Tag: Resources

Tending to Endings (seventy-two)

I mentioned to a friend that I’ve been trying to wrangle my next Tending to Endings and have been struggling, not because I have nothing to write, but because I have so many things! Between Chaplaincy School and the surprise Liver Transplant Practicum that fate enrolled me in over this past year and a half, I have a firehose of material related to end-of-life and the other topics I focus on here—caregiving, storytelling, grief, aging, talking about hard things! Also, community, community, community! (I will write more on community soon).
 
My favorite Tendings to write are those where a short true-life narrative leads into a topic that might actually be useful to others! I’ve started about twelve of those recently and they each seem to unravel into too many threads. Which I know just means that I’m too close to it all to write it here. As you may have recognized by now, I don’t mind sharing the details, but I like to have a clear purpose in doings so. It takes me awhile to know what might be most relevant and helpful to others. 
 
So, I figured I’d start here, with a few resources I have found especially powerful and resonant, all written by people who already have their thoughts in order! They write to many of the topics I’ve been drawn to lately. This gives me hope that there is a cultural shift or at least the potential for one that will offer more support, more freedom, more honesty, and more loving community during end-of-life care and other stories of upheaval.
 
Speaking of which, I want to let those of you who have following since John’s liver cancer diagnosis to know that he is doing great! We both are really! At his six-month post-transplant appointment, we learned there are no signs of cancer. John will be on anti-rejection meds for the rest of his life, but right now they don’t seem to be causing any problems and he feels healthy and is back to full activity including (of course) almost daily tennis. We are both forever changed by this experience (which is part of what I’m finding my way towards writing about) and it is such a gift to be on the other side of transplant!
 
I appreciate you being here very much!

More Resources

Alzheimer’s Society, UK

I want to begin by thanking everyone who posted about aging and Alzheimer’s care on the website last month: Diane, Janet, Lorelei, Wendy, Tom, Amy, Katie, Jana. I have new books on order!

I also wanted to mention that the national UK Alzheimer’s Society has a community care focus for their website that I find helpful and that is very different from the US ALZ.org site which is more research and fundraising focused. To me it seems both are essential as so many people are currently impacted.

Did you know we in the U.S. have a Surgeon General who investigates loneliness as a public health issue and can lead an amazing group meditation? I did not. Here is his conversation with Krista Tippet that aired a couple weeks ago on the On Being podcast.

The Light of the World, Elizabeth Alexander

Elizabeth Alexander is a poet who write with wisdom and beauty about the unexpected death of her husband, Ficre. Here is how the memoir opens:

This story seems to begin with catastrophe but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story. Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love. “The queen died and then the king died” is a plot, wrote E.M. Forester in The art of the Novel, but “The queen died and then the king died of grief” is a story.

Later she writes about her mother-in-law’s death which occurred before her husband died. (This memoir elegantly meanders forward and back and time):

When my mother-in-law was dying, she faced illness with tremendous equanimity. She did not want pain—and luckily, medicine could take care of that—but she was not afraid of dying. We never saw her flinch in its face. I had always been afraid of death, waking from nightmares of its imminence even in my childhood. Much to my surprise, I was able to be present and useful and near to her as death approached near. I was surprised to learn I could sit by the side of death. I was grateful to be able to help this great woman who by example showed me so much of what it meant to be a matriarch. By letting me near, she showed me I was much stronger than I’d known I was.

So often spiritual thoughts and questions arise when people die and one of the things I love about this book is the natural, fluid way Alexander lets us in on those moments where she notices and questions mystery:

My mother-in-law’s last night on earth, a fox crossed our path in Branford, Connecticut, as we left the hospice. We knew somehow that it was her, as I no know the ravenous hawk came to take Ficre. Do I believe that? Yes, I do. I do not believe she was a fox. But I believe the fox was a harbinger. I believe that it was a strange enough occurrence that it should be heeded. Zemesh Berhe, the quick, red fox, soon passed from this life to the next.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, adrienne maree browne

There are many things I love about this book. For instance, browne builds on prophetic work of Joanna Macy, Octavia Butler, and Grace Boggs to offer a way to envision and enact social transformation. One reason it speaks to me is that browne gives attention to the set-backs and losses and range of emotions that occur along the way in any collective movement:

