donor liver. Things are going well, and he will likely be able to stop many of the medications at the end of the month, but we don’t want to take unnecessary chances. For the holidays we plan to bundle up for walks with family members or connect over zoom.

While we look forward to the day when we can gather again, it feels like a festive holiday even with just the two of us. I even put up a tree, which is not something I do much now that the kids are grown. We are still basking in the afterglow of his having made it through a life-or-death story spectacularly well. He is even gearing up to (hopefully) play tennis in January!

We know we have a wide circle of friends and family who have kept abreast of our story and journeyed through much of this with us in spirit. All of this makes us feel less alone even though we don’t see many people and when we do, we are masked and six feet away, or outside in the cold walking briskly!

Thinking of all this during the holidays has reminded me of how some of my loneliest, most grief-filled days have been in December. The holidays didn’t cause the loneliness, but they certainly accentuated it, and this is true even though I don’t think I ever once was actually alone on Christmas.

There was the loneliness of the first Christmas without my grandma Bedingfield (1983). Throughout my childhood, Christmas morning was defined by going to my grandparents’ house for cowboy coffee cake and oranges halved (each topped with a maraschino cherry) and gifts opened one at a time from youngest to oldest grandchild. How could Christmas even occur without my grandma?

There were the first holidays post-divorce (1999) when Gabe and Dylan were preschoolers and their dad and I entered the era of scheduling two Christmases in two different houses, each marked by absence and filled and with heartache and grief. That one took a long while to transform into something new, and the shadow of it still rears its head from time to time.

Grandma Jean Bedingfield readying the Christmas bacon.

The loneliest of all, though, was in 1981. I was seventeen years old and had just returned home to Illinois after a failed attempt to move to Colorado for my senior year in high school to get residency so I could attend college in Boulder. Well, that was one way to tell the story. Another was that I moved to Colorado to outrun my drinking problem and the wreckage it was causing at school, at home, with friends, and even with myself. I was hoping for a reset, a new start in a new place with new people. A chance to do everything differently. Those familiar with addiction and recovery will not be surprised to hear that in Colorado my drinking and relationship problems only got worse.

That year, I sat with my parents and my two younger sisters, around the tree decorated with ornaments from our childhood. I opened a box from my mom that held a full-length puffy winter coat that I instantly hated because it emphasized how ugly and huge I was (I wasn’t ugly or huge). I am sure after Christmas I returned it the way I returned everything my mom gave me during those years.

What I felt was not the magic of Christmas or the love of my family, but shame and fear and loneliness so deep I couldn’t see a way out. I carried secrets, a tangled mess of my own risky behavior and sexual trauma from abuse and fear that I was pregnant (I wasn’t). I carried the terrifying knowledge that I couldn’t stop drinking even when I tried, even when the stakes were very high.

And, there was a deeper secret below all that. I didn’t see how stopping would help. Alcohol had been a solution for all my unsolvable problems: for anxiety, for an eating disorder, for a pervasive sense of self-loathing that used to come and go and now just stayed. Alcohol had stopped working; it no longer took away the pain. But where would I be without it?

I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone all of this on that morning. Certainly not my parents. I think back to that time now and wonder why. I knew intellectually that I was loved, even when I couldn’t feel my parents’ love. Was it fear of being controlled? Or of hurting them? Disappointing them? Maybe all of the above, though the last rings especially true. I also sensed that in the that telling, I would acknowledge the problem was real.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to start with telling those who loved me most, and I didn’t even have to start with everything. I called an acquaintance from high school who I heard had stopped drinking through a recovery program. On Christmas, he called me back and connected me with a group of people who were not at all baffled by the fact that I kept drinking even when I didn’t want to.

While 1981 may have been my loneliest Christmas, it also ended up being my first sober day, which is to say, it was also my best. It was the beginning of finding a new way of life and a community of friends and a sense of purpose and eventually a way to repair most of those damaged relationships. It led to a long string of sober days that continues today.

It might be tempting after all these years to view that time as a teenage stage that I was bound to outgrow. But overcoming addiction is no sure thing, even for a middle-class white kid in a home filled with Christmas lights and love. Alcohol poisoning, car accidents, suicide–all of them were quite possible. Not every teen makes it through such dangerous terrain. I never take it for granted that I have.

If you have been reading Tending to Endings for any length of time, you know I am all about sharing our stories. It is not because I think talking fixes everything. It doesn’t. But for me storytelling and storylistening with those who understand—whether it’s the experience of addiction, or what it’s like to share custody of kids, or the grief of losing a grandparent or a mom—is one way I find sturdier, more expansive ground for the next step.

There is a saying that has become popular in the recovery community in recent years: the opposite of addiction is connection. That seems right to me. Healing has meant connecting in an honest and imperfect way to people both inside and outside of recovery circles including my family. It has meant connecting to my own intuition and the natural world and a mysterious and creative thrum that is more than me, and also, me.

