Tag: Relationship Work

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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

Laura and John on a post-transplant mini hike. October 2022.

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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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 21st 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.

Thanksgiving at the Prairie House 2019

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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Conversations

Tending to Endings (sixty)

The first Friday of October snuck up on me! I thought of postponing Tending to Endings. I have many ideas to write about. Just less time to go through my rather organic process, which begins with a big sprawl of words and ideas and tangents and then slowly over a number of days becomes shaped into something that others might be interested in and able to read!

Writing Tending to Endings also feels weighty this month. Death is a relevant and painful topic in Boise and much of Idaho. The ICUs are overwhelmed with COVID patients and the coroners and hospital leaders are past pleading. They are in despair.

If the models are correct, cases will not peak until mid October. I am frightened by the trauma so many in our community have had to face, especially our healthcare professionals. I don’t understand the mental rift that has happened in my own community, and I don’t yet know how to write about it other than to say please get vaccinated if you have not already.

I am so very sad about the unnecessary deaths, and how many have occurred isolated from family and friends because of COVID. And I am worried about how these experiences are going to affect the people on the front lines who have been carrying so much of the weight for eighteen months and are now facing the worst conditions yet. I have nothing wise or helpful or new to say about this, but it felt wrong to not say something.

Prayer wheel at Sawtooth Botanical Garden in Hailey, Idaho

I knew you’d understand if I postponed. I feel like I have the kindest readers on the planet.

But then my students started turning in one of their assignments for my Aspects of Death and Dying class this week, and I have to say it felt a little like magic. I gave them a simple assignment: sit down with three people they know (one at a time) and ask each to tell an experience about a time they learned something about death. I asked students to record their conversations and turn in recordings between five and fifteen minutes each.

To provide a model for my students, I asked John to tell a story about an experience where he learned something about death.

John talking about his mom’s death.

As soon as I began listening to what my students turned in, I realized that it was fulfilling a little dream of mine. They talked to their parents and neighbors and classmates and their own children about some of their most important stories.

I often include a tagline at the end of my post: Tending to Endings aims to build community and conversation around end-of-life matters. Yet I admit, mostly this blog has been a lot of l me talking! Comments features are clunky and asynchronous. We have been more isolated than usual. It’s hard to actually find ways to converse. But I suppose my hope is that what you read here might help you open conversations with those who are in your daily life.

Along those lines, I want to invite you to this assignment, and I hope you’ll dive in! It is not a new idea, of course. Story Corp has been capturing conversations for decades now, and they have helpful info on their website.

But, as I reminded my students, those stories are edited and produced and aired, whereas their recordings have the aim of opening a conversation and saving it for their own purposes. Stumbles and backtracking are fine. All they really need is a person to talk to and recording device, which these days usually means a smart phone.

The results so far have been beautiful. When I listened to my students’ stories, I knew they were hearing things they might not have heard if not for this assignment.

Or maybe they would have. I have talked with John about his mom’s death many times during the twenty years we have been together, after all. But this conversation and the others I’ve recorded have felt different. As though setting the record button to on is a way of marking sacred space. We speak and listen more intently. I listen again. We tend to this story, and find it worth saving.

More Resources

For you, there are no requirements or deadlines! But if you want to know the details or where this is going, here they are. (You’ll have to expand the text if your eyes are like mine).

I’d love to hear any feedback from you about how your own conversations went!

Thank you for reading Tending to Endings. If you would like to subscribe, please leave your name and email below and you will receive it by email on the first Friday of every month. Tending to Endings aims to build community and conversation around end-of-life matters.

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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!

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More Life

Tending to Ending (fifty-seven)

I found myself sneaking around, arranging Zoom meetings while my husband was at tennis. Even I didn’t know what to make of this behavior! I tend to be–as my friend Debbie calls it–an external processor, talking my way through any major decision.

I was pretty sure my hesitancy had little to do with John. In the twenty years we’ve been together, John has been supportive of so many of my endeavors: to become a freelance writer, to take on a leadership position at a college, to leave that job of ten years (health insurance and all) to be with my mom at the end of her life.