Transformation doesn’t happen in a linear way, at least not one we can always track. It happens in cycles, convergences, explosions. If we release the framework of failure, we can realize that we are in iterative cycles, and we can keep asking ourselves—how do I learn from this? Emotional growth is nonlinear. It feels really important to me to include pieces on grief and emotions in this book because, as people participating in movements, we are faced with so much loss, and because we have to learn to give each other more time to feel, to be in our humanity

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From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, Caitlin Doughty

Before my mom died, I was often one of many people referring to the body as “just a vessel.” That bodies, might be rather important vessels (even after death) given that they carried the people we loved throughout their lives was not something I pondered much. Since then I have come to believe that spending some time considering, honoring, caring for the body after death can be helpful to many throughout those early days of grief. 

Caitlin Doughty is a mortician who does a deep dive into learning how bodies are considered, tended to, honored, celebrated, grieved over, and dispensed of in various countries. Like most good travel stories, this one helps Doughty also see her own culture’s death practices in a new light. She also investigates some newer (still rare) US options such as composting in Washington and open air funeral pyres in Colorado. Her book is not an argument for a particular way, but rather a look at what elements of death care are tended to in different communities.

This is a quote gives a view into her overarching thesis:

In America, where I live, death has been big business since the turn of the twentieth century. A century has proven the perfect amount of time for its citizens to forget what funerals once were; family-and-community-run affairs. In the nineteenth century no one would have questioned Josephine’s daughter preparing her mother’s body–it would have seemed strange if she didn’t. No one would have questioned a wife washing and dressing the body of her husband or a father carrying his son to the grave in a homemade coffin. In an impressively short time, America’s funeral industry has become more expensive, more corporate, and more bureaucratic than any other funeral industry on Earth. If we can be called best at anything, it would be at keeping our grieving families separated from their dead.

For those who are newer to Tending to Endings, Body of Grief is an earlier essay post related to this topic about being surprised at how important some of the death care rituals were to me after my mom’s death.

Instructions on Not Giving Up, Ada Limón

And finally, I want to leave you with a poem someone mentioned in my writing group last week that seems just perfect for spring during complicated times. By U.S. Poet Laureate, Ada Limón.

I love hearing from you! If you have resources you want to share or questions or feedback about Tending to Endings please leave comments below. You can also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com. If you would like to subscribe (for free!) to Tending to Endings, please leave your name and email. Also, in case you are wondering about those photogenic goats! They live next door and are quite neighborly!

Laura

Tending to Endings (sixty-eight)

I carry my camp chair to the circle of people sitting in the sun among gravestones. There is a large group beneath the shady oak, too, but this is June and the temperature is more Boise spring than summer. Dry Creek Cemetery is only blocks from my house and adjoined to Veterans Cemetery which I can locate from the U.S. flag flying atop the hill, every time I walk my regular trail loop behind my house.

Once, a few years ago, the summer after my mother’s death, I was about halfway through the canyon when I heard the sound of a solo bugle playing “Taps” coming from beyond the ridge. I stopped, listened knowing this was for some soldier, yes, and also for my mother. Mom was a peace activist, but even she was moved by “Taps” and would sing the words, which she remembered from her days at summer camp. In the months after my mother’s death, she was with me on every walk, and I would see each songbird and insect and wildflower as though through her eyes.

As I stood, something came up behind me on the trail, I assumed a mountain biker, but when I turned, it was a young buck. I’d never seen a deer in the canyon on one of my walks (and haven’t since), though I’d recently discovered one eating breakfast at our apricot tree. I wondered what a deer was doing out on a trail in the heat of the day on the last week of July. He stepped over some sage and then stood a few yards off, both of us giving our full attention to the song. When the last note hung in the air, the deer leapt off into a neighbor’s backyard, and I continued my hike through the canyon, my mom as present with me as she has ever been.

So, I have a relationship with Dry Creek Cemetery, and yet, I have only been inside these gates a handful of times to attend services.