Jane, Dylan, Gabe, and Laura (who could use warmer coat!) circa 2000

And it has led me to find new meaning and purpose in old stories. Sometimes they can be helpful to others who are going through their first post-divorce holiday season or their first sober one or the tenth where there is a particular, empty chair at the table. And even my own stories change with time. When I think back to that huge, puffy, warm coat my mom gave me, all I see now is how much she loved me!

This year while John and I hibernate in the warmth of our most recent story, I am wishing you communion with all that brings you peace and meaning this season. Whether you are worried about someone, or joyously gathering, or sitting this one out, or grieving a hard loss, or some combination of all these things, I wish you connection to community that understands and to whatever inner voice sustains you.

I wish you peace, and I send you love,

Laura

More Resources

Al-anon Family Groups at al-anon.org

Alcoholics Anonymous at aa.org

Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988lifeline.org

Resources on loss and grief: https://grief.com

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February 22, 2022February 22, 2022

Whatever Just Happened

Tending to Endings (sixty-four)

As personal as some Tending to Endings posts have been, I have not aimed for it to be a series where I spool out what is going on in my life while it’s still raw. Those blogs are probably more true to the form. But when something big happens in my life, I tend to traverse huge expanses of thoughts, feelings, insights in ways that are disjointed. It’s hard to know where I’m going to land and what is just anxiety and grasping and noise. So generally, I begin in my journal or with close friends who know to not put too much stock in anything as I verbally wander and epiphanize through the early stages of whatever just happened. Instead I tend to see how events take shape and then write something more akin to a personal essay that I hope might also be useful to others. There was a time when I wanted to be a columnist—Mike Royko and Erma Bombeck were my favorites when I was a kid—and Tending to Endings has let me play at that a bit.

But, two weeks ago, while I was in Maui visiting my dad, John called from Idaho to let me know the MRI results showed the mass in his liver is cancer. I was already staring at my phone because he had promised to call as soon as he came out of the appointment. We knew it wouldn’t be great news since the doctor invited him into the office for the results. I expected more tests, or the cirrhosis is worse, or we need to do a biopsy. But, I learned that afternoon that liver cancer can be diagnosed from an MRI. John’s voice over the phone was relaxed. He was as surprised as I was. All this had started with a wellness exam and none of it seemed real.

As I’ve contemplated what or whether to write this month, I’ve realized that what is going on is a little too relevant for me to ignore. I’ve been writing Tending to Endings for just over two years now, and though the readership is still modest (150 subscribers), you are steady! Some of you have been friends for years or family forever, and and others have been referred here because you are going through a time of loss. Or maybe you found me from a Facebook share, which probably means you are friends with my sister Amy. No matter how you found this blog, I’m glad you are here, and anytime someone takes the time to read something I have written, I am touched and appreciative. It felt important to write this post, even though I don’t yet know the shape of the story or how it might be useful.

Like many medical stories, this one already contains reasons to be hopeful as well as complications. On the good side, John is very healthy and active and doesn’t drink (hasn’t since 1988); it looks like the cancer began in the liver and has not spread; he is currently symptom free and playing tennis daily. On the complicated side, John has prior liver disease advanced enough that the tumor cannot be surgically removed without risking liver failure.

On Thursday, the surgeon referred us to a liver transplant center in Salt Lake, and we are currently researching options and awaiting that appointment. Due to the cancer diagnosis, the surgeon believes John will be placed high on the list. The upside of the transplant is that it offers the best chance of living a cancer-free life and John will have a new liver. On the downside—my husband needs a liver transplant!

I know many of you are at some point on your own hard journey or have just gotten through one or know someone who is going through something painful and full of loss. I don’t have a lot of insight to share yet, though, being me, I’m collecting observations that may someday turn into some post about surviving the first couple weeks after getting really horrible news.

For now, I’m remembering how overwhelming medical news can be. There is the worry over the person you love and then the way the axis of your life suddenly changes to a whole new plot line that includes a mountain logistics to navigate all with a hurting heart and brain that is not operating at full capacity. I didn’t even know how to manage getting home from Hawaii quickly much less helping my husband through a liver transplant. But I did make it home just in time for the first oncology appointment, which is a story of kindness and grace that I will save for another day.

John, by the way, is doing much better with all this than I am. The hardest thing for him is not being able to go out in the garage with his tools to fix his liver himself as is his usual way. But, the other day he came in from tennis and told me that he was in the car listening to music and a wave of pure joy for being alive came over him. “That happens to me a lot,” he said, “but I didn’t know it would still happen after news like this.”

That still happens for both of us.

We are at the beginning of a journey that we would not choose, but we are both seasoned adventurers. I will probably be writing about it here though I don’t know in what form or when. We have set up a Caring Bridge site to let our friends and family know more details as we learn them. You are welcome to visit there. Thank you for being part of our community. We know know we have so much love holding us.