Sure, I support John’s passions too, but first I worry about how these changes might affect me. Only eventually do I remember that I love John and I want him to be happy and things always seem to work out well when we follow the nudging of our hearts.

For John, this process of jumping aboard with me seems to collapse into a millisecond if he has to go through it at all. When I tell him I’m writing a book or going to river guide school, he meets me with genuine enthusiasm. All this to say, I am very lucky.

John and I have been in love for twenty years and celebrated 15 years of marriage on summer solstice.

Yet, here I was during the two weeks John and I had together in Hawaii, hiding my journal beneath a stack of books, stepping out of the condo to take phone calls, being very intentional in not mentioning that I was researching graduate schools.

Seminaries to be more specific. Not telling most of my friends, either, as I visited virtual classes, talked with admissions counselors and current students, and contemplated signing on for a second post-graduate degree–this one a Master’s in Divinity with a focus in inter-religious chaplaincy.

Maybe I was waiting because I wasn’t sure and this thing I was considering is time consuming (I’m fifty-six!) and illogical (I don’t belong to a church!). But, I kind of specialize in impractical, time-intensive pursuits—I’ve been a triathlete, high school English teacher, mother of twins!

No, deep down I knew. The reason I wasn’t saying anything was because I probably was going to follow through with this particular endeavor and that would mean change.

One blog post is not enough for me to do justice to why I’m at this juncture right now–planning to attend classes (online) in fall at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. I’m not sure where this education will ultimately lead. But of course my interest is at least in part informed by the same questions that prompted me to start writing Tending to Endings, and so I wanted to write something about it here.

Being with the dying is many, many things–heartrending, confusing, transformative, messy, emotional, stressful, beautiful, strange. Also, sacred. Sacred the way being present to welcome a baby into the world is sacred.

The last days I spent with my friends Susan and Ellen, and the months I spent with my mom during her decline, revealed how hard it can be to make room for relationships during the final stage of life. Also, those experiences showed me that making a even a little room for relational, the communal, the spiritual, could bring a reprieve and even meaning to seemingly unbearable conditions.

After my mom’s long bleak trek through surgeries and treatments and waiting rooms and visits to the ER, my main question for the hospice intake counselor was simple: How do we get more life into the end of Mom’s life?

Hospice was incredibly helpful in making that possible. It still was not easy: caregiving continued to take the bulk of our time and energy. But there were also Scrabble games and songs sung together and Jane’s Big-Head book, which I now know from my doula training is called a legacy project. My family and I found opportunities to each say what was on our hearts. And there were stretches of time for staring out over the ocean together and noticing, suddenly, that the shadows in the reef below were turtles swimming.

I don’t often write about my own spiritual journey directly. For one thing, it’s hard! Even Virginia Woolf thought so:

As for the soul… the truth is, one can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes; but look at the ceiling, at Grizzle [the dog], at the cheaper beasts in the Zoo which are exposed to walkers in Regent’s Park, and the soul slips in.

Plus my religious education is a bit all over the map: a Lutheran Sunday school when I was very young; a Presbyterian church with a friend in grade school; at one time, I even joined the Catholic church for a relationship that lasted about two years.

My spiritual practice began in earnest, though, when I was still a teenager and alcoholism led me to a recovery community where I found an openness to all spiritual paths. Since then, prayer and meditation have been part of my everyday life, and I have found spiritual sustenance many places: meetings in church basements and yoga class and poetry books. On walks with friends, and around the campfire with family, and kayaking through a river canyon with John.

Recently, when I sat in on seminary classes while researching schools, I quickly learned my experience is not all that rare. I heard terms like “previously unchurched,” or “denominationally challenged,” which made me feel right at home! I still have many, many questions, and about all I know for sure about this next step is that I’m very excited to learn.

John’s church

My secret from John did not last long. On the seventh day of our time in Hawaii, we sat on the lanai watching for sea turtles. There were an abundance of them near shore on this trip, as though the turtles had grown accustomed to having the beaches to themselves during the pandemic. Finally, I took a deep breath and told John I was looking into graduate schools, explaining that after doula training, which I loved, I knew I wanted to learn more.