Usually Death Cafés are held quarterly but, like many gatherings, they have been on hiatus since the start of the pandemic. Now, about twelve of us sit and chat, waiting for the official start, and I feel calm and peaceful among the tombstones.

I wonder when that change happened? When did graveyards cease being scary? As a child they made my skin tingle and I dutifully, superstitiously, held my breath so I would not be the first one in the car to die when, whenever we passed a cemetery. As a teenager they were the settings for horror films and scary stories. Now, cemeteries settle me, give me perspective.

One of the first times I remember noticing this change was not in a graveyard per se, but while backpacking through the canyons of southern Utah and coming upon remnants of kitchens of people from ancient times in alcoves. I thought, This is us! All I worry about, and this is where our bones will be. Bones and maybe shards of some of the things we made, mere fragments from which to imagine a story.

Why that insight was reassuring to me at that time, I can’t quite explain. I am fond of existing. Maybe in my older age I am just more aware of the benefits, the whoosh of freedom and release, when I recognize all that is not mine to worry about or control or carry. All that will outlast me. And then, the other side of that knowing, what is mine right now, the miracle and the rarity of it. In recent years, I find myself wanting to hone that perspective of the long view, to keep it close at hand like some smooth polished stone.

Tending to Endings is partly an attempt to hold that perspective, I suppose, to remember what I have at hand and its worth. And, of course, it is also an attempt to learn more about the stage of life I avoided thinking or talking about for most of my life.

Death Cafés were started in England for some of the same reasons, and thirty-two months ago I attended my first one in Boise and wrote about it in the first two installments of this series. It felt good to be back this June, sitting in the grass at Dry Creek listening to stories about death. My circle included a social work student in his twenties and a man in his eighties who had technically died twice already and a woman who had recently sat vigil with her mom. I spoke about my mother’s dying with more distance this time, more perspective, though she is with me still. I continue to feel her smile spread across my face, for instance, when I see a preschooler crouch to inspect a ladybug.

Throughout the evening, we laughed a lot and cried a little, which I’ve learned is typical of a Death Café. And afterwards, we folded up our camp chairs and carried them over the graves and between the tombstones, heading back into the sweet brevity of our lives.

The next Boise Death Cafe will be held at True North Yoga on September 16, from 6:30-8 pm. All are welcome. You can find more information at the Boise Death Cafe Fb page or email deathcafeboise@gmail.com.

More Resources

Cemetery scenes figure prominently and positively in the three recommendations I’ve included here: two fictional books and an audio essay. Each, narrator meditates on, yes, loss, but also what continues on after a big loss. In each case, cemeteries are rendered as a place for the living to find healing and perspective as well as a place to mourn.

Fresh Water for Flowers, by Valérie Perrin (translated by Hildegarde Serle).

This novel has been accused of being “too chock-full,” but I loved that about it! It is love story and mystery and bad relationship drama and a spiritual meditation and a family saga and a story about friendship and parenthood and finding home. All the life that can go in and out of a cemetery happens here, pulled taut through the voice of the caretaker, Violette.

The Last White Man, by Moshin Hamid.

This speculative fiction reflects on various forms of loss and the different ways humans in an unnamed city and country respond. Here is one passage from a time when the two central characters, Anders and Oona, visit the cemetery together:

They walked on, and Anders put his arm around Oona, and he suspected then that maybe there was something different about them, about Oona and him, and he thought that possibly they felt the dead as not everyone felt the dead, that some people hid from the dead, and tried not to think of them, but Anders and Oona did not do this, they felt the dead daily, hourly, as they lived their lives, and their feeling of the dead was important to them, and important part of what made up their particular way of living, and not to be hidden from, for it could not be hidden from, it could not be hidden from at all.

If you want a bit more before diving in, this interview with Hamid introduced me to the book in a more thorough way than some of the other media coverage and made me want to read it: “How Do We Face Loss with Dignity,” The Ezra Klein Show.

The Joy of Being an Unwilling Traveler through Life, by Maya Shanker.

