All of It

Tending to Endings (fourteen)

Lately, it has been impossible for me to not think about last year this time. I imagine with a pandemic going on, many of us are more reflective. We likely have more alone time, for one, save those who are front-line workers or parents of young children in which case, thank you, thank you, thank you for showing up each day in these harrowing conditions.

I am pretty sure I am not the only one missing their mom at this time, too. Or missing someone who helped hold them steady who is no longer reachable by phone or zoom.

I alternate between feeling my mom’s absence profoundly, and then, maybe even simultaneously, feeling relieved that she didn’t have to experience this in her fragile state at the end of her life. All of us in my family were at our limit last spring. I cannot imagine adding a pandemic into the situation.

And it occurs to me that a year later, even with Covid-19 begging every minute of our collective attention, my mom’s death is here sitting in the room with me.

There was a time when I would’ve said I would rather honor my mom’s birthday rather than the day she died. And, well, yes, that sounds positive, and logical. In the long run, August 28 will be the day to celebrate all Jane Stavoe brought to this world.

But apparently that does not mean that when April 9 comes around, my heart or my bones will let the anniversary be ignored. I didn’t think about that part.

I know many readers have also gone through the death of someone very close and have more perspective than I do on anniversaries. For next week’s Tending to Endings, I’d like to include some collective wisdom. If you have a story or experience about a death anniversary, I would love to hear from you. I’ve included more details at the end of this post.

I don’t know yet what we will do if anything on April 9, but I know I will be thinking of my mom because I think of her every day. I think of when she was well and I could lean into her wisdom and strength because I can use all of it I can get right now. And I think of how she was at the end, too, having lost her bearings, her body fragile, and yet somehow still grateful and funny and determined to go out loving. I do not want to forget her ending. It has been one of my greatest lessons about love and strength and intimacy. My mom was always my teacher and always will be.

Laura, Jane, Sandy. (1969)

This time last year, my mom moved into a hospital bed in the condo full time. She was no longer able to eat or drink or spend time on the lanai, though the slider in her bedroom allowed a wide view of the ocean. Blue was always her favorite color, and I was grateful she was surrounded by sea and sky.

This time last year, we knew any hour might be Mom’s last. My sister Sandy had just spent her spring break by my mom’s side, and my youngest sister, Amy, was about to arrive. I wrote this in my journal:

I am in the guest room of the condo and I hear the click-click-clicking of Mom’s fancy walker coming from my parents’ room. For a second, I get excited, thinking my mom is up and about, heading towards my room. Then I realized that it is—of course—my dad pushing my mom’s walker. He is storing it in the hall out of the way.

There is a day when you are sad that your mom has to use a walker. And then there is a day when you consider the sound of your mom’s walker coming towards you something to be thrilled about. Last week she was able to use that walker, and today, she is not.

Enjoy all of it. I remind myself.

Or maybe, not enjoy exactly, but love. Love that tonight I can sit with my mom and hear her breathe. And that today when I told her I loved her she smiled and nodded. And that tonight my dad and I watched the sunset from the lanai and talked about how we are sad.

It’s quieter with Bill and Sandy gone; I can get pretty serious, and my sister is good at making me laugh. Today it is harder to not focus on the losses. But my mom is here. And I am here. And my dad is here. And Sandy and Bill are on a plane over the Pacific. And Amy is almost here. And so many friends and family are holding us in their hearts.

Ron and Jane (January, 2019)

All of It is no small feat, and probably impossible. I didn’t love lots of things about my mom’s ending. But I am so very grateful for the long moments I sat listening to her breathe, loving her.

I hope you will consider sharing your experience with anniversaries, whether the death was last year or many years ago. These can be traditions, or stories, things that surprised you. Ways of honoring the day, or just surviving it. Maybe the anniversary didn’t bring the expected emotion, or maybe there are things you wish you’d done differently. I’m not looking for one particular thing, but rather a wide range of experiences (All of it!), which I think could be helpful to others.

A sentence or a few sentences or a few paragraphs are all fine. Email to Laura@laurastavoe.com. Please let me know if you want your name or initials used, or if you’d prefer anonymity. I don’t know how many I’ll get (I hope, a lot!) or how many I’ll be able to include, but I will respond to your email either way before the post runs next week. 

So do not tarry! And please do not worry about saying it perfectly. (Trust me, I know how that goes.) I can help with editing if you would like, but I think your voice and honest thoughts will make them just right. 

