Relationship Work – Page 3

August 28, 2020August 28, 2020

Listening, Learning

Tending to Endings (thirty-four)

In 2015, my friend Roya called to ask if I’d speak at our friend Pat’s Celebration of Life. Roya is a minister and was officiating the service, and Pat had been a close friend and spiritual mentor of mine for fifteen years. Pat was 82, but her death came only one week after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. She was beloved in a wide circle of friends and our community was reeling from the unexpected loss of her. I felt both the honor and the weight of being asked to share at her service.

I told Roya, of course I would speak, and then I did what I do: I opened a file on my computer and began typing. I wrote pages and then took a bunch out and moved paragraphs around until I had a beginning, a middle, and an end. I added more sensory detail. I edited each sentence. I read it aloud and fiddled with wording and then read it aloud again. It made me tear up which seemed a good sign. Then I sent it to Roya to see what she thought.

Roya was kind. She said something like, “This is beautiful essay about Pat that you might publish somewhere, but I’m not sure it is what people will need from you at the service.” She added, “It might good to bring a few notes up with you but to speak more from the heart. Friends and family will be hurting, and they will want to connect.”

I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking of how I was going to get through this talk and how I could possibly make it good enough to honor Pat. Fine goals, but I was missing one that Roya saw because she had been through this many times before.

I’ve been thinking of things I’ve learned from people who have dedicated their professional lives to end-of-life care. So often when I listen to their experiences, I hear about an angle missing from my own view. Often it is a perspective that both humbles and helps me.

Since beginning this blog, I’ve found opportunities to talk with people who spend many hours with those at the end-of-life and their families. In this week’s post I’m sharing a few insights they’ve shared with me that have helped broaden my perspective.

On Helping Families

Humans are made with a capacity to tolerate grief. And, in fact, until we know that space where love was, that is now empty, we cannot know it will one day be a source of something powerful and important in our life. So, I think when I approach dying people, and their families, it is from a place of nonverbal confidence that they can do this, that in fact there is the possibility at end-of-life of something beautiful to find in the experience. –Norm, Hospice Chaplain

Here is something I learned a long time ago. There are many things worse than death, the actual death is not the hard part. The fear, the pain, and suffering can be very hard. My 28-year-old niece has a recurrent cancer. It is not an immediate death notice, more likely a notice of a serious marathon of difficult surgery and chemo. My sister is grieving. For my part, right now, I am a sister rather than a cancer nurse, trying to be a listener, not a know-it-all. It seems that my encouragement of my sister as a strong advocate for her daughter brings Pam the most comfort. We want to know that what we do matters and that comes in the middle of so much helplessness. The intangible actions such as listening, reassuring and acknowledging feel so helpful. — Jane, former Oncology Nurse

Families are all so different. I try not to go into the experience with any assumptions about what each person may or may not be feeling. I’m there to help support them with caregiving and coping with the end-of-life, and to help them tap into their own strengths and get through it together.–Kathe, Hospice Social Worker

On Care in the Time of Covid

Although we haven’t been able to do volunteer visits due to COVID, we look for other ways to help. When the pandemic started, a number of volunteers immediately went to work on a mask project. Some volunteers have been able to do visits over the phone or FaceTime. And our staff has been reaching out to our colleagues who work within the longterm care facilities, sending them cards and pastries and letting them know we are thinking of them. Their jobs are so hard right now. We try to support them in any way we can. –Desiree, Hospice Volunteer Coordinator

One of the things that has been happening lately is that families who never expected to care for loved ones at home are now doing so because of COVID. So some of our hospice work has been helping families succeed in doing this care. And for the same reason, we now also have end-of-life patients who are isolated in hospitals and facilities due to COVID precautions. So we are discovering new ways to help them connect to their loved ones—like window phone calls and FaceTime and tele-health and more in nursing home care. –Norm, Hospice Chaplain

On Listening to the Dying

My friend Dia, who worked in the hospice field for years, has been such a gift to me as I’ve navigated this topic. Last winter, during a walk along the Boise River, she shared some of her experiences and I still hear her voice whenever I start thinking of what my own role might be.

Laura, when I started hospice work, I truly thought I was gonna be God’s little gift to the dying. I’d go in and strew all my caring and pearls of wisdom over them and then they’d have a good death. Boy, did I have it backwards! I just laugh at myself now because they were the ones who had all of the wisdom. They were the ones facing death, and they were my teachers. I still look at that hospice work as being the place where I learned more and gained more than anything else I’ve done.