John and Laura, Leslie’s Gulch, ID January 2021

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November 5, 2021September 23, 2022

Fire, Thanks, and Giving

Tending to Endings (sixty-one)

“What fire?” I ask Patty.

I am at my computer where I’ve been all afternoon. Patty’s voice over the phone sounds concerned.

“Richard just got home and says there’s a fire by your trails.”

I stand to look out my office window and see billowy smoke just over the ridge. The ridge where Patty and I hike each week and I walk every day, a brisk two minutes from my backdoor. In between those two points, grows sagebrush, some native grass, and lots and lots of cheatgrass, all of it crackling and dry. It is October 6 and the wildflowers have long withered. I cannot remember the last rain.

I remind myself things on the horizon often look closer than they are. I open the slider from our living room and walk out back, Patty’s voice still up to my ear. The winds are erratic, the kind that sends tumbleweed tumbling; the kind that breathe flames to life. It is hard to tell what way the fire is moving.

“It doesn’t look good,” I say, “I’m going to try and get more info.”

I have one of those 21^st century moments where I’m googling on my cell phone for information about the smoke I see with my eyes. I find nothing. I hear sirens. My heart rate quickens.

It’s never time to panic, some inner voice says. Think. Pray. Water.

I dial John while heading to the garage.“Call me when you get this,” I tell his voice mail, “There’s a fire in the foothills.”

John is playing tennis on the other side of town, his phone in his truck. I will continue to try to reach him every five minutes.

I go to metal box in the garage that contains the automatic sprinkler controls, aware of things I should pay better attention to, like when John shows me how to reset the sprinkler system in case I ever need to when he’s not home. I see an array of buttons and knobs. I flip switches, and turn dials until I hear the familiar whoosh running through the lines and the start of the rotation.

I walk to the backyard and crank open the faucets on the house, flop hoses as close to the stupid junipers as I can get them. We are grateful to Beryl and Otto who built this house in 1980 and cared for it until we got here a little more than three years ago. The house is sturdy and came with fruit trees in the back and tall pines on the western edge of the yard.

But the junipers—which will take heavy equipment to yank from the soil—are not on my gratitude list. We’ve been meaning get rid of them ever since we moved in because they are scraggly and overgrown and, as the fire-wise websites inform us, they are among the least fire-resistant plants due to their lacy leaf structure and volatile oils.

I walk into the house and I grab my computer and John’s and set them in my car. I pack passports and car titles and the wills John I just signed. It turns out in a crisis, I’m not sentimental–I do not pack photo albums or my mother’s tea set–but I know how much I despise bureaucratic paperwork, and I don’t want to redo it.

I back the car out of the garage and turn it around for a quick exit, toss keys on the seat. Patty has pulled in the drive and is asking what she can do. We walk to the backyard and she picks up the hose and sprays the junipers, the dry grass.

My neighbors, Rob and Daryl are next door in their garden. Rob, walks over.

“What are we doing?” I ask as though there is a joint plan.

“If the flames come over the ridge, we’re going to leave.” They have dogs and two daughters and turkeys and hens that lay eggs in our yard. “Mike says, for now the winds are in our favor.” Mike another neighbor, has worked for the Bureau of Land Management.

“The winds feel all over the place,” I say.

“Right!?” Rob nods, “And you and I both know this is a tinder box back here.”

Finally I hear a helicopter overhead and look up to see it pulling the tiny bucket of water towards piles of smoke and flame. A police SUV makes its way up the wide trail past our backyard and the officer tells hikers and bikers to leave the area. It has been about twenty minutes and the calvary has arrived. I notice how small they seem up against the long giant cloud of smoke and the vast expanse of brown hillside.

I see the glow of orange flame licking the ridge.

We might be homeless, I say to myself. Though the word, doesn’t quite sit right. We might lose our house. That is true. And I have the twin sensation knowing how awful this is and how lucky I am at the very same time.

I walk back in. This time I grab underwear, sweat pants, tee-shirts, my contact solution and glasses. If I have to stay at someone else’s house, I at least want to have clean underwear and clear vision.

John has finished tennis, seen my twenty-three missed calls. I tell him over the phone that I have turned on the sprinklers and Patty is here helping water. I have packed our computers and paperwork. I ask what else.

“It sounds like you have done all the right things,” he says. “I’m on my way.” He assures me it will take time even if the flames come over the ridge. I don’t quite believe him.

“Anything else you want me to pack in the car?”

“No.” he says, and then, “Did you get my guitar?”

I walk back in the house. The wood from the piano flashes at me from the living room, the piano my sons learned to play on. Out of the corner of my eye I see the tiles John’s daughter fired in her kiln and that our kids set into the kitchen wall during our last Thanksgiving together, pre-Covid. The year we dined on Indian take-out while the grout dried.

