Tag: Story

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Choices

It is common in creative writing classes to begin an assignment by giving students constraints. Write a story in which a lemon, a large body of water, and a gas station all appear. Write a poem where each line starts with the letter J. Write a scene where a man on a job interview accidentally locks himself in a bathroom. One gift of constraints is they keep my analytical mind occupied so something more creative and serendipitous can sneak in the side door.

Life gives us constraints. Some unique to us or to our community and many shared. A dependency on fuel sources that are destroying human habitat. A new variant when everyone is weary. The fact that each of us will die though we don’t know how or when.

My mom lived her life as though her constraints were challenges giving her the opportunity to engage her creative acumen. When she gained weight after quitting smoking, I remember laughing with her on the phone when she said, “It finally occurred to me I could buy bigger clothes!” That was classic Jane. More than positive thinking–though there was that–Mom found her own way through things by looking for where she had choices.

The end game was always for her to be happy in her life so she could continue to be a positive force in the world. She was a giver who did not believe in martyrdom.  Which means she found ways to want to do a lot of things that were good for her community and her family and the world.

Dad with Mom on her last trip to Idaho, August 2018

The hardest thing for me to accept about my mom’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s was that she would not be able to finish her own story. Towards the end of her life the constraints grew exponentially, and her cognitive skills diminished just as quickly making it hard for her to see her way through. Still, she continued to look.

Given the expansiveness of my mom’s life as a teacher and peace activist and poet and gardener and friend, watching her work so hard to find purchase was heartbreaking. Often when my dad would offer her a wedge of pineapple, she would receive it with glee. Once, when she was more pensive I asked her, “What are you thinking, mom?” And she looked up with a small smile said, “I’m thinking how lucky I am that I can swallow.”

Seeing her Jane-ness emerge from around the constraint of Alzheimer’s, that was painful, and also, gold. “These things happen…” Jane Kenyon writes, “the soul’s bliss / and suffering are bound together / like grasses.”

Laura and Jane in Maui, March, 2019

One of the things that has occurred to me while writing a blog called Tending to Endings is that we often don’t know during a health crises (or any other hard time) whether we are near the end or enduring a very hard middle, or on the cusp of a comeback. I look at those two photos of my mom only seven months apart and see that what felt like an era in the life of our family was really one half of a year.

During that last visit to Idaho, my mom’s health wasn’t good. She suffered from radiation wounds from cancer therapy and the Alzheimer’s was wreaking havoc on her short-term memory. But she could still play a mean game of Scrabble; and she knew the mechanics of getting in and out of the car; and when she was picking up her prescription of Aricept and the pharmacist would ask for her birthdate, Mom could still recite it before adding, “You know this is for my memory, right?”

That she would not see another summer? I did not know that. The pandemic has already lasted far longer my mom’s final bout with cancer.

As I’ve listened to more and more friends, family, colleagues, students who are walking through serious health events with their parents or spouses, I’ve realized that they often think the truth they need to accept or get others to accept is that the end is near. But what has often been truer for me is that I don’t know where I am in the story, that the future is uncertain, and the decisions need to be made in unfamiliar and shifting terrain. Sometimes they need to be made on someone else’s behalf which can feel nearly impossible to get right. 

Last year I had the privilege of interviewing Chaplain Norm Shrumm about talking to our families about end-of-life wishes, ours and theirs. The holidays seems a good time to revisit the conversation. The whole interview is full of compassionate wisdom, and these words in particular have continued to help me:

And to the point you bring up about dementia like in the case of your mom, it can help to remind ourselves what that role of health surrogate entails. You are being asked to make decisions on a pretty high level emotionally and ethically. There isn’t any trickery there. I think that is what we sign on for: In the event I cannot make decisions for myself because I’m unconscious or because I no longer understand the complexity of the situation or its implications—my health surrogate will make those decisions.

I don’t argue against the guilt because I don’t think that helps. We have guilt because we are in moral distress and there is ambiguity. It is not a slam dunk decision. So, we just need to do this alongside of the guilt.