If you prefer, you can also leave your response in comments below; I may still use it in next week’s Tending to Endings so that more people will get to see it.

Thank you so much for being part of this community.

Much love and strength to you and yours,

Laura

photo of Laura

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Room for Grief

Tending to Endings (thirteen)

I welcome grief like it is some unknown beast growling on my front porch in the middle of the night. I lean hard against the door, wedge chairs beneath the handle, brace myself like my life depends on it. Grief slips beneath the kick plate, oozes in through the mailbox, enters my life and my body in ways I find confusing.

One afternoon after I returned from my mom’s Celebration of Life last spring, I met a friend at an Indian restaurant. Over the six months prior I had left my job of ten years, lived apart from my husband and close friends, and cared for my mom during her final months of life.

Even I knew grief was in order. But that doesn’t mean it showed up in ways that made sense.

At the restaurant, we had just made our way to the buffet line when a family joined us. Under normal circumstances, I would grin at the two-year-old who was hopping up and down in front of the naan making her shoes blink. I am a kid person.

But on this day I shot a look at the mom, expecting her to save me from plowing over the toddler. She remained oblivious, traveling back and forth in a very disorganized fashion narrating entrees to the older children who also moved every which way in front of the buffet. Then her husband jumped in line in front of me reaching over his daughter to grab his own bread and moving on.

I carried my empty plate back to the booth to wait so I would not yell at a two-year-old or her parents. It was not empathy that stopped me, but some niggling suspicion that if I unloaded, I would eventually feel embarrassed.

People grieve differently. Some people hike the Camino de Santiago or wail along a wall or build a huge sculpture in the desert.

I become petty and irritable. Or at least that is one sign that I am experiencing loss. Things that normally don’t bother me feel personal and important. Newly aware of the fragility and preciousness of life, I think I should be kind toward all. Instead am self-centered and afraid. 

When the pandemic news began ramping up and we were beginning to recognize how our lives were changing, one of my friends posted on facebook, “Don’t forget to take time for yourself to ugly-stress cry.” I read it and thought, oh right, that.

We have lost jobs and school days and music festivals and sports seasons and symphonies and church and therapy and family vacations and retirement funds and graduations and weddings and funerals and coffee dates and the ability to go to the store without fear and hugs from grandchildren and a sense of security however illusionary it may be.

Of course, grief is in order. And it is in me, waiting.

A friend of mine often says, “Grief is not a character defect.” This is comforting and true. But sometimes my grief squeezes into shapes that look a lot like character defects.

I check the news obsessively though I know it makes me feel worse not better and it interferes with my ability to be present for people and for creative work. I am sharp with my husband even though he is a kind person and currently the only human I can hold hands with or sit next to or hug.

One upside of having just gone through a big life loss before this pandemic is that I became aware of my own grief cycle, or maybe more of an avoid-grief cycle. It looked something like this:

  1. Do something productive, let’s say write a chapter of my book
  2. Sense a wave of uncomfortable feelings arise
  3. Pick up my phone and scroll through Twitter to distract myself from the feeling
  4. Berate myself for being undisciplined and unfocused
  5. Feel worse
  6. Repeat

This happened a lot in the early months after my mom died. I was trying to write a book, and I knew time was short. At first I tried to fix steps 1-3, telling myself I needed to Be Present. Let myself feel. Maybe under normal, non-grief conditions that would work.

But not last year, and at some point I decided to just allow that my distractedness was part of my grief. Instead of focusing on being more disciplined, I decided to skip step four altogether. I would notice I was scrolling rather than writing, and I did not have to say one mean thing to myself about it!

In The Five Invitations, Frank Ostaseski writes about how we tend to think the inner critic is motivating us when it is actually getting in our way. He says, “It is neither a conscience nor a reliable moral guide, and it isn’t the voice of wisdom.”

When I skipped judging myself, I could also skip feeling worse. It turns out, four and five were very sticky steps. I got a lot more feeling and a lot more writing in when I let them go. Eventually I even finished a draft of my book.

My judgements–whether aimed at the toddler in a buffet line or my husband or myself–are almost always a futile attempt to regain control. Sometimes they are sneaky. When I say to myself, for instance, other people have it much worse (which is always true) it also carries an implication: Who are you to grieve? As though sadness is a limited resource with only so much to go around.

Today I am sad because my father is far away from family and close friends. The anniversary of my mom’s death is approaching and this is the first year in 57 that he does not have Jane by his side. We can’t fly to Hawaii because of pandemic measures and he shouldn’t return to Chicago until it is safer to do so. I am sad that my dad is alone during such a difficult time.

Dad sends us photos of rainbows daily.

I have a friend who is caring for parents in much more dire circumstances than we are right now. I’m glad I know today that in order to be available for her, I must be willing to feel my own grief. It is the exact thing that helps me connect with others. It is the foundation of empathy.

Ostaseski writes,

The willingness to be with our suffering gives rise to an internal resourcefulness that we can carry forward into all areas of our lives. We learn that whatever we give space to can move.

Many years ago, my friend Debbie had just graduated from University of Arizona and was planning to join her beloved in Venezuela. She was saying goodbye to friends and packing while he had gone ahead to look for a place for them to live. Then Luis died in a car accident while helping his brother-in-law learn to drive. 

Instead of going to Venezuela to begin a new life, Debbie flew there to meet Luis’s family and attend his funeral. As soon as she arrived relatives took shopping for black clothes. She dressed in black for the remainder of the trip. It was helpful, Debbie said, because no one expected her to be normal. Everyone treated her gently and gave her leeway, which was a relief amidst so much lost.

Everyone I know and everyone I don’t know these days is experiencing loss. We are not just in self-isolation, we are in mourning.

During these strange days I find myself walking on the trail with my heart full of love for the earth beneath my feet, for the hikers who smile when they pass, for the hawk circling over head. I am just so grateful to be here.

And ten steps later I want to swear at the runner who doesn’t say thank you when I move out of his way.

Then I begin the climb up the hill where I spot a stone that a child painted and left in a nest of grass. To Mom is penned in crooked letters, and I am standing next to bitterbrush weeping.

This is a lot to have and it is a lot to lose. I’m good with not being normal, for you too. No matter what shape grief comes, it seems wise to make room, to give grace.

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Welcome

Tending to Endings (twelve)

It may sound strange to be comforted by a book about death during a pandemic, but I have been reading Frank Ostaseski’s The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach us about Living Fully. I have returned to it morning and night during this last week when so many of us find our lives changing, and it has given me direction and comfort and hope.

The principles will not be new to anyone who has practiced Buddhism or a Twelve-Step program of recovery or studied Brene Brown’s research on vulnerability and whole-hearted living or who knows the tenets of acceptance, humility, and love from a wide variety of traditions.

What Ostaseski does is give generous personal context to the practices, using story to show how they hold even in dire conditions. He takes the hard stuff head-on and gives such relevant, poignant examples that I end up trusting his perspective and being reassured.

Ostaseski began his work with hospice patients in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic. He founded the Zen Hospice Center in California, where he worked for thirty years. More recently, began the Metta Institute which provides education on spirituality in dying. Over many years, he sat with thousands of people as they approached death.

He writes, “I am not romantic about dying. It is hard work. Maybe the hardest work we will ever do in this life. It doesn’t always turn out well. It can be sad, cruel, messy, beautiful, and mysterious. Most of all it is normal. We all go through it.”

Death is normal.

This week I intended to write about hospice, but like so many things, visits have been halted where I have been training to volunteer.

The stories of loss that have been getting to me most lately have been the ones about care facilities on lock-down and the many people who cannot be near their spouses or family or friends. It has been reading about people in Italy who died in isolation and whose families cannot yet come together to honor and grieve them.

My impulse to write this blog and to pay attention to endings myself has in part come from my sense that it is important to be present for people during their final months and days on earth. To bear witness and to share those times. To usher people out of this world lovingly the way we usher them in upon birth.

But even births hardly ever go as planned. Dying, too, involves a great deal we cannot control. Ostaseski’s book offers a window into how to proceed with an open heart anyway.

I have underlined a great deal throughout the whole book, but it is the second invitation, Welcome Everything, Push Nothing Away, that feels most relevant to me this week. Ostaseski explains, “I cannot be free if I am rejecting any part of my experience.”

His personal stories are of his brother’s alcoholism and death, his own triple heart bypass surgery, being sexually abuse as a young teen. So, he really does mean everything. Or, more specifically, everything that already is.

Welcoming what is, as it is, we move toward reality. We may not like or agree with all that we encounter. However, when we argue with reality, we lose every time. We wast our energy and exhaust ourselves with the insistence that life be otherwise…Acceptance is not resignation. It is an opening to possibility. And openness is the basis for a skillful response to life.