I see now, but I cannot afford to think of all we will have to grieve. I walk out the front door lay John’s guitar in its black case across the backseat of my Subaru.

By the time John gets home, there are bulldozers on the ridge and the plume of smoke is making its way northeast of us towards other homes. A stray spark from the smoldering embers could still set fire to the hillside, but our house is no longer in the direct line and at least four city fire departments have arrived.

By 8 o’clock we are without electricity but feeling out of danger for ourselves. We worry about neighbors to our east who have had to evacuate. John and I play Scrabble by flashlight. We realize the network news has aired when friends from all over the Boise Valley text me to see if we and our house are ok.

By ten pm the flames are out and all the residents are able to return home.

This was not the first time I packed a bag to leave home with my heart racing and fear for my well being. The other is a story I don’t tell often or even think of much anymore. But it came forward during those moments I spent packing and illuminated things I don’t think I saw decades ago, when I left my first marriage and before I had children. And of course this is very pared down version of a complicated story:

While in my twenties living in San Diego, I was driving home from my new teaching job one afternoon trying to figure out if my husband really might kill me or if I was overreacting. A thought came that was more like the bright flash before a migraine than an everyday thought: I’m wondering if my husband might kill me. That’s not normal.

When I got home, I called my mom in Chicago from the back bedroom, whispering into the phone even though I was the only one home. My mom asked only one question. Did I have somewhere I could stay that night? This surprised me. I hadn’t told them much. It was a marriage after all. I thought there would be more questions. She told me to grab only what I needed and leave. I took random clothes and my wallet and headed to a friends.

For a few months I did not have a stable address. The threats and stalking continued for some time, and for years I remained on hight alert and half afraid. But I had so many friends willing to give me a guest room. I had access to counseling. I had parents in Chicago who would’ve gladly had me move back. I always had a kitchen table where I could unravel, places where I felt more at home than the apartment from which I’d run.

Eventually less than two years later, I moved to Idaho rather spontaneously and for variety of reasons. Once here, I noticed I was less afraid. I stopped looking for a particular shape of headlights in the rearview mirror. I made new friends, taught in a new school, grew a new life.

About two weeks after the fire, rumors were confirmed. The blaze was started by teenagers setting off fireworks. Thanks to multiple fire crews, no homes or animals or people were lost. Four-hundred and forty acres of land and trail system burned. The brush and sage will recover. We were all very lucky.

When I walk along the ridge now, I see scorched earth on one side and the beauty of Boise’s autumn trees on the other. There is something—not comforting, exactly—but grounding about having both so clearly in my view. I almost wish the scar from the fire was more visible from town. You have to hike up the ridge to see how close this fire came to the edge of us. It’s easy to think the danger has passed as if it couldn’t happen again next summer or tomorrow.

We are all vulnerable in the face of wildfire or hurricanes or the threat of violence or cancer or Alzheimer’s or death. And yet, in moments when this frailty comes most into focus, I am also aware of what I have. The things that won’t burn down.

Had we lost our house, I would have many kitchen tables where I could be myself as I wept. House or no house, I have places I belong including inside my own body, my own marriage, my own community.

The truth is that the winds have always been in my favor. I have had and always had layers and layers of safety net, many of them since birth. I have to participate to maintain relationships, but I have had one hell of a running start.

Loss in these conditions is different than losing a home when everyone you know is also living on the edge of poverty. Or when you are new to a country. Or when you have fled abuse and no one in your community believes you.

My questions for myself these days have less to do with how do we build emergency shelter and more to do with how can I help make sure that in my community people have places where they can be themselves in good times and in times of loss. It feels like a complicate question that will take me time to know.

November is a month of giving thanks for many of us. It is also my birthday month, having made now fifty-seven trips around the sun! What a gift it is to be here.

As a small way to celebrate, I am making donations to nonprofits in my area committed to providing community and support as well as secure housing to those in Boise going through challenging times. I welcome you to join me! Or to give in your own community in whatever way is most meaningful. In the meantime, I will be following my question about what my own role is in nurturing a beloved community in my home town.

With love and gratitude,

Laura

Catch: Every Family. Every Person. A Home.

Idaho Coalition Against Sexual & Domestic Violence

Boise’s Agency for New Americans

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August 1, 2021August 1, 2021

Opening

Tending to Endings (fifty-eight)

These things happen…the soul’s bliss
and suffering are bound together
like the grasses…
–Jane Kenyon, “Twilight After Haying”

A woman in a ponytail offers to take John’s and my photo if we’ll take a family portrait for them, the family still tumbling out of the van at a pull-out along Going to the Sun Road in Glacier. John and I pose in front of the rocky peak that cradles traces of ice, and then five girls, also freckled and ponytailed and looking like various-size versions of Mom, assemble with their parents on the edge of wilderness.