Which brings me right back to humility. Sometimes for me this means listening to those who are already gone.

After my conversation with Roya, I went for a walk on the trails feeling lost and not at all up to speaking the next day. It wasn’t perfectionism that had me this time. I wanted to be honest when I spoke, and the truth was I felt sad and confused and a little angry at Pat for dying so fast. I was mad at myself, too, for not calling her more often in the months before, when I knew she wasn’t feeling well. I was utterly sad I didn’t get to see her one more time. These selfish feelings seemed unworthy of Pat’s Celebration speaker.

Somewhere during my hike, I brought my frustration directly to Pat, which felt childish, but I didn’t care. “You are the person I would talk to when I had a problem like this, Pat! If there is something you think I should say, will you please help? Because I am not feeling up to any of it.”

It was a relief just to say it aloud and I stood on the ridge and took a deep breath before heading home. Then I turned around and was completely surprised by a rainbow that arched from one golden hill to the next. It was February in Boise (not Rainbow Beach in Kaanapali), and the colors stretched across the whole sky.

“Well, okay, then,” I said to Pat. “Thank you.”

And I had at least one thing I could say to my beloved, grieving community, all of us aching and confused by the empty space where Pat was: We can be here for each other. And guess what, we can still talk to Pat, too. She told me so.

Tending to Endings is a weekly column that comes out each Friday. If you would like to subscribe, please leave your email below. You can also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com.

August 14, 2020August 14, 2020

We’re Here

Tending to Endings (thirty-two)

Are you taking care of yourself?

This is a question friends, acquaintances and even strangers would ask me after learning I was a caregiver for my mom. Everyone was aware of statistics about how stressful caregiving is on the health of the caregiver. This is especially true of spouses of Alzheimer’s patients for which the trajectory of decline is often long with care needs increasing with time. For years, I had been asking my dad the same question.

When I left my job to live with my parents to help with my mom’s care after her cancer returned, I no longer knew how to answer the question honestly and succinctly. Do you mean have I eaten or showered in the last few days? Well, yes, probably. Do you mean am I physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually in balance? Of course not, and it would take too much energy to explain why that is not possible. During those days, a trip to the grocery store was self-care. It offered a change of scenery and time for a short phone call to a friend outside of the walls of the condo.

I have numerous friends who are primary caregivers for a spouse or parent, and I have been worried about them during these COVID times. They are caring for people who are already in fragile health and so they are more isolated than usual. They don’t have anyone coming in to give them a break. They are not able to go to yoga or play tennis; they can’t have company over for visits. Groceries have to be delivered! There is no break.

Ana and Patty were always only a phone call away when I was caring for my mom.

Early in March, my friend Debbie received word from her dad that her stepmom had cancer that would require six weeks of radiation therapy in Colorado. By the time Debbie arrived to help, Colorado was already on lockdown. The medical situation was dire and my interactions with Debbie were only through occasional texts. She sent pictures showing the snowstorm that almost kept them from radiation therapy.

I was worried about my friend and longed to talk with her, but she had little time for phone and her step mom could not be left alone. COVID protocols meant others couldn’t be called in to help.

Debbie texted me,

As soon as I get a chance, I’m going to cry. But it will have to be after a split feeding, a doctor appointment and the last feeding after which I need to keep my stepmom upright for thirty minutes while she is miserable because all wants to do is go to bed.

Oh how I understood that place. I sent my friend hearts and let her know I loved her.

Debbie has been home since mid-May and her stepmom is recovering well. The crisis has passed. When I asked Debbie about caregiving during COVID, she answered by comparing it to another time she was a primary caregiver at the end of her Mom’s life.

I’m not sure this will be helpful but what I felt this time was that the whole world had similar feelings as I was having, albeit for different reasons. This time, I didn’t feel so alone. When taking care of my mom, I felt isolated because others lived as though nothing had changed. For me, everything had changed.

It reminds me that I never know the particulars of a caregiving experience except for my own. I have a tendency to fill in the details with the worst possible scenarios. Debbie’s experience was full of difficulties and graces, too, much like my time with my mom.

Friends from work made a poem book for me to carry with me when I went to care for my mom. I treasure it still.

