Talking about Death – Laura Stavoe

April 23, 2023May 14, 2023

Recent Findings

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.

To Be a Healer, Interview with Vivek Murthy

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

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

November 19, 2022December 30, 2022

Where to Begin

Artwork on the wall of Intermountain Transplant Center in Murray, Utah

Tending to Endings (sixty-nine)

It was our second day in the little house in Salt Lake, where John and I moved to be close to the transplant center while waiting for John to hopefully be called in for a liver transplant. His MELD score would go up on September 29 due to his cancer diagnosis, making it far more likely that he would get called. Still, it would likely be a month or two, we were told, maybe longer.

We arrived with a trailer filled with our work stations, clothes for all seasons, the mattress from our own comfy bed, piles of books for my seminary coursework and a few extras just-in-case. We held out hope for making it home by the holidays, but it was a slim hope.

John and I were told to stay within an hour drive of the transplant center and to answer every call from every area code. I told friends that for me, the waiting was going to be the hardest part. Yes the months of testing and procedures to get John on the list were stressful and all-consuming, but at least I knew what to do. Now we were entering this unknown stage where a call could come at any moment or not at all. All there was to do while my husband’s life was on the line was wait.

And yes, to live while we were waiting, but even that was a strange task, uprooted as were were from our community and home and not certain of how long we would be in this unfamiliar place.

On the road; the view of the Wasatch Range from the backyard of the little house.

The second evening in Utah, just as I logged off Zoom where in my History of Modern Theology course we had been discussing Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schleiermacher — Is religion morality at its core, or is it, at its essence, a feeling, an experience of the Divine? — I heard John’s phone ring just outside and his hello. He had walked into the backyard of the little house, I would learn later, to snap a photo of the clouds over the mountains at sunset.

A pause and then, This is John, and there was something in his voice—hope? surprise? fear?—something that made me stand and head toward the door, thinking, Already?

When I opened the side door, John was right there about to come in. He pointed to the receiver, wide-eyed, nodding.

*John the day before transplant and the photo he took* of clouds at sunset, September 29, 2022

All that happened since that call is a story I will be writing for a long time. The very short version is that, as of October 1 at about 1:30 in the morning, John has a new-to-him liver and is cancer-free, cirrhosis-free, and very much alive.

John was released from the hospital four days after surgery, and we attended follow-up appointments at the transplant center twice weekly for the next three weeks, and then were told we could head home to Idaho. We happily hauled all those unworn winter clothes back to Boise on October 26.

John still gets blood draws each week and takes an array of medications each day, and we are back to pandemic level protocols during these first months while his immune system is knocked down to the ground floor. But, he is doing exceptionally well. At his latest appointment in Boise, Alyssa, the transplant P. A. said John was definitely an outlier based on how well he is accommodating the new (to him) liver and how fast he is healing. She also confirmed that he really does have to wait until at least January to play tennis so that his abdominal muscles fully heal.

For this event you get a new organ and a tee shirt; John ten days after transplant (Oct 11, 2022)

Transplant has profound physical, emotional, moral, and spiritual implications. I knew this going in, but now it is a more textured knowing. Ours is only one experience of many (there were ~9000 liver transplants in the U.S. last year), but it gave me a glimpse into a world I had not seen up close.

One of the reasons I haven’t come here to write all this down sooner is all that complexity. Also, I don’t even know where to begin to acknowledge the grace that showed up in seen and unseen ways, and it feels important to start there. John and I are grateful beyond measure for the help we have received from that first moment we learned that he had cancer in February, all the way to now. Grace that showed up as exceptional medical care and generous housing help and food on our porch and handwritten notes in the mail and heartfelt prayers and people caring for so many parts of our lives that we dropped to tend to this.

It will be a long time before I am able to sift through (and maybe write) about the many strands of this experience that make it whole. But there was a moment the night of the transplant that feels important to attempt to capture here in a blog I’ve been writing for almost three years now about endings.

We were in the hospital room and John was prepped for surgery, but we didn’t know yet whether he was going to get a liver that night. We knew the donor was out-of-state and was scheduled to be taken off life support at ten pm. Then there was a window of time for a number of events to occur that included waiting for a heart to stop beating and a liver to be flown back to Utah.