I snap the photo, we pull together to talk about our adventures. The girls laugh and shiver in their sweatshirts even though it is 70 degrees out and will soon get up to 90. “We’re fresh from the humidity of Alabama in July,” dad explains. Two of the girls rattle off the parks in a duet. So far they’d been to Badlands and Mt. Rushmore, and next will be Yellowstone and Grand Teton.

Usually when John and I travel to wild places, we search for the most remote spot to camp. But on this trip—our first to Glacier— we decided to stay in a park lodge on either end of the park and take, what John dubbed, The Funnel Tour. Which means, we drove from one end of the park to the other stopping where everyone did, and we ran into a lot of families.

Honestly it was fun after so many months in segregated quarters during which time all the families with young children never got a break, and the rest of us went long months without hearing endless knock-knock jokes or the spontaneity of kid laughter.

We lunch along McDonald Creek and meet two little boys from Colorado standing ankle deep between their parents, mesmerized by the colorful stones in the clear water. I feel my spirit lift, much like when we spotted a moose standing in St. Mary’s Lake, or the mule deer in velvet who posed for photos.

When the boys open their palms to show off their finds, John shows them how to hold each stone in order to get the perfect spin. They practice and look to us and their parents to make sure we are appropriately impressed whenever a stone gets three hops. And we are!

“There are so many sweet kids here,” John says as we climbed back to the car.

And I know what he means. Where I expect whining and eye rolls, kids and parents seem lighthearted with one another. Teenagers play card games with their parents on the lodge porch as the sun goes down. One boy, I guess to be in middle school, shouts from the lake, “Mom, I found you the perfect rock! You are going to love this one.” And—rather than shaking her head and yelling back, “No more rocks!”—she wades out to admire his find.

I don’t mean to make this sound overly idyllic–I heard complaints, even tears. Something was just slightly different. Family members seemed connected, not in a clingy way, but by some invisible thread joining one to another.

Was it that eighteen months without a vacation made everyone more grateful? Or that a year and a half of togetherness forced us all into a choice between utter boredom or learning to enjoy one another?

I thought about the gentle shifts in my own relationship with John, the way both times of solitude and togetherness seem more natural. We are more in tune with each other than we were at the beginning of COVID.

Does it still irritate me when the box of granola looks like a grizzly opened it first? Well, yes, but now I’m apt to laugh as I attempt to perform surgery to make it pour correctly. We tend to give each other a little more grace.

And this year, we didn’t let our anniversary just slide by, instead following the tradition we always meant to which started deep in the Grand Canyon on our honeymoon: to always celebrate by doing something outdoors together in a place we had never gone before. There have been years where in the busy-ness of life, it did not seem all that important to honor that tradition. This year, while John and I hiked to St. Mary’s Falls and kayaked rapids on the Flathead River, I was so grateful we could.

I’ve come to understand that for me, the question of getting through the hardest times is not how to survive them, but rather, how to get through them without tuning out or shutting down. Which might sound like an aspirational platitude. But, about a quarter of a century ago, that choice arrived in a very physical and immediate way when I went into preterm labor during the second trimester of my twin pregnancy.

It is a story I return to often, including here, because of how it it changed me. Up until that point, shutting down in the face of potential loss seemed a valid, even a wise choice! But the dilemma while on bedrest and medication and as contractions continued to roll through my uterus was that this might be all I had of motherhood. These kicks beneath my palm, these squirms, these aches. Did I want to miss it?

And so I sang songs to my sons and read stories of the hundred acre wood and I told them secrets. Although I had not officially met them, had not yet looked into their eyes or heard even one knock-knock joke, I loved my sons. For seventy-seven days, our connection grew.

First of many Grandma visits, April 1995 (Dylan, Jane, Gabe); Celebrating year 26 April, 2021 (Laura, John, Ali, Dylan, Caroline, Gabe)

Gabe and Dylan lived to be born and they live still and that will always be my favorite story. It has meant twenty-six years of days to get to know and love them. And yet, I quickly learned, even good endings include loss, and parenthood gave me extra practice. One day they are no longer in your belly, and the next they want to build towers with their preschool friends instead of you, and if all goes well, they eventually move to Kentucky or Seattle and are too busy to call.

Now, as an entire planet of people begin to open our doors and come out to take stock of the events we have endured during the last eighteen months, I wonder if families with young children have a leg up on the rest of us. That maybe their hearts have remained a little bit more open to all we have been through, and thus they are a bit steadier in the midst of what feels to me a whole lot of vulnerability.

We lost friends and dreams and school years and sports seasons. Some relationships did not grow closer; some marriages did not survive. We are finally beginning to hold the funerals.

No time reminded me so much of those days in preterm labor–where heartache and connection intertwined–as the months I spent with my mother during her dying.

One afternoon when things were particularly intense with my mom’s cancer and Alzheimer’s, I went for a walk and ended up at Whaler’s Village, an outdoor shopping area in Maui. I watched the people walking in and out of stores and felt entirely out of place.