I’m not a fan of articles that tell you what to say in difficult situations as though we can short-cut our way to empathy. Whether Are you taking care of yourself comes across as a loving question or a pat cliché has to do with context and tone and whether I’ve had enough sleep.

But what is true for me is that I would rather my friends ask pat questions than back away out of worry about saying the wrong thing. Whether they say the right or wrong thing is not going to change the gravity of the situation. But their presence in my life, even from the sidelines, can make all the difference in how supported I feel.

At times I have been that friend who has backed away. I told myself I was giving my friend privacy (without asking if that was what she wanted). Usually that distance was born of fear. As a result, I have missed opportunities to learn, to grow, to be a friend.

Sometimes being a friend to someone in dire circumstances is difficult not because there is so much to do, but because there is not much that can be done. I couldn’t give Debbie what I thought she needed most, which was a break and some rest. I often felt like I was bugging her when I would ask things like have you been able to go for a walk? And I felt like the words I had to offer were far too small to match her situation.

It doesn’t always feel helpful to stay in touch with someone during critical times. But looking back at Debbie’s and my long thread of texts which sometimes were despairing and sometimes philosophical and sometimes funny—texts that sometimes involved her telling me, no, she really could not fit in a walk that day—I am very grateful we stayed in touch.

There are definite advantages to having young mom friends who can send photos like this one of Josie! Photo Credit: Jenna Petrykowski.

During the last months of my mom’s life, when my father and I were living in the caregiving bubble that sometimes felt like chaos and other times like a cocoon, I had no energy for friendships. And yet, I needed my friends more than ever.

And now thinking back to that time, I see my friends as being central to how I got through. They sent cards and texts and voice mails. They responded to the sunset photo I sent them with hearts. They answered when I called on my walk and let me spill my sadness and exhaustion into the short time we had to talk together. They sent me poems and really good pears; they took online Scrabble turns late into the night; they sent photos of their babies they knew would make me smile.

What I needed from my friends during that time was not privacy so much as grace. I had very little to give. Still, my friends stayed. They were thousands of miles away, and yet I remember them as being with me in that cocoon of a condo during that sacred time. It made all the difference that they kept reaching out, each saying, one way or another, we are here.

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July 17, 2020July 17, 2020

Band of Brightness

The little band of brightness that we call our life is poised between the darkness of two unknowns.

— John O’Donahue, Anam Cara

Tending to Endings (twenty-nine)

This week I am sharing a short passage from the manuscript I wrote following my mom’s death. This section comes from the final chapter of the book and covers the time early last summer when I was spending my days hiking and grieving and writing and making apricot jam.

Maybe it is because I’m back making apricot jam that I returned to this section, but when I did, I was reminded of how much my mother’s example helps me still, particularly through trying times.

Sometime soon I plan to collect stories from readers about people who help them through hard times. Please feel free to send me yours. Who serves as your teachers even after they have gone? And thank you to my friend Patty for getting my started by sending me a story of her uncle, which I will include in that installment!

Next week I will be taking a break from digital sites including my own, so there will not be a post of Tending to Endings on the 24th. I will be back with an essay for Friday, July 31.

Excerpted from Band of Brightness, “Home”

I carry my mother with me. I always have. Sometimes I have attempted to extricate myself from her out of fear I would never hear my own voice or I wouldn’t be able to distinguish mine from hers. Strong mothers are a gift—they show us we can be strong. But sometimes they also make it hard to know ourselves.

All of us raised by mothers carry at least some of their secrets. We are watching our mothers before they are even aware that we are separate from them.

My mom always loved and cared for me, but during some of my youngest years, I thought she did not like me as much as I wanted her to like me. Today I see that time in such different light. I believe what I sensed was her fear of the soft places in herself that she learned to make sturdy through intellect and values and humor and distance. Places that my young, sensitive self was trying to pry open.

My mother was a survivor of her own childhood. And I was a daughter who arrived with no knowledge of her past and with the belief that anything I witnessed had something to do with me.

It took me well into my thirties to recognize that I had an exceptionally good childhood. It took me until her death to recognize how consistent and compassionate and rare her form of strength was. She wanted her life to be an example. And it was.

In the late eighties Mom went through this time where she joined an organization called Beyond War and strengthened her commitment to nonviolent action. She got involved in many projects and she hung a photo of the earth taken from space in our living room. Into almost every conversation she would eventually inject the statement, “We are one,” as though it was the obvious conclusion to whatever we had been saying. To her the words were profound, but I was a literature major at the time, and to me it sounded like a trite cliché with awkward grammar.

Thirty years later, I realize that even though she stopped saying it with such frequency, Mom lived—we are one—like a practice. She lived it in the quiet way she connected to people she met on the bus or in a restaurant. In the way she fed the birds outside our kitchen window and then sprinkled seed on the ground for the squirrels. In the way she would bring neighbors to our patio and children to her garden even after her children had grown. She lived it in the way she would not criticize someone who disagreed with her. She would speak her mind, but she would not try to take someone else down. Friends who disagreed knew where she stood, and they loved her.

Not that everyone loved my mom. Mom was a letter-to-the-editor writer and one time she wrote a letter to the local paper making a case for peaceful negotiation rather than military response to some international crisis that was escalating. It was in the early days of online comments, before the concept of trolls and before I understood how mean comments would eventually get. Someone wrote a response to my mom’s letter calling her a stupid old lady who believes fairy dust was going to save us.

I was hurt and worried for my mom. I was angry someone would say something so disrespectful. I called my mom hoping she didn’t even see the comment. But she just laughed and said, “That doesn’t hurt me, Laura. I think it’s funny that someone would think something like that. They clearly don’t know me.”

My mom was strong.

When I meditate or hike in the foothills or stand on my yoga mat, I sense a connection to people and animals and rivers and sky. I sense that oneness with the world.

But, my mom went further than that. She treated people on a daily basis as though that connection was true. She knew that what hurts one, hurts all. What nurtures one, nurtures all. She spent her time on earth living the nurture part of that equation, the best she knew how.

I think back to that planet earth photo in my childhood home, now, during a time when our global situation is bringing home my mom’s mantra to us all. Maybe fast enough, maybe not, but it is becoming obvious, our connectedness. We can argue if we want.

Still, we are one.

Thank you for reading Tending to Endings, and I will look forward to posting again on July 31. If you are new here or interested in a rerun, Room For Grief seems relevant though it was written in March when we first went into quarantine.

If you would like to subscribe to Tending to Endings, please leave your name and email below.

Much love,

Laura

June 12, 2020July 16, 2020

Mending

Tending to Endings (twenty-four)

In November of 2016 I visited my Mom and Dad in Maui. One evening I asked them if I could read a letter:

In recent years, I’ve become more aware of how some of my actions in the past were hurtful. You have always been so generous and loving to me that it didn’t even register how unthinking I was sometimes, even well into my adulthood.

When I pull that letter up from my computer now, I have a number of responses to the timing. One is that I can’t believe it took me so long to see how some of my actions affected my parents. The things I wrote about in the letter were more than fifteen years old in 2016. They weren’t secrets to them or me, I just had not discussed them directly.

Secondly, I am struck by the timing because any further hesitation and I would’ve been too late. My mom’s cognitive abilities were declining, something that happened slowly at first, but accelerated after her second cancer surgery. Had I waited even one more year, my mom would not have been able to receive the information without it causing confusion and probably distress.

Life prompted me to do this work. My summer had been marked by loss. My friends Susan and Ellen had each died unexpectedly in July, Susan of a brain aneurysm and Ellen a two days later of an infection. These deaths of friends who were near my age and who I was very close to brought my own mortality into focus. They also gave me insight into particulars of death related to relationships.

For example, Susan’s husband and daughter were incredibly welcoming to friends and colleagues and extended family when Susan was in a hospital on life support. The time there was very difficult because we were losing Susan, but I also witnessed an ease in the relationships among those who came to help help and to express their love and to say goodbye. When Susan was removed from life support, she was surrounded by friends, colleagues, step-children, her daughter and son-in-law, her husband, and her ex-husband, Katie’s father.

Susan and I had been friends for many years, and I knew what I was witnessing was a result of her commitment to the work of nurturing and mending relationships. Even the medical staff commented on how rare it was to have so many caring people lending support.

Susan had lost her own mother to cancer when she was in her twenties. And in that hospital room in Portland, I knew that the single most important thing to Susan that day and going forward would be that Katie had her dad by her side and a circle of strong support around her.