That night, while we waited to learn whether the surgery was truly a go, I though about the times I have been in that other room while a loved one was taken off life support. It had been twice now, with two dear friends, each too young to die, that a small group of us gathered close and did our best to love someone through the end part of her story in a strange hospital room, under heart-breaking circumstances.

And it came to me and I said to John, “No matter what happens with that liver, that other family is having a terrible night.”

“I’ve been thinking of them all day,” John said quietly. “Something that always get’s me is all the people I don’t even know working on my behalf.”

The place to begin of course is gratitude to the human who checked that box on their driver’s license application or wrote it into their advanced directive or told their spouse they wanted to be an organ donor. And then, to the circle of loved ones who did the very hard work of seeing that wish through.

That night in our room, John and I prayed, and wept, and talked a little but not much. Mostly we waited. We ate hospital jello and texted with our kids and eventually watched the latest episode of The Rings of Power on my laptop. After midnight, John was brought down to surgery.

*Back in Idaho in time for the first snow (November 4, 2022)*

I often know when I’m standing on the cusp of something big, but hardly ever how the story will go. I don’t know what will be the hardest part. Or the best. What will be sloughed off and what will be carried forward. What will be ending and what will be birthed or re-birthed or just plain borne.

But I always know, these days at least, that I am not alone.

With gratitude and love,

Laura

Feel free to comment below or send your thoughts or questions or ideas for future installments to laura@lstavoevoe.com.

If you would like to read future issues, please consider subscribing by leaving your name and email below. If you are interested in seeing my favorite end-of-life care resources, you can find them at Laura’s Library.

September 3, 2022September 5, 2022

The Long View

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.

Mom and I at Chicago Botanical Garden, 2016

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!

Laura Library

July 26, 2022July 26, 2022

Accompanied by Books

Tending to Endings (sixty-six)

As John and I continue on his transplant journey (which truly is still going about as good as a liver cancer odyssey can go), I find myself jotting down things I want to eventually write about here. I don’t finish as many projects during times of upheaval, but journaling about life’s complicated times helps me to understand my own thoughts and questions in the midst of it all. It also helps me to feel connected to others.

I will post more often again soon, and in the meantime, I want to share a few of the books (four nonfiction, three novels) I’ve read during the first half of this year. These include themes relevant to Tending to Endings, and they also contain a hard-to-describe quality that is key for me when my life feels upended. Some people want escape books during hard times (for that I have the Great British Baking Show!) what I want is an author who engages with the hugeness and complexity of living with intelligence and heart. During what has so far been a very strange year, these books have been conversation partners, teachers, honest friends.

Nonfiction

The Grieving Brain, By Mary-Frances O’Connor

People often ask me to recommend a book about grief. What they mean, I think, is something full of helpful advice. But the books that are generally most helpful to me are either deeper dives into the research or stories in the form of memoir or fiction. Self-help books have the tendency to make me want to look behind to curtain to see what has framed this author’s theory and experience on grief. I just don’t relax into them very often, the way some people do.

However, now I have a one I can recommend that kind of straddles all three of those categories (research, self-help, memoir)! Mary Frances O’Connor is a neuroscientist who is also a storyteller and clearly wants to be helpful. I learned much from her book that I think others will appreciate as well.

Her introduction describes the visceral experience of grief, and why it is disorienting as well as painful:

Losing our one-and-only overwhelms us, because we need our loved ones as much as we need food and water…Fortunately, the brain is good at solving problems. In fact, the brain exists for precisely this function. After decades of research, I realized that the brain devotes lots of effort to mapping where our loved ones are while they are alive, so that we can find them when we need them. And the brain often prefers habits and predictions over new information. But it struggles to learn new information that cannot be ignored, like the absence of our loved one. Grieving requires the difficult task of throwing out the map we have used to navigate our lives together with our loved one and transforming our relationship with this person who has died. Grieving, or learning to live a meaningful life without our loved one, is ultimately a type of learning. Because learning is something we do our whole lives, seeing grieving as a type of learning may make it feel more familiar and understandable and give us the patience to allow this remarkable process to unfold.