While I was working on this post, I listened to an essay written by Dr. Maya Shankar which includes a scene where her father brings her to a cemetery as a way of offering perspective. Shankar is also the host of a A Slight Change of Plans, which is a podcast I listen to regularly and I suspect would appeal to many readers of this blog. This essay is found on the podcast, Meditative Stories.

Library Remodel!

Last week I spent some time refreshing my online library, starting with the titles related to end-of-life matters. I’ve added some images and briefly annotated each title with a few thoughts. The categories (nonfiction, fiction, poetry, podcasts, film…) now include five favorites related to Tending to Endings themes. I also have started an overflow page for those wanting to delve deeper in the stacks. I will continue to add to that list as I find more resources that seem relevant and helpful.

All of this is of course only a small, subjective sampling of the resources available on the topic, but I figure those who come here regularly might have similar reading taste and interests.

I hope you’ll visit soon and let me know what you think, both about the library and what would make it more useful, and also any suggestions you have in general for Tending to Endings. I plan to continue to write here about once a month. At the end of the year, I hope to make some small changes including broadening the scope of the series a little based on things I’ve learned along the way.

Please consider sending your thoughts about topics, frequency, style, length, organization or anything at all you think will make this better. Or, feel free to tell me things you want to stay the same, too. There is a comments field below, or you can also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com. If it is your first time you are leaving a comment, it will appear after I approve it (just to save all of us from spam comments), but future comments will appear as soon as you post.

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Thank you for being here!

Tending to Endings (fifty-nine)

In preparation for classes at United Theological Seminary (UTS) next week, I received a list of questions to ponder before orientation. One read, “If you came with a warning label, what would it be?”

Which brought to mind a memory from my grade school years of standing on the slippery tiles at the base of the high dive at Kopp Pool in Des Plaines, Illinois. My friend Amy Ayers is next to me and she says with a sigh, “Laura, do you always have to be so deep? Can’t we just have fun?”

I don’t know what I said to garner that response, but given my intense fears about high dives and what others thought of me, my guess is that I was trying to make a philosophical case for why getting out of line for the three-meter board was actually the brave thing to do.

Even at age ten I warranted a label: Ill-equipped for small talk.

My making it to middle-aged as a relatively happy person has involved some combination of acceptance and balance and having good friends who can make me laugh. And when I think of that day on the pool deck in the context of my current work–writing Tending to Endings and volunteering for hospice and beginning a chaplaincy program–I do laugh.

Not everyone wants to address the meaning of life in every conversation, but I seem to have found places where it is the natural thing to do!

This month I return to College of Western Idaho to teach in the Social Studies Department, I start graduate school for the first time since the 1980s, and I begin hospice visits as a volunteer at St. Luke’s Hospice. For someone who writes about endings, I’m immersed in a whole lot of beginnings!

In preparing for this new work, I’ve come across so many things I want to share here. I’ll start with three finds that have been particularly helpful.

This American Life: In Defense of Ignorance

As I’ve prepared my CWI course, “Psychosocial Aspects of Death and Dying,” a friend reminded me of Lulu Wang’s story which first ran on This American Life in an episode called What You Don’t Know (30 min).

Wang is troubled by her family’s elaborate plan to keep a cancer diagnosis secret from her grandmother (the person with the cancer). Family members fake medical test results and quickly plan a wedding so that family members have a reason to travel to China to see Nainai (Wang’s name for her grandma).

In this short passage Wang explains how her aunt (named Little Nainai) justifies the secrecy:

Little Nainai told the doctor that Nainai is too old, that she couldn’t handle a blow like this. It’s not just that Little Nainai didn’t want to upset her sister with the news of her death. She actually believed that not telling her was a way to prolong her life. Knowing Nainai’s personality, Little Nainai worried that her sister would get overwhelmed with fear and depression. She’d stop eating. She’d stop sleeping. She’d lose interest in life. The Chinese believe that mental and emotional health are completely linked to physical health.

The story reminds me how many factors influence how we think and feel and act about death: culture and generation and geography and personality and particular circumstances. And the part that resonated most with me was how even values that I considered foundational and clear looked different amidst the particulars of my mother’s illness.

If you asked me whether you should tell someone of their own terminal diagnosis I would say of course!

But when my mom was given a cancer diagnosis while she was also in the grips of Alzheimer’s, things didn’t feel as clear. Mom was in the room when the doctor explained that her cancer was not curable, so she heard it. But by the time we made it to the parking garage of the hospital, the information was foggy and by the next day, she had forgotten it completely. And it wasn’t just memory, but also her ability to process and cope with the information of her condition–both the Alzheimer’s and the cancer–was different on different days.

Before this I knew honesty and directness weren’t always easy, but now I didn’t even know if they were the right path. Do I keep reintroducing painful information when Mom would have to go through the pain of processing it again, and again, and again? What about when she asks why she is hurting? Do I tell her then? What about when she becomes more agitated after I tell her? Do I do something different next time? How important is it at any given moment that my mom understands she is nearing the end of her life?

I was never fully able to reconcile those questions in a way that was satisfying to me. Mostly, I bumbled my way through, doing the best I could to give my mom the information she seemed to want to know when she asked.

Towards the end, I sensed that at some level below the Alzheimer’s, my mom knew and made peace with her own leaving. But this was not a knowing that had anything to do with talking it through. Instead I felt it in the changed cadence of her breath, her relaxed brow, the way the corners of her mouth turned toward laughter in her particular Jane way. It wasn’t because I said the right thing, but it happened, and for that I am grateful.

Call to Care

I’m reading The Call to Care: Essays by Unitarian Universalist Chaplains edited by Rev. Karen Hutt (who is also our Vice President of Formation and Vocation at UTS!), and I could easily pull quotes from any of the essays, which tend to take on the very questions I have about the role of chaplaincy. But this passage from Nathan Mesnikoff’s “Lost (and found) in Translation,” has stayed with me:

Philosophers and theologians have debated for ages what knowledge we can have of the world, let alone for the complexities of another’s heart and mind. There is always a gap. Indeed, one of the first things we are taught [as chaplains] is never to say, “I know how you feel.” I don’t know how you feel, or how you understand death or God. I don’t know what this particular moment of suffering, which you happen to be present for, means to you in the context of your life and faith.

So I reach out across that gap and do three main things. First I bear witness through unflinching presence. I don’t turn away from your suffering, remorse, guilt, or anger. Second, I ask what this experience means to you. Where does this episode fit in the narrative of your life? Third, I try to help you connect with sources of strength and hope, whatever they may be: organized religion, disorganized religion, hiking, schnauzers, grandkids, whatever. Many people have no one who can effectively do these three things, these acts of human love and compassion.

One of the things I loved most about this quote is it named things I can practice in my relationships today that don’t require any special degree or certificate. They require a deep breath, maybe, a little courage, a willingness to be present with another in the face of uncertainty and pain and the things we cannot fix. Given how much is going on in the world and in the lives those I know, it’s good to have a place to start.

Heart & Soul: St. Luke’s Home Care and Hospice

Writing has long been my creative outlet, but so often words fall short. The above article in Heart & Soul: A Newsletter for St. Luke’s Home Care and Hospice Volunteers, reminds me there are other options.

After years of service in the downtown St. Luke’s hospital, Barbara Beck began sewing memory bears for hospice patients and their families in 2005. Since then, she has sewed over 1000 bears. Suddenly, I wish I knew how to sew! What are words when you could have a bear made from the soft garments worn by loved ones? 

Many hospice providers have programming around the arts. Volunteers sing in traveling choral groups. High school students interview elders about their favorite music and bring iPods with special playlists. People gather to create prayer shawls or quilts or memory boxes. And of course there is a long tradition of friends and family bringing comfort food to the porch. 

I currently am not practiced in any art form other than writing, but I would love to have an alternative for those times when there truly are no words. I don’t think I have enough time left on earth to master the sewing skills necessary for bear making, but it is a goal of mine in the next year to explore some other small (imperfect) offering I could create that doesn’t rely on sentences. I’ll let you know how it goes!

It means a lot to me that so many of you keep returning here! Please feel free leave comments or add your own resource suggestions below. You can also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com. If you would like to subscribe leave your name and email below, and you will receive Tending to Endings on the first Friday of every month.