And what you are being asked to do is to draw on all your love for this person to make the decision on behalf of this person that she is unable to make. You landed in this role for this very reason. And so the moral weight of deciding on her behalf what would be the best death—remembering there is no option available to not have a death—rests with you. You’re being asked to clear the path towards the gentlest death, a soft landing.

Sometimes we get to help people finish their stories. I won’t have all the information I need any more than I know all the variables in my own life.

There was a time after my mom was on hospice care. This was after she had lost the ability to know how to sit down in a chair and had stopped using the whiteboard to find out what day it was and instead would just look to me or my dad for reassurance that all was well. She was no longer the first one up every morning, the way she had been for most of my life. Except on that morning, I woke up before dawn and came into the kitchen to find my mom studying the calendar.

“Would you like coffee, Mom?”

“That would be wonderful,” she answered, and her voice sounded like her old self. I inhaled deeply, noticed she was wearing her robe and glasses. She looked up and her blue eyes met mine.

“Laura, I woke up knowing that I haven’t been right. It’s as though I’m suddenly aware that it has been me who is crazy and not everyone else. I don’t know if this will last, but right now, it feels so good to understand. It’s like I’ve been gone and I am back.”

She was back, and I wanted to crawl in her arms and beg her to stay.

We sat on the couch each holding our mugs. She took long sips from the cup she often requested but, these days, usually let sit before her growing cold. We talked like we had on so many dark mornings throughout my life.

“I am here,” she said, “I am in Maui having a good conversation with my oldest daughter, Laura. I wish I could write it all down. I don’t know how long this will last.” Then she said, “If I wrote a book you know what it would be called?”

“What?”

“Choices. My life really started once I knew I had choices,” and she looked up at the ceiling like she so often would when thinking, and then to me. “It wasn’t which choices, or that I had choices. It was me knowing I had them.”

I too, wished I could write it all down. Wished I had brought my phone into the living room so I could turn on the recorder. Wished she could stay.

That was the last time we were in our rightful roles: mother, daughter. By the time the pastel glow of morning revealed a daytime moon, the fog of Alzheimer’s returned. But the living continued and we made our ways somehow through those final months together. And my mom, Jane Stavoe, shapes my story, still.

More Resources

While teaching the community college course this semester, I put together a list for my students. These are the books and podcasts and films that I find myself returning to often. You can now find that in-progress list at the Laura Library link on my website.

Three recent podcast episodes that I loved and may be of interest are “70 Sounds Young To Me,” a 70 over 70 interview with Diane Meier, a pioneer in palliative care medicine; “The Fullness of Things,” an On Being episode with poet and Zen monk, Jane Hirshfield; and George Saunder’s on Longform, which may be slightly off topic for this blog, but he has been one of the people who have helped me stay more grounded, hopeful, and (I think) kinder during the pandemic. He is a fiction writer, writing teacher, and wise soul.

If you would like to receive Tending to Endings when it publishes, please leave your name and email below. I plan to continue to post once or twice each month in 2022, though not necessarily on a regular schedule. I hope you’ll continue to find it useful. May your last days of 2021 be restorative and full of love.

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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!

Please consider subscribing to Tending to Endings. It is free and will arrive in your inbox once a month. You can also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com.

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Touching Grief

Tending to Endings (fifty-six)

I almost missed the iris this year! I made it home from Hawai’i at the end of May to catch the tail end of their bloom. I’ve always loved the curvy shape and deep color of an iris. And these days, more than anything else, they make my think of my friend Teresa and her story about her mom (which she shared in more detail in a post last spring).

Teresa moved back to Boise in 2016 after a particularly difficult time in her life. One of the many things she mourned leaving were the iris bulbs from her mother’s garden that she had transplanted into her Montana yard. She had moved in winter when the ground was frozen, and so she could not dig them up.

Teresa began to rebuild her life in Boise and was able to buy a beautiful cottage that called to her. The first spring when flowers began to bloom, Teresa discovered her new home was surrounded by irises. She knew she was in the right place. Or as Teresa put it, “God is fancy.”

I am so grateful to know that story. I love feeling that leap of love–that connection to my dear friend and her mom–when I see an iris.

It has been a gift to gather these photo stories for our virtual memorial. Thank you for sharing your heart and honoring your loved ones here.

Artifacts of Loss and Love

This elephant pin cushion belonged to my granny.  I remember as a very young child (probably around 6) that my granny would pull this down off the shelf for me to have something to play with when I’d visit.  I would pull the pins out and redesign the pattern of the elephant.  Now that it is so old it has faded to the pattern it is now so there is no redesigning it anymore.  I imagine I was the last one to place the pins where they are now.  Funny to think this is the toy a 6 year old would play with but I sure did love it and am so grateful I have it now. Patty Marks  

These shadow puppets belonged to my close friend, Alberta Dooley. They hung in her therapy office, her college office, after retirement in her living room, and after her death on my wall. We shared our lives, our families, and our confidences for forty years, but there were bits of herself she always kept in the shadows. Mary Ellen McMurtrie
My sister-in-law Cheryl made the urn out of my brothers’ ashes, after they both died within a month of each other in 2016.  I think of Cheryl’s hands shaping this, pressing the lip into place, brushing the blue-green glaze, her favorite combination of colors.  She used her tears as slip for the clay.  Now Cheryl is gone, too, and her fingerprints are all that I have left of a friendship that started even before she met my older brother, over 40 years ago. When I pick up the vase, I imagine my hands over hers as we both hug these men, each in our own time. Ana Halland
I was living in Yuma and my brother Miles was living in Tucson and we would meet to go hunting. These were some of the best times I spent with Miles before things got too bad. We were by the campfire one night and he told me how much I meant to him and he gave me this buckle. It was made by a favorite artist of his in Tucson, and I knew it was hard for him to give it to me and that he gave it to me because he loved me. To tell you the truth, I never wanted to remind Miles that he gave me his buckle because he might want it back. So I never brought it up. The whole thing meant so much to me, I wasn’t taking any chances. John Westover
Growing up, I spent a lot of time at my Grandma’s, whether it was after school or over the weekend when my parents were on an adult trip. My Grandma always had a cup of coffee, some type of homemade sweet on the counter, and she was always cold. Whenever I said I was cold, she would always ask, “would you like a robe?” My grandma had many robes over the years, enough to cultivate the perfect idea of comfort when looking for a robe based on season, weather, and time of day. 

My Grandma passed away in late November of 2020. Upon bringing home one of her robes, there were moments that I would just pick it up, hold it close to my face and smell the comfortable scent of my grandma standing in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee and nibbling on a cookie. With each day the scent of my grandma has lingered farther and farther away from the fibers themselves, but each time I put the robe on, I am able to be comforted and warmed up by my grandma one more time. Ali Smith
Grandma Frances wore this watch the years of the later part of her life. I remember her drumming her fingers while she thought about something I had said or something she was thinking about doing. I also remember it flashing while she played her organ and sang “The Green Green Grass of Home.” Now I wear it most days while I teach and it reminds me how much she loved me, and would have been cheering for me to be myself. Lori Messenger
Jane Stavoe was my wife, mother to our daughters, and friend to many. Jane passed away April 2019. We bought our home in 1964 and that began Jane’s love of gardening. Jane would gather with neighbors and friends and share her joy from playing in the earth. She decided that young people needed a better understanding of where their food came from and invited 60 fourth-grade children to plant vegetables.  The school garden went on for seventeen years until we sold our home of forty-nine years and moved to a condo. 

Each year when I start planting our terrace garden and see the “Friends Rock” which was given to Jane by one of the fourth-grade classes, it makes me think of the many friends with whom Jane had shared her garden. Ron Stavoe
My mother, Jean Ingles Bedingfield, was born in 1910 and so even though this is just a broken plate of what was once a beautiful set, it has “lived” for at least a hundred years.  The set was precious to my mother and each time I look up at my shelf and see the piece I , of course, think of her with love and smile. I picture my mother smiling, too. The set was precious, but my mother was a realist and had a wonderful sense of humor.  She would love that I kept the piece and that I display it. Our connection is not broken.  Our relationship endures. Carol Buick
This plaque hung in my grandmother’s kitchen and I would sit and read it every time I visited. It made me laugh as it read with a Norwegian accent telling how to make “scandihuvian” lefsa. Besides the fact that my grandmother was an amazing cook and taught me how to make lefsa, this plaque depicted a side of my grandmother that I loved. She had a hard life growing up on the plains of North Dakota and Wisconsin. But despite the hardships my grandmother had a fun and silly side. One winter when I was 9 or 10, we made Christmas ornaments out of felt. And my grandmother said ‘that sure was some funny feeling felt’. I replied ‘I never felt any felt like that felt before’. We bantered back and forth making funnier ‘felt’ sayings and phrases for our description of felt. We thought we were extremely funny, laughing uncontrollably and nearly driving my poor mother crazy. From then on that was our running inside joke – that funny feeling felt, that we had never felt any felt like that felt before. So whenever I look at this plaque that is now in my kitchen, I warmly remember the fun loving side of my grandmother. Cam Victoria
Every time I see Rudy the Rooster, I think of my friend Susan Gardner.  She loved to go to Jim’s Diner, Rudy’s former home, for breakfast on her birthday.  Theresa Madrid
My mom was an incredible artist and left a treasure of her art work for her loved ones! I have many in my home! This particular one brings me closer to her each day! We share a love for flowers especially purple iris! Sometimes I stare at one of her paintings and realize how incredible it is to look at her brush strokes and feel connected! Grateful for the gift she left for us! Teresa McDonald
While cleaning the house in order to put our house on the market, this is one of the few old objects that made the “keep” pile. My grandma made this magic square for my 15th birthday. I can feel the love and care that she put into each stitch. It helps me remember the many blessings of the time spent with grandparents. Sandy Blethen
My mom died in her sleep ten years ago this summer. This is my stepdad who I call Papa. When I am with him I feel closest to my mom because they think and react the same – with big love. Lorelei McDermott
This glass monkey was given to me as a keepsake from my close friend Allie, who passed away. She purchased it to remind her “Not my Monkeys!” It reminds my of Allie’s gentle soul and struggle with co-dependency. I laugh when I see it because it’s just like her to get all fancy about the props she uses as reminders. Roxanne Abramowitz
The object in the foreground is a lava lamp which belonged to my grandfather, Victor L. Bedingfield.  Possibly fearing a probate battle among his grandchildren for this treasured, incongruous item, he gifted it to me on my thirty-fourth birthday, approximately six months before he died.  The faded labels on the base include a line that he spoke to me over the phone probably three weeks before his passing:  “I think about you every day.”  This shocked me.  My grandpa had many things, and many people in his life to think about.  But in a world where we often receive the message that we are NOT special, or unique, or cared about, here was a deep voice of authority countermanding that message and reminding me that I was being thought of.  The clarity of that message was startling and palpable and life changing.  And I realized that, indeed, I thought about HIM every day.  And so many others (as I know that I am not the only person that my Grandfather thought about each day).  There is room in our hearts for all.  So every morning, as the connection is made and the electricity surges through the filaments in the bulb, which then heat the orange globules producing the same strange shapes my siblings and cousins and I marveled at in our grandparents old fashioned house—I think, I remember, and I rejoice. Kevin Buick
Those of us who are able-bodied are sometimes referred to by the disabled community as “the temporarily able-bodied.”  It does put “the em-PHA-sis on the right syl-A-ble” as Mr Ellfeldt, my beloved childhood music teacher used to say at choir practice.

My husband Gordon went from able-bodied to quadriplegic in the time it took for a tire to blow out. This mouthstick was a tool of his trade. It was more comfortable and easier to use than the earlier ones with just two prongs. This one has a mouthpiece molded to his bite which was easily held and manipulated. The remaining marks from Gordon’s teeth are a surprisingly intimate and lovely reminder of him.
 
He used it for turning pages on his lapboard (a lapboard I am using right now to get the trackball down within reach after shoulder surgery) as he read aloud to me as I cooked or folded laundry. He had always read to me, though now there were pauses as he picked up the mouthstick out of the docking station on his wheelchair, turned the page, replaced the mouthstick, and continued on.
 
When he was first learning to turn pages in rehab, I couldn’t see how it would ever work at all. He used it even more constantly on his keyboard at the especially designed desk which came up to his chest. In time, his neck grew strong. In fact, his shirt collar increased two sizes.

The mouthstick was a godsend and yet it was slow and laborious to use. As I sit here with one arm in a sling, I’m amazed he wasn’t more frustrated than he was. He had helped to develop speech synthesis in the years I first knew him and here he was editing the monthly church newsletter one keystroke at time.
 
Gordon died nineteen years after his accident. There’s so much I didn’t keep, but this I have still.  I’m sorry I didn’t keep the plate-guards – they’d come in handy for me now. Louise Buck
As John and I built our life together, I became more aware of what I lost in never having had the chance to meet his mom who died in 1999, three years before we got together.

I came to know Grandma Dean through stories John’s daughters told and from John telling me how much she would enjoy my sons. Soon after we met he told me how his mom said when he was a teenager, “You better learn to speak better because someday you’re going to meet a cute English teacher, and you’ll open your mouth and it’ll be all over!” (She was wrong about that last part. :))

Some of the objects Dean loved grace our home. We have a few prints on the wall, an antique hutch with a marble top, three plates from Portugal decorated with peaches. And we have a drawerful of the chunky jewelry she wore that never fit my style or frame. John recently pulled this turquoise and silver cross from his nightstand and said, “This is sooo my mom!”

With the weight of it in my palm, I think about the objects and the places and the people Dean loved. I think especially about how close she and John were and how I know and love this man more with each passing year. It is possible, I now see, to grow a relationship, to grieve a relationship, with someone I never met. Laura Stavoe

More Resources

This American Life ran a show titled Good Grief last week that is right up our alley! Here are the episode notes:

So many of us, we don’t want to think about death. We avoid grieving when we lose someone, distract ourselves, look away. In this episode, at a moment when so many families are mourning, we have stories of people figuring out how they’ll grieve, and doing a pretty good job of it.

A new podcast related to end-of-life matters is 70 over 70 in which one of my favorite interviewers Max Linsky talks with seventy people who are over seventy years old. I found recent episodes with Norman Lear and Sister Helen Prejean particularly touching.

If you are inspired by these photo stories and want to read more about expressing grief through creativity, Heart Art is a Tending to Endings post from last summer that includes an essay on the topic and some resources.

To read Teresa’s story in her own words (and see the cottage surrounded by irises!) and other stories from readers, go to April 2020’s post: Your Words .

And if you like Tending to Endings, please become a subscriber by leaving your email below. Each installment will arrive in your inbox the first Friday of the month. Tending to Endings is cost-free and ad-free. You can also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com or in the comments box below. I would love to stay in touch!

Laura

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Telling and Retelling

Note: If you don’t have time to read the entire post, please do scroll to the Call for Photo Stories section under “Artifacts of Grief.” I’d love for you to join in!

Tending to Endings (fifty-five)

“Does that make you think of Mom?” my dad asks.

I’m folding clothes on my parents’ bed because post-vaccine, I’m visiting my Dad in Maui, and the washer and dryer is in their bedroom suite.

“I think of Mom every day! Especially here!” I tell him.

“Yes, but when I fold laundry I think of how she liked to fold towels.”

And I do know. There were times after the Alzheimer’s advanced that I would pull clean towels from the shelf and throw them in the dryer to tumble a bit so Mom could refold them. It gave her a span of time where she knew what she was doing, which brought her a sense of purpose and thus peace. She particularly liked folding the towels and napkins because she could get them into a shape that was even and that pleased her.

It’s strange that this memory makes me smile now. The whole activity was out of character for both of us. I was being sneaky and my mom was keeping house.

Before her illness, I was the family member who pointed out the elephant in the room rather than hiding it under a pile of warm towels. And my mom, for most of her life, saw domestic chores as something that got in the way of her real work which was attending peace vigils, and writing letters to the editor, and teaching kids to garden or to read, and holding study groups in our living room about her newest passion.