This (20 min) clip from Arizona Public Media will give you a taste of O’Connor’s voice and focus as well as some really useful information:

The Anthropocene Reviewed, by John Green

John and I listened to this series of essays on one of our many trips to and from Salt Lake City for medical tests and procedures this spring and both of us loved it. Green has a way of toggling between big philosophical questions and specific moments in life in ways that are insightful, poignant, and often funny. This three-minute clip will give you and idea of his style and tone.

You can also find versions of many of these essays as a podcast under the same name. I prefer the book version on audio because the essays are shaped into a more connected whole.

The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee

This book has been around a while, but I just finally read it. It helped me to see the landscape of the whole field of cancer and cancer research in a more three-dimensional way. It focuses on the people who have researched cancer and some of the political forces that have steered money and research in particular directions. It also gives insight into why cancer is a particularly difficult riddle to solve. The book is very readable, and while it gives no simple answers to cancer or anything else, I feel more prepared to join the conversation about treatment options because I have more understanding of the research and forces from which they arose.

This three minute video gives a brief introduction to both the book and the PBS series that followed:

Beauty, by John O’Donohue

If you have not read any John O’Donohue yet, I would recommend starting with Anam Cara which also discusses death (and many other stages of life) in ways that are insightful and true. If you already love John O’Dononue’s work, then I think you will appreciate this one. I’m including it here, because when I got to chapter on death, I immediately began writing down quotes, like this one that mirrors my own cultural experience and explains some of what prompted me to begin exploring the end-of-life field:

Where time is money no-one really wants to focus on that edge where time runs out on you. Our education system never really considers it; we have no pedagogy of death. Consequently, death is something we are left to deal with in the isolation of our own life and family. When death visits, there is no cultural webbing to lighten the blow. Death can have a clean strike because the space is clear. Against this background, it is not surprising that we are never told that one of the greatest days’ work we could ever do in the world is to help someone to die.

And in a section titled “Deathbed as Altar,” Donohue offers wisdom I wish I had available to me the first time I was with a friend during her last moments of life:

If you attend reverently and listen tenderly, you will be given the words that are needed. It is as if these words make a raft to carry the person over to the further shore. We should not allow ourselves to settle for being awkward and unsure around a deathbed. There is vital and beautiful work to be done there. When you realize that the dying person needs and depends on your words and presence, it takes the focus off your limitation and frees you to become a creative companion on that new journey. One of the most beautiful gifts you could ever give is the gift of helping someone die with dignity, graciousness and serenity.

On this homepage that honors John O’Donohue (who died in 2008), you can watch a short clip of the author speaking about connection to landscape and also find a link to a one-hour conversation from his interview with On Being‘s Krista Tippett.

Fiction

These novels are all share a similar structure of using multiple narrators to tell a story that traverses across time, geography, culture, and perspective. Loss and grief are central to each story in ways that beautiful and true and, for me, helpful.

The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich

As soon as I began reading this book, I wished I could share it with my mom I because she was the person who first recommended Erdrich’s writing to me and I knew she would get a kick out of the voice and the sense of humor. Also, it is a ghost story that takes place in an independent bookstore! The Sentence tackles tragic topics such as the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd with humility and honesty and attention to their emotional complexity and real consequences. The fact that all of this is accomplished in one book that is captivating and enjoyable to read is remarkable!

For those who want to visit with Louise Erdrich in her famous bookstore where some of this story is set, this (6 min) video is a gem!

Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr

I have long considered everything Anthony Doerr writes to be a poem as well a a beautiful example of whatever else it is–novel, short story, essay in Orion Magazine. This is because he writes to the essence of things and attends to language so elegantly that whatever he writes comes through as a beautiful whole. A work of art.

Still, I have to admit, I was a little skeptical as I listened to the first chapters of this weirdly titled book, wondering how in the world Anthony Doerr was going to pull this one together! There are so many intricate parts that were interesting in themselves, but that span centuries and geographies and imaginations. I began to worry that maybe this time he was trying to be a little too fancy. Should this be a few different books?

About one-third of the way through, I saw it. And, I went back to the beginning and completely enjoyed re listening, this time noticing all those breadcrumbs leading me to the heart of the story.