This experience prompted me to take stock in a more deliberate way. What I needed to tell my parents was that the distance I had put between us during hard times in my life was never because of them but because of me. For much of my young adult life, I made a habit of pulling up stakes and starting something new whenever things got too painful. I would leave jobs, relationships, whole states behind and then throw all of my attention into something new.

I would talk to my parents about these changes after everything was back together again, and I felt on stable ground. Or, on those occasions when things were so bad that I needed their help, something they always graciously and lovingly provided. This pattern continued until 1999 when I was going through a second divorce at the age of 34.

I had many relationships to mend after that and a lot of work to do. Certainly in the fifteen years between that time and my amends, my relationship with my parents had already grown much closer due to those changes.

Still, I had never directly acknowledged how the distance I created hurt them. My mom had made a practice of never guilting us about anything, and it was fairly easy for me to remain in my self-centered haze. But now I had adult children of my own. I was freshly aware of how difficult that time of distance must’ve been for my parents, when they knew their daughter was struggling.

I am deeply grateful for the nudge that prompted me to write and read that letter. I was able to tell my parents that I saw how much they loved me all along and that they had always made it easy for me to come home. I told them that their loving support made all the difference in my life when I finally was ready to grow. I told them thank you.

My mom told me she knew all that and that she loved me and that I was a beautiful writer, which is exactly what my mom would say. My dad folded the letter and thanked me and told me he was going to keep it in the nightstand to read again. I could tell that it mattered to him that my mom got to hear my words.

Often my amends lately have been recognizing and receiving love, sometimes belatedly. Many people besides my parents have been good to me throughout my life, and I at times have been too self-centered to notice the depth of their care. I think of my friend Louise who I only recently reconnected with about two years ago after having lost touch in 1991 when I moved from San Diego to Idaho.

When I was going through my first divorce, I was in a great deal of pain and fear. I was also in graduate school and pretty much avoiding feelings by staying very busy taking 22 units and student teaching and commuting on the weekends between San Diego and Los Angeles.

Louise knew I was struggling and that I was more isolated than usual, and so she mailed me a letter every week that I received at my rented room in Los Angeles. I only remembered this now because while going through boxes during quarantine time a few weeks ago, I found piles of handwritten cards and letters and artwork she had mailed me. One for every single week of the year I was away. I am someone who resents having to find a stamp and envelope when bill arrives that I can’t pay online, so I was impressed by her commitment!

I’m sure I appreciated Louise’s notes at the time, but I hadn’t even remembered this act of love. I was so glad I found them and that we are in touch again so that I can say thank you for reminding me during that time that I wasn’t alone.

Laura and Louise 2017. Letters from Louise, 1989.

This work of righting wrongs of course takes many forms in spiritual and religious traditions as well as programs for addiction recovery, counseling practices, and justice groups. Sometimes it is called reckoning or reparations or amends, all of which imply an admission of wrongdoing, an attempt to repair, and a commitment to doing better going forward.

Going forward, I made that commitment to remain open and available to my parents. I became more actively engaged in their lives, and I showed up when I could be helpful. Which of course ended up being the greatest gift of all for me. I was able to be present during the years when my parents needed me most and to be by my mom’s side when she died.

Frank Ostaseski writes in The Five Invitations, “as people come closer to death, I have found that only two questions really matter to them: Am I loved? and Did I love well?”

The second question in particular was one my mom asked in different ways during the last weeks of her life. Had she given enough? Had she shown enough love? My dad and my sisters and I took turns reminding her of all of her grandchildren she nurtured, the children she taught, the daughters she’d raised. We read to her all of the stories her friends had sent about her teaching and activism and book groups and gardening. My mom was a sharer of ideas and enthusiasm and love. What a gift to be able to crawl in bed beside my mom during those last days and whisper to her about all of the ways she loved us.

More Resources

Most books I’ve read recently about death and dying spend at least some time on addressing the topic of unfinished relationship work. One that went into more depth and approached the work from a variety of interesting contexts is The American Book of Living and Dying: Lessons in Healing Spiritual Pain, by Richard F. Groves and Henriette Anne Klauser.

I also want to mention that one of the reasons this topic came to mind this week is because like many, I have been reading antiracism scholars including Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo both of whom speak powerfully to different facets of antiracism work. One thing DiAngelo’s White Fragility offers related to amends are examples of ways to acknowledge and take responsibility for times we fall short in a way that does not put more pressure on the recipient or do more harm.