“So what would the actual degree be?”

“A Master of Divinity.”

“Wow, that’s cool! Sounds like you should get a purple robe and wand when you graduate!”

“Probably not. But if I did the whole program, I’d be an interfaith chaplain, maybe a hospice chaplain.”

“You’d be good at that.”

Have I mentioned, I’m very lucky?

More Resources

Turns out there are many authors who are good at writing about the soul and so I thought I’d include some of my library in the resource section of this post. These are books I’ve turned to over the last few years. Some, old favorites like Mary Oliver and Parker Palmer. Others I’ve found recently: Linda Hogan, Henri Nouwen, Christian Wiman , and Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Many have been included in other posts, but they all feel like friends so I wanted to include them again. I have pulled one gem from each, which is not nearly enough to do them justice, but at least will give you a taste in case you want explore more.

Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit, Parker J. Palmer

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.

Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Marie Rilke (also, Book of Hours: Love Poems to God edited by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

…I would like to beg you, dear sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, John O’Donohue (Also, Eternal Echoes)

As you begin to befriend your inner silence, one of the first things you will notice is the superficial chatter on the surface level of your mind, Once you recognize this, the silence deepens. A distinction begins to emerge between the images that you have of yourself and your own deeper nature.

When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Pema Chodron

If we really knew how unhappy it was making the whole planet that we all try to avoid pain and seek pleasure–how that was making us so miserable and cutting us off from our basic heart and our basic intelligence–then we would practice meditation as if our hair was on fire.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer

What I mean of course is that our human relationship with strawberries is transformed by our choice of perspective. It is human perception that makes the world a gift. When we view the world this way, strawberries and humans alike are transformed. The relationship of gratitude and reciprocity thus developed can increase the evolutionary fitness of both plant and animal. A species and a culture that treat the natural world with respect and reciprocity will surely pass on genes to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than the people who destroy it. The stories we choose to shape our behaviors have adaptive consequences.

Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl

To be sure, a human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions. As I once put it: ‘As a professor in two fields, neurology and psychiatry, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is subject to biological, psychological and sociological conditions. But in addition to being a professor in two fields I an a survivor of four camps–concentration camps, that is–and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.’

The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, Edited by Roxane Gay

And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective. (The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action)

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.

My Bright Abyss, Christian Wiman

All too often the task to which we are called is to simply show kindness to the irritating person in the cubical next to us, say, or to touch the face of a spouse from whom we ourselves have been long absent, letting grace wake love from our intense, self-enclosed sleep.

Upstream, Mary Oliver (also, Long Life; Owls and Other Fantasies; and New and Selected Poems)

But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple–or a green field–a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing–an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness–wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak–to be company. (My Friend Walt Whitman)

Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life, Greg Levoy

The particle chamber is a container for making the invisible visible. So are the compass, microscope, telescope, radio and television; so are scientists, psychologists, and artists; so is conscious attention.

The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society, Henri J. M. Nouwen (also, The Way of the Heart)

What does hospitality require? It requires first of all that the host feel at home in his own house, and secondly that he create a free and fearless place for the unexpected traveler.

Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman

The first step toward love is a common sharing of a sense of mutual worth and value. This cannot be discovered in a vacuum or in a series of artificial or hypothetical relationships. It has to be in a real situation, natural, free.

The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning, Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham

Feelings are fine, but they are also transient and ephemeral; gratitude is not a feeling but an ongoing vision of thank-full-ness that recognizes the gifts constantly being received. A feeling is fleeting, and emotion for the moment; gratitude is a mindset, a way of seeing and thinking that is rooted in remembrance–the remembrance of being without the gift.

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

We have forgotten that this land and every life form is a piece of God, in divine community with the same forces of creation in plants as in people. All the lives around us are lives of gods. The long history of creation that has shaped plankton, and shaped horseshoe crabs has shaped our human being. Everything is Maker; mangroves, termites, all are resources of one creation or another. Without respect and reverence for it, there is an absence of holiness, of any God.(Creations)

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