In 2001, when anthrax was showing up in the mail and in the headlines, which happened about a month after the World Trade Center bombings, which happened soon after my divorce while I was still grieving and helping my young sons grieve, I had a teaching job that involved traveling to Southern Utah for a backpacking trip with a group of seventh graders. My own kids, kindergarteners at the time, were at home with their dad and I would be out of contact with them for five days. As we drove away from Boise in the vans, I felt vulnerable and uncertain and like the world might really be coming to an end. 

At the trailhead, the teachers—four of us—cinched packs on awkward, seventh-grade shoulders, and the heaviest over our own. We walked into the desert among juniper and yucca, over red earth and beneath the clear blue sky.

The first night we slept on the rim of Dark Canyon, where we told stories from our sleeping bags and watched bright Orionids slip across the night sky. The next day, we found springs to refill our water bottles. We were in wilderness, so we took care to watch out for ourselves and each other and the organisms in cryptobiotic soil.

A couple of days into our trip while exploring Mule Canyon, we came upon the dwellings of ancient Puebloans, curved stone shelters shaped by people living more than a thousand years ago. It was impossible not to consider that these people, too, lived and drank from the spring and climbed the towers and slept beneath Pleiades. That the clay and the canyon and the sky had outlasted them, and would outlast us too. 

I don’t know why humility reassures me during difficult times, but it does. What I felt in that moment was not that I was insignificant, but that I was connected, part of something vast and beautiful and whole.

When it came time to leave the canyon and we drove to the first small town where there was a gas station and convenience store, we saw the headline on the New York Times, “Twenty-one Senate Employees Test Positive for Anthrax.” It was jarring, but it was not everything anymore. Like the florescent light of the store, it outshone the sun due to proximity, not power.

Like most of us right now, I am unsure of many things. And maybe that is why it helpful to read something that reminds me good can come from not knowing. Ostaseski writes, “The energizing quality of mature hope helps us to remain open to the possibility that while life may not turn out the way we first thought, opportunities we never imagined may also arise.”

All five sections of the book have been compelling, useful: Don’t Wait; Welcome Everything Push Nothing Away; Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience; Find a Place of Rest in the Middle of Things; Cultivate Don’t Know Mind. They have been an antidote to fear and a reminder that humility is not weakness. It is a way towards openness and possibility.

With love,

Laura

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Body of Grief

We have become death and grief illiterate, Sarah Chavez.

Tending to Endings (nine)

Last week, my sisters and father and my mom’s siblings gathered in Maui, which was the second place she wanted her ashes spread, the first being her garden at home near Chicago. My father said it was strategic on my mom’s part. She wanted all of us to have an excuse for another trip to Maui together. I am certain this is true—I can imagine my mom’s smile as she added this to the will, her giddiness.

I also know that Maui truly is sacred ground to my mom. Mom was very loyal to her true loves: my father for almost sixty years, Maui since their first visit in 1976, the color blue for life.  

A lot happened during that trip that may be relevant for Tending to Endings. We had a second celebration of life for Maui Ohana that truly felt celebratory. People reminded us of Mom’s commitment to the children of the island and I thought a lot about legacy and about family, too, and how death reshapes relationships, deepens them.

But when I think about what might be most helpful to share, what I didn’t know ahead of time, it has to do with my mother’s remains.

Honestly, I did not expect the ashes to be much of a thing for me. I guess I thought they would be symbolic. I knew my mother was not experiencing whatever happened to her body after death. I had not given much thought to what happens to my own body after death, planning for cremation because it was affordable and would get the unpleasantness over with quickly.

And so it has been a surprise to me that after my mother died some of my most intense experiences of grief and disappointment and healing have had to do with her body.

In April when my father and I went to Nakamura mortuary, the attendant placed the cardboard box containing my mother’s ashes into my arms, and I was stopped short by the heaviness of the moment.

Grief was no stranger by then. I had been missing my mother ever since the Alzheimer’s took hold. It had been two years since I’d been able to call her to find out the name of name of a flower or to get her take on a book I was reading, or her advice on what to do next with my life. But this grief was different. It came on like the flu, so sudden and severe it made my bones and teeth hurt.

I cradled the box as we walked out to my dad’s convertible and I stood at the passenger door, not knowing where to place her. Not the trunk. The back seat? Should I belt her in?