In this interview, in addition to learning more about the Cloud Cuckoo Land and Doerr’s process of writing it, you’ll see lots of footage of beautiful, McCall, Idaho which served as inspiration for one of the book’s settings. It also made me laugh that Doerr had a similar feeling I did part way into writing the novel (This is never going to work!)

This story is about all the things I worry about and care about and love. So far, this is my favorite book I’ve read in 2022, and probably in quite a long time. It is a novel that is also a poem. I hope you’ll read it.

The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak

In this four-minute video, Elif Shafak reads a passage from the book that is written from the point-of-view of a fig tree. There are many stories, storytellers and themes contained in this book. It is about immigrating and war crimes and family and loss of a parent and loss of a child and brutality and bullying and being between two or three different cultures. It is about ancestors and politics and young love and old love. And, it is about a fig tree with an amazing story to tell.

What books have accompanied you through hard times? I’d love to read about the stories that have befriended you! Feel free to leave titles and a bit about why they were helpful to you in the comments section. Or, you are always welcome to email me at laura@laurastavoe.com.

If you would like to receive Tending to Endings by email as soon as it publishes, please leave your name and email below. Tending to Endings aims to build community and conversation around end-of-life matters.

Thank you for being here,

Laura

May 22, 2022May 23, 2022

Retracing Steps

Tending to Endings (sixty-five)

In my last post, I wrote about learning my husband has liver cancer, and so it seems only fair to begin with a brief update on our medical journey. Many of my readers know John and while I also have a Caring Bridge site set up for those who know John or want to follow to learn more, this will give an overview which leads into this post’s topic.

John and I have spent much of the past three months going through the very complicated preparation for him to be approved for a liver transplant. It has involved four trips to Murray, Utah (five hours from Boise) dozens of medical tests and interviews, and five outpatient surgeries. I will write more about this someday when I am not so tired from having just lived it, but it is a relief and a joy to report that John has been approved for transplant by the team and our insurance. He is officially on the list.

Because cancer affects the liver differently than some of the other reasons for transplant (It’s complicated, and not all bad for us that they do it this way) there is a six-month waiting period before John will be moved up to a priority spot where he is likely to receive a liver. That will be October 1, and therefore, we plan to move (temporarily) to the Salt Lake City area to await transplant at that time. We of course don’t know how long we will be there, but from what we have learned so far, we expect it to be between two and six months, including wait time and recovery.

In the meantime, John is doing well. The tumor has been zapped by microwave ablation and is now an empty crater and moon dust (not the technical term). He still feels no symptoms from the cancer or cirrhosis. He is playing tennis at least four times a week, and working from home part time as he was before all of this. We are both feeling very grateful to have made it through the transplant prep process and for all the love and support we have received from so many.

John on one of our walks between medical tests in Murray, Utah. March 2022.

I was talking to my friends about how sometimes I function better in the intense time of a crises than after the worst of the danger has passed. Like the stories (maybe urban myths) of people who receive super-human strength when they need to lift a car to save someone’s life. For three months the priority in our life was very clear and I was very focused. Now that John’s prognosis looks good and we have some room to move about, my decision-making skills have unspooled. Do I go for a walk or finish my ethics paper or catch up on laundry? Do we go camping or to visit friends or have the kids over? I have about eight books by my nightstand, and three on audible and I am likely to switch from one to another mid paragraph. Seriously, one reason I haven’t written here in awhile is each time I start an essay I can’t decide what it is about.

And what is it that I’m doing with my life again? How did I get to be a person writing about death and going to chaplaincy school and using the term end-of-life in regular conversation? And there are so many threads to this life project that may or may not turn into vocation. Do I work on my book, my blog, or my research paper? Do I make a plan to get back to hospice volunteering first or teaching. I’m keenly aware that time and energy are limited resources and so these decisions feel weighty.

Deep down I know myself well enough to realize this is grief and it will pass. So many things are put on hold or slip away when cancer becomes the story. I am both grateful things are going well and very sad that my love has a life threatening illness. People respond to grief differently and for some reason one of my biggest symptoms is difficulty making decisions.

Yesterday, during my morning meditation, something I read made me think, