Mourning – Laura Stavoe

April 17, 2020June 14, 2020

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.)

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March 27, 2020June 14, 2020

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:

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

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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February 28, 2020June 14, 2020

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 you. Thank 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.

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