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June 5, 2020July 16, 2020

Speaking Names

Tending to Endings (twenty-three)

Much of this week for me has been about listening and weeping and witnessing and reading and very little cohesive writing. But I do want to share a few personal reflections that seem relevant during this collective loss, and also, a few resources in case you find them helpful.

Boise held a vigil on Tuesday evening to mourn the killing of George Floyd and a long list of other Black lives taken by state sponsored violence. Five thousand attended at the steps of the Capitol. I watched over livestream and wished I was there in person. The Black leaders who organized the vigil helped us channel anger and despair into story and silence and song. And then we said the names, thirty minutes of names, each one followed by fifteen seconds of silence. Some were familiar to me: Tamir Rice, Eric Gardner, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Emmett Till, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. Far too many were not.

I’ve thought a lot recently about how difficult it is to speak the name of those who have died even when the death is not untimely or brutal or tragic. Bringing up the name of a loved one who is gone sometimes brings uncomfortable things into the conversation–sadness, the need to console, new questions, the reminder that we are mortal.

When the death is one that is marred by tragedy or wrongdoing or violence, when I am uncertain of my own responsibility, when innocent people get hurt, it is even harder.

At times in my own life, I have felt the pull to avoid reckoning and grief. When my kids were young, for instance, and I was going through a divorce, it was tempting to avoid stories about their past that included their father. Divorce with young children was excruciating and I felt a great deal of guilt and anger and uncertainty and sadness. I didn’t want more hurt to arise for them or me. It was tempting to try to start from where we were in our new parallel co-parenting lives.

But one afternoon while my sons and I snuggled on the couch for story time, one of them asked me to tell the story of when they were born. I hesitated, thinking, no way can I tell that one. And then I took a deep breath and dove in to the story they had heard many times before. The telling was healing for me and important for my sons. It was their origin story and evidence that they come from great love.

That moment of hesitation gave me awareness, and it was the beginning of me learning to not step around any of our stories. It took practice and a willingness to be very uncomfortable and, for me, lots of therapy. I needed to talk through all the painful stories with wise adults so that I could be present for my sons as they worked through their own hard journey. That work brought me to a point where I could talk about their daddy as they did, with ease and enthusiasm and kindness.

This has come to mind lately, not because it compares in scope or scale (it doesn’t), but because guides me as I grapple with the question of my own role in the painful story of racism our country. That moment of hesitation still informs me.

For instance, saying Black lives matter shouldn’t be any more complicated for me than saying the lives of the elderly matter. Both of those statements are true and needed and both have implications for policy and politics. I believe both deeply. But only one feels like it takes a bit of bravery for me to say. I suspect this is because I have not fully integrated our collective past with our current story.

I believe much of my own anti-racism work begins with making space for that larger story. In my experience, stories are essential for healing, not because they provide closure, but because they offer a path to connection and belonging. It’s human to want to skip over the hard part, but I don’t think we get anywhere good without it.

More Resources

These are just some of my favorites that speak to the healing power of story, particularly stories that have been excluded or left behind

In this ten minute episode of Poetry Unbound, Ali Cobby Eckermann’s A Poem for Keeping Memory Alive. Pádraig Ó Tuama introduces the poem:

Ali Cobby Eckermann’s poem calls readers to pay attention to the fact that remembering is a moral act; it is a courageous act, and to remember the ways in which our people may have participated in massacre mobs and to remember that mourning is an ongoing muscle that we need to recognize and that we need to practice;

Isabel Wilkerson is a masterful storyteller and historian and The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America’s Great Migration is one of the best books I’ve read in recent years on the topic of American history.

Our US Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo writes often of indigenous stories that have been silenced in her newest book, An American Sunrise. The poem, “Washing My Mother’s Body,” is a particularly visceral account of reconnecting with story through memory and ritual:

I never got to wash my mother’s body when she died./ I return to take care of her in memory./ That’s how I make peace when things are left undone./ I go back and open the door./ I step in to make my ritual. To do what should have been done,…

I used to incorporate Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk: The Danger of a Single Story into my writing classes, and it has been coming to mind a lot lately:

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, “secondly.” Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.

The Facebook Page of the Idaho Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence includes links to the video of the Boise vigil held on Tuesday. I have also been participating in their Collective Thriving Story Circles that they are facilitating this year which may be of particular interest to those living in the Treasure Valley area.

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Thank you and Love.