Finally, I sat and held the box on my lap as my father drove us around the island following the shoreline my mother loved, looking out at the big blue sea, her absence resting against my womb.

I thought it was just her body. But, of course, it was my mother’s body.  

The first time my father and sisters gathered to spread my mother’s ashes was four months later on what would’ve been my mom’s 80th birthday. Dad invited us to their Chicago home for hamburgers out on the terrace. After dinner, Dad brought out the cardboard box which contained the plastic container approved for air travel and a plastic bag with the remnants of my mother’s body. It was a lot of packaging to unravel.

My sister Amy asked if we should Facetime my aunt in Colorado. None of us was sure how to proceed. We wanted her to be part of things, but was it wrong to have a camera on the event? Amy shrugged and we called.

I suggested we find a hand trowel so we could till ashes into the soil, and then felt guilty for the suggestion. Was it uncouth to use a shovel? Was I just trying to avoid having to touch the ashes?

We stood in front of geraniums beneath the pear tree. We each took a turn, my sister walked around with the iPhone narrating for my aunt. I silently grew impatient with people for tossing but not tilling. My aunt suggested finding the patch of blue flowers for her scoop since blue was my mother’s favorite color. That seemed right, and I wished I’d done the same.

After we each took a turn, my dad put the box away. We went inside for dessert and my dad and my brothers-in-law talked about the World Series over beers.

When everyone had left, I asked my dad how he felt about the evening. “It was fine,” he said. “I guess I thought we would talk about your mom more than we did.”

Which was exactly how I felt, not that there was anything wrong with the process, but it had not felt all that connected to my mother.

Ash scattering is one more aspect of dying process that we tend not to talk about beyond logistics. What is often missing then is ritual or ceremony, and also the ease that comes when we are comfortable with an occasion. All of these can provide opportunities for connection. Most of us have attended a number of memorials and funerals and celebrations of life before we lose our parents. Most of us have not attended many (if any) ash scatterings or burials before we are responsible for conducting one.

Because I was not comfortable talking about what happened to my mother’s body, I was surprised by the intensity of emotion surrounding each encounter with her ashes. My mother’s body was not just a body. It was the body I had known as long as my own. It was the body that gestated and birthed and held and fed and bathed me. It was the body I eventually bathed. It was the body of my mother for 79 years. Her ashes are evidence of great loss.

Today I believe how we cared for that body at the end of my mother’s life and after she died when the hospice nurse came and we washed and and dressed her one last time and how we eventually came together around those ashes once again in Maui, all helped me and my family to mourn.

One of the things I did before the second trip to Maui was I talked to friends about their ash ceremonies. A friend of mine who recently lost her husband said she and her kids each wrote a letter to their dad and read them before scattering his ashes. This sounded helpful, like it would provide some opportunity for meaning making without being overly structured.  My sisters and father agreed.

And then, when my sisters and father and I came together again in Maui, just like my mother planned, we talked about what we wanted, what we would do. It was a loose plan. My mom was not one for formalities.

The night before we discussed the pros and cons of various containers we found in the condo. My sister Sandy landed on a wedge wood blue vase made by one of my mom’s favorite artists on the island. We discussed the best way to get the ashes from the Ziploc baggies my dad used this time for travel through the narrow neck of the vase. Dad cut the corner of the bag to create a funnel and Sandy worked it like a pastry bag. She was very careful. We made jokes about how mom—who couldn’t stand cooking or any domestic chores—would never forgive us if she had to spend eternity in the grout of the kitchen tile. 

In the morning, we walk to the shore before sunrise. The sky and the water are the pastel blue of a day about to open. Waves lap at our ankles. We read our love notes to my mom or recite what comes to our hearts. We laugh at my mom’s sense of humor when my aunt’s phone spontaneously begins jangling, playing “Happy,” by Pharrell Williams.

My voice cracks when it comes my turn to tell Mom, Thank youThank you for this father this family this life. My sisters reach around my shoulders, hold me. The sand of my mother mixes with my tears mixes with the sand of the sea. We are together, and I know, my mother has gotten her wish.

Amy, Laura, Ron, Sandy, February 22, 2020

If you would like to receiving Tendings to Endings each Friday, please leave your name and email below. It is cost free, ad-free, and I will not share your info. My hope is to help build community and conversation around end of life matters. Please feel free to leave comments below or send your thoughts to laura@lauratavoe.com.