Finally, I sat on a concrete planter and texted a friend of mine back in Boise whose husband had died from Alzheimer’s: Sometimes I feel that what is going on is so heavy that I am not fit for public interaction. I either feel fake because I’m staying on the surface, or, if I try to explain, there is just too much and I would overwhelm people.

Today I know that gap I felt had as much to do with the connection and tenderness towards my mom as it did the trauma. It is not only the pain of hard circumstances that makes me clumsy in the face of everyday life. Sometimes it is the intimacy.

And maybe that is why this opening at times feels stranger and more awkward than the shut down. We hesitate at the threshold because we don’t know what to expect of ourselves or each other or how to explain all we have been through. And maybe even because there are things from this experience we don’t want to lose.

At Glacier, smoke from distant wildfires shrouds the view and sometimes makes it painful to pull a deep breath into my lungs. On the drive home, a newscaster informs us of new fires in Idaho and variants of the virus wreaking havoc in other countries and our own.

There will be more endings. And beginnings, too.

My struggle seems to be—this day, every day—to consider both worthy of devotion, woven as they are with suffering, with love, with bliss.

More Resources

Three Books I’m Reading Now

No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering, Thich Nhat Hanh

Nothing can survive without food, including happiness; your happiness can die if you don’t know how to nourish it. … We can condition our bodies and minds to happiness with the five practices of letting go, inviting positive seeds, mindfulness, concentration, and insight.

When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi

Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon, English major, scientist, and husband who wrote a memoir about his own illness that was published after his death from metastatic lung cancer:

I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.

Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care, Edited by Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast

This book includes writing by pioneers in hospice care like Dame Cicely Saunders and Elizabeth Kubler Ross, contemporary practitioners like Frank Ostasekski and Rachel Naomi Remen, and poets like Mark Doty and Marie Howe. There is an intimacy to this collection alluded to in the introduction:

There are pieces here to wake you up in the morning and pieces to tuck you in when it’s time for bed, pieces to hold your hand through long sleepless nights and pieces to watch with you when you don’t know what you’re watching for. There are poems to cry with you when you’re sad, and poems to lift you up when you need lifting up. This is a book to keep you company as you make your way to the bedside, and this is a book to comfort and console you as you make your way back home.

Three Kid’s Books

Tear Soup: A Recipe for Healing After Loss, by Pat Schwiebert and Chuck DeKlyen

A book about allowing grief to have its season:

Some people thought that the neighbor was eating too much tear soup. So Grandy, being an old and somewhat wise woman, called and invited her to a special soup gathering where it’s not bad manners to cry in your soup or have second helpings.

Drawing on Walls: A Story of Keith Haring, by Matthew Burgess

A biography about the mural artist from childhood to his death from AIDS at 31. The story focuses on Haring’s dedication to the creative spirit and public art.

After watching Keith work, a kid came up to him and said, “I can tell, by the way you paint, that you really love life.”

Frederick, by Leo Lionni

A story about the role of a poet during hard times.

“Close your eyes,” said Frederick, as he climbed on a big stone. “Now I send you the rays of the sun. Do you feel how their golden glow…” And as Frederick spoke of the sun the four little mice began to feel warmer.

Three Poems

Twilight: After Haying, Jane Kenyon

From her book, Otherwise, here are the opening lines to the poem quoted in the post:

Yes, long shadows go out / from the bales; and yes, the soul / must part from the body: / what else could it do?

A Ritual to Read to Each Other, by William Stafford

An old favorite I pull out during hard times as a comfort and a reminder to stay the course:

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, / a remote important region in all who talk; / though we could fool each other, we should consider–lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

The Affliction, By Marie Howe

I first came to know Marie Howe’s poetry from a book my friend Mary Ellen sent me after two friends died called What the Living Do. It is excellent and probably would appeal to many who read Tending to Endings. “The Affliction” is from a more recent collection, Magdalene captures the experience of presence after being, as Howe describes it, “outside–watching…as if I were someone else…”

Three Listens

The Thing I’m Getting Over, This American Life

All of the stories on last week’s episode about being in that place where you are in recovery but not recovered, are poignant and engaging. The last one, “Shot Girl, Summer in the City,” is related most directly to the idea of opening up post COVID precautions, and the strange awkwardness and changed-ness that seems to follow us as we rub our eyes and wander back out into the streets.

Conversation on Chödrön’s The Things that Will Not Die

Krista Tippett recently launched an app that contains conversations and coursework on spiritual topics. This short conversation with Devendra Banhart focuses on a passage from Pema Chödrön’s Things Fall Apart about practicing Tonglen:

This kinship with the suffering of others, this inability to continue to regard it from afar, is the discovery of our soft spot, the discovery of bodhichitta. Bodhichitta is a Sanskrit word that means “noble or awakened heart.” It is said to be present in all beings. Just as butter is inherent in milk and oil is inherent in a sesame seed, this soft spot is inherent in you and me.