The island holds many stories for my family. Mom considered Maui paradise and her second home ever since she first visited in 1976. While dad and I walk along the coastal trail, I pull my camera out to take a photo. My dad says, “Your mom would’ve taken a photo of those same blue flowers.” At lunch, a bird sits on our table and we talk about how mom would scoot her plate over and say, “All our welcome here.”

Even memories about difficult times spill out easily. The towels for instance remind me of once when mom was up in the middle of the night. I retell the story to my dad.

Her wounds from the cancer were bleeding and I had gotten her to the shower and washed off and somewhat calmed down, but she was still out of breath and hurting and I didn’t think I could get her dressed and back to bed. I said, “Let’s lie down here for a few moments.”

I threw towels on the floor and brought pillows and a blanket from her bed and we lay facing each other on the bathroom tile.

She looked at me and said, “I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t have to take care of your mother.”

“You don’t have to be sorry, Mom. Remember how many times you stayed up with me when I had the stomach flu?”

“You were a lot smaller.”

“We need help at different times. That’s what family is for.”

“True.”

“I might need help again someday. You would help me if I was sick, right?”

There is a pause and then she says, “Well, I might decide to hire a nurse.”

My dad laughs and says, “She really said that?”

He knows she did. I told it to him after it happened and during other visits and I have even written about it before in a story he has read. But we tell it again. It is a reminder of my mother’s wit and strength. It is evidence of her essence, her Jane-ness, even with Alzheimer’s, even on one of her hardest nights. Mom still had a talent for one-liners that were both funny and true.

Jane, Ron, Laura 2017

One of the things I learned INELDA’s Doula School—and I learned so many things!–is how helpful it can be to retell the story after a death of a loved one. The story of the dying, and the time leading up to the death as well, particularly for those involved in caregiving.

I had already provided this opportunity to myself after experiencing a series of deaths in recent years. I wrote a book and began a blog. I held grief writing workshops. I went to death cafés. I made friends with people who wanted to share their losses too. I see now that I found and created places where it felt appropriate to share those stories.

Like many of us, I have been steeped in a culture where talking about death is at best awkward and at worst taboo. I have traces of my old worries. Am I grieving too long? Making too much of all this? Will I get stuck here?

But it does not feel that way. And I do not see it in my father either. Not talking about my mom would seem strange; sharing stories feels natural, a relief.

With each telling the angle of the light is different and I see things at the edges that I might have missed. In so doing, the ache lightens and the smiles grow. Telling stories seem to be a way forward that helps me connect past to present to something I don’t yet know.

More Resources

INELDA: International End-of-Life Doula Association

Many people are interested in the role of doula: what it is, whether they need one, whether they should become one. The INELDA introductory doula class answered those questions and outlined many tools for providing emotional and spiritual support for those who are dying and their families. The class was delivered online, the atmosphere was warm, inviting, and communal. I was moved by how many participants already dedicated their days to end-of-life work as chaplains, hospice nurses, and other heath-care professionals.

I’m sure I’ll include other things I learned in future posts. But, in short, I’d recommend INELDA’s training for anyone interested in learning ways of offering support to the dying and their families. The coursework involves deep reflection and active participation. Be prepared to dive into small group exercises on emotional topics such as planning your own death vigil or imagining you have a terminal illness and talking about a regret.

Doula certification from INELDA requires additional steps including hours of supervised practice and an exam. I plan to continue towards certification, but even if I was not, I would consider what I learned extremely valuable to me as a mortal being who loves other mortal beings.

You can find more information about the course, the role of a doula, and a list of doulas who are INELDA certified on the INELDA website.

Doorway into Light

After hearing about it for years, I finally drove to Haiku, a tiny town not far from Paia and visited the Doorway to Light, which is a storefront full of resources about death and dying. The center was founded by Ram Dass, Reverend Bodhi Be, and Leili Be.

And speaking of storytelling! My favorite experience at the center was when Reverend Michelle Renee, co-director at the center, suggested I select figurines from the shelf full of tiny characters to place in a sand tray. “Whatever ones you’re attracted to,” she said.

I quickly pulled a robin, some alphabet blocks, two lovebirds in a boat, a table with a rather table set for a festive tea.