When I Get to Heaven by John Prine

A poem, a song, a conversation, all in one. Enjoy!

Please consider subscribing to Tending to Endings. It is free and will arrive in your inbox once a month. You can also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com.

May 7, 2021May 7, 2021

Telling and Retelling

Note: If you don’t have time to read the entire post, please do scroll to the Call for Photo Stories section under “Artifacts of Grief.” I’d love for you to join in!

Tending to Endings (fifty-five)

“Does that make you think of Mom?” my dad asks.

I’m folding clothes on my parents’ bed because post-vaccine, I’m visiting my Dad in Maui, and the washer and dryer is in their bedroom suite.

“I think of Mom every day! Especially here!” I tell him.

“Yes, but when I fold laundry I think of how she liked to fold towels.”

And I do know. There were times after the Alzheimer’s advanced that I would pull clean towels from the shelf and throw them in the dryer to tumble a bit so Mom could refold them. It gave her a span of time where she knew what she was doing, which brought her a sense of purpose and thus peace. She particularly liked folding the towels and napkins because she could get them into a shape that was even and that pleased her.

It’s strange that this memory makes me smile now. The whole activity was out of character for both of us. I was being sneaky and my mom was keeping house.

Before her illness, I was the family member who pointed out the elephant in the room rather than hiding it under a pile of warm towels. And my mom, for most of her life, saw domestic chores as something that got in the way of her real work which was attending peace vigils, and writing letters to the editor, and teaching kids to garden or to read, and holding study groups in our living room about her newest passion.

The island holds many stories for my family. Mom considered Maui paradise and her second home ever since she first visited in 1976. While dad and I walk along the coastal trail, I pull my camera out to take a photo. My dad says, “Your mom would’ve taken a photo of those same blue flowers.” At lunch, a bird sits on our table and we talk about how mom would scoot her plate over and say, “All our welcome here.”

Even memories about difficult times spill out easily. The towels for instance remind me of once when mom was up in the middle of the night. I retell the story to my dad.

Her wounds from the cancer were bleeding and I had gotten her to the shower and washed off and somewhat calmed down, but she was still out of breath and hurting and I didn’t think I could get her dressed and back to bed. I said, “Let’s lie down here for a few moments.”

I threw towels on the floor and brought pillows and a blanket from her bed and we lay facing each other on the bathroom tile.

She looked at me and said, “I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t have to take care of your mother.”

“You don’t have to be sorry, Mom. Remember how many times you stayed up with me when I had the stomach flu?”

“You were a lot smaller.”

“We need help at different times. That’s what family is for.”

“True.”

“I might need help again someday. You would help me if I was sick, right?”

There is a pause and then she says, “Well, I might decide to hire a nurse.”

My dad laughs and says, “She really said that?”

He knows she did. I told it to him after it happened and during other visits and I have even written about it before in a story he has read. But we tell it again. It is a reminder of my mother’s wit and strength. It is evidence of her essence, her Jane-ness, even with Alzheimer’s, even on one of her hardest nights. Mom still had a talent for one-liners that were both funny and true.

One of the things I learned INELDA’s Doula School—and I learned so many things!–is how helpful it can be to retell the story after a death of a loved one. The story of the dying, and the time leading up to the death as well, particularly for those involved in caregiving.

I had already provided this opportunity to myself after experiencing a series of deaths in recent years. I wrote a book and began a blog. I held grief writing workshops. I went to death cafés. I made friends with people who wanted to share their losses too. I see now that I found and created places where it felt appropriate to share those stories.

Like many of us, I have been steeped in a culture where talking about death is at best awkward and at worst taboo. I have traces of my old worries. Am I grieving too long? Making too much of all this? Will I get stuck here?

But it does not feel that way. And I do not see it in my father either. Not talking about my mom would seem strange; sharing stories feels natural, a relief.

With each telling the angle of the light is different and I see things at the edges that I might have missed. In so doing, the ache lightens and the smiles grow. Telling stories seem to be a way forward that helps me connect past to present to something I don’t yet know.

More Resources

INELDA: International End-of-Life Doula Association

Many people are interested in the role of doula: what it is, whether they need one, whether they should become one. The INELDA introductory doula class answered those questions and outlined many tools for providing emotional and spiritual support for those who are dying and their families. The class was delivered online, the atmosphere was warm, inviting, and communal. I was moved by how many participants already dedicated their days to end-of-life work as chaplains, hospice nurses, and other heath-care professionals.

I’m sure I’ll include other things I learned in future posts. But, in short, I’d recommend INELDA’s training for anyone interested in learning ways of offering support to the dying and their families. The coursework involves deep reflection and active participation. Be prepared to dive into small group exercises on emotional topics such as planning your own death vigil or imagining you have a terminal illness and talking about a regret.

Doula certification from INELDA requires additional steps including hours of supervised practice and an exam. I plan to continue towards certification, but even if I was not, I would consider what I learned extremely valuable to me as a mortal being who loves other mortal beings.

You can find more information about the course, the role of a doula, and a list of doulas who are INELDA certified on the INELDA website.

Doorway into Light

After hearing about it for years, I finally drove to Haiku, a tiny town not far from Paia and visited the Doorway to Light, which is a storefront full of resources about death and dying. The center was founded by Ram Dass, Reverend Bodhi Be, and Leili Be.

And speaking of storytelling! My favorite experience at the center was when Reverend Michelle Renee, co-director at the center, suggested I select figurines from the shelf full of tiny characters to place in a sand tray. “Whatever ones you’re attracted to,” she said.

I quickly pulled a robin, some alphabet blocks, two lovebirds in a boat, a table with a rather table set for a festive tea.

Michelle and I sat in a little nook in the store below a sign that read “Grieving Allowed,” with the circular sand table between us. After I had set up character asked, “Will you tell me the story?”

This made me nervous. I hadn’t really been thinking about a story and was just trying to be a good sport. I worried I’d let her down, fail to have the cathartic experience that the sand table and grief nook clearly intended. But I figured, I could make something up.

“These are my parents in this boat,” I told Michelle. “One of the biggest gifts from my caregiving experience with my mom was seeing how in love my parents were after fifty-six years of marriage.” Well, that was all true, and Michelle was listening. “I knew they loved each other, but I learned in the months I lived with them that they were still truly in love. They had all these little special jokes! They delighted in each other!”

And suddenly Michelle and I were both getting teary.

By the end of my scene I had discovered who each of those people were at my tea party including the strong woman who decided to invite death to the party. “This is powerful medicine this sand toy thing,” I said.

“It sure is,” Michelle said, her eyes wide.

Doorway into Light has a humble storefront and a big mission. It aims, among other things, to transform our culture by transforming attitudes and relationships with aging dying and death. Also, to reclaim the care of the dying and the dead as village-building work and sacred service. Not to mention, to provide low-cost and free counseling, support and burial to those in need and insure that no one need die alone!

Bodhi also began an end-of-life doula Doula Training and a Certification program in 2017. It is now offered in partnership with The Esalen Institute. Certification requires additional hours of work in the field.

Psychosocial Aspects of Dying and Death (PSYC 211) at CWI

This fall, I am excited to be teaching a course at my old stomping ground in the fall, College of Western Idaho. This is a three credit course that has both in person and online required components. The in-person meeting is on Thursdays at 1:00-2:15 pm at the Ada County CWI campus off of Overland Road. The course number is PSYC 211-01H.

This class is appropriate for anyone interested in learning more about death and dying, and there are no prerequisites. You can find more information on how to enroll at the college website or feel free to reach out to me by email at Laura@laurastavoe.com.

Call for Photo Stories

Artifacts of Grief

The sand tray at Doorway into Light reminded me of a photo feature in The New York Times last month by Dani Blume and Jaspal Riyait: What Loss Looks Like. The editors asked readers to share photos of objects that remind the of those who died over the last year and created a digital memorial. The premise was that during that time where funerals and in-person memorials have been curtailed, people are looking for ways to share losses with their communities.

Objects seem especially potent. They offer tactile evidence of those we can no longer physically touch. I remember my husband John talking about how wearing his dad’s jacket made him feel a little like he was hugging his dad the winter after he died.

I’d love to create a similar memorial of objects that honor people we (readers of Tending to Endings) have lost. I’ll include the collection in next month’s post, and I of course will need your help! To participate, please send one photo of an object that helps you remember someone you have lost and a few sentences about the story to Laura@Laurastavoe.com.

These can honor recent losses or someone who died many years ago, whomever you would like to remember in this way.

Also, you don’t have to be a subscriber to send a photo. If you found your way to this blog and would like to remember someone with others, please join in. All are welcome here!

You may want to click on images in the Times article for ideas, and here is one I will contribute as an example:

Pat Lambert was a spiritual advisor and soul friend to me for many years before she died in 2015 from pancreatic cancer. This charm from a necklace is something I carry in my backpack wherever I travel. Pat was the kind of person who never forgot a friend’s birthday, and even though she lived on a modest income and had tons of friends, she gave me a thoughtful gift every year. The charm reminds me of her spiritual energy which was full of pure, natural joy.

I would love to have a photo from you. No need to format the text and no need for perfection! I can help with editing and will send you out a link before the email goes out to make sure you like how it turns out. Our digital memorial will be less polished, more homespun than The NY Times version as I have little photo editing experience. But it will be made with care.

Send the sentences in an email and attach a photo in jpeg format to Laura@Laurastavoe.com. Feel free to reach out if you have questions. Please send your photo story by May 21.

You can read or leave comments on this post at laurastavoe.com. Thank you!

Much love, Laura