Michelle and I sat in a little nook in the store below a sign that read “Grieving Allowed,” with the circular sand table between us. After I had set up character asked, “Will you tell me the story?”

This made me nervous. I hadn’t really been thinking about a story and was just trying to be a good sport. I worried I’d let her down, fail to have the cathartic experience that the sand table and grief nook clearly intended. But I figured, I could make something up.

“These are my parents in this boat,” I told Michelle. “One of the biggest gifts from my caregiving experience with my mom was seeing how in love my parents were after fifty-six years of marriage.” Well, that was all true, and Michelle was listening. “I knew they loved each other, but I learned in the months I lived with them that they were still truly in love. They had all these little special jokes! They delighted in each other!”

And suddenly Michelle and I were both getting teary.

By the end of my scene I had discovered who each of those people were at my tea party including the strong woman who decided to invite death to the party. “This is powerful medicine this sand toy thing,” I said.

“It sure is,” Michelle said, her eyes wide.

Doorway into Light has a humble storefront and a big mission. It aims, among other things, to transform our culture by transforming attitudes and relationships with aging dying and death. Also, to reclaim the care of the dying and the dead as village-building work and sacred service. Not to mention, to provide low-cost and free counseling, support and burial to those in need and insure that no one need die alone!

Bodhi also began an end-of-life doula Doula Training and a Certification program in 2017. It is now offered in partnership with The Esalen Institute. Certification requires additional hours of work in the field.

Psychosocial Aspects of Dying and Death (PSYC 211) at CWI

This fall, I am excited to be teaching a course at my old stomping ground in the fall, College of Western Idaho. This is a three credit course that has both in person and online required components. The in-person meeting is on Thursdays at 1:00-2:15 pm at the Ada County CWI campus off of Overland Road. The course number is PSYC 211-01H.

This class is appropriate for anyone interested in learning more about death and dying, and there are no prerequisites. You can find more information on how to enroll at the college website or feel free to reach out to me by email at Laura@laurastavoe.com.

Call for Photo Stories

Artifacts of Grief

The sand tray at Doorway into Light reminded me of a photo feature in The New York Times last month by Dani Blume and Jaspal Riyait: What Loss Looks Like. The editors asked readers to share photos of objects that remind the of those who died over the last year and created a digital memorial. The premise was that during that time where funerals and in-person memorials have been curtailed, people are looking for ways to share losses with their communities.

Objects seem especially potent. They offer tactile evidence of those we can no longer physically touch. I remember my husband John talking about how wearing his dad’s jacket made him feel a little like he was hugging his dad the winter after he died.

I’d love to create a similar memorial of objects that honor people we (readers of Tending to Endings) have lost. I’ll include the collection in next month’s post, and I of course will need your help! To participate, please send one photo of an object that helps you remember someone you have lost and a few sentences about the story to Laura@Laurastavoe.com. 

These can honor recent losses or someone who died many years ago, whomever you would like to remember in this way. 

Also, you don’t have to be a subscriber to send a photo. If you found your way to this blog and would like to remember someone with others, please join in. All are welcome here!

You may want to click on images in the Times article for ideas, and here is one I will contribute as an example:

Pat Lambert was a spiritual advisor and soul friend to me for many years before she died in 2015 from pancreatic cancer. This charm from a necklace is something I carry in my backpack wherever I travel. Pat was the kind of person who never forgot a friend’s birthday, and even though she lived on a modest income and had tons of friends, she gave me a thoughtful gift every year. The charm reminds me of her spiritual energy which was full of pure, natural joy.

I would love to have a photo from you. No need to format the text and no need for perfection!  I can help with editing and will send you out a link before the email goes out to make sure you like how it turns out. Our digital memorial will be less polished, more homespun than The NY Times version as I have little photo editing experience. But it will be made with care.

Send the sentences in an email and attach a photo in jpeg format to Laura@Laurastavoe.com. Feel free to reach out if you have questions. Please send your photo story by May 21.

You can read or leave comments on this post at laurastavoe.com. Thank you! 

Much love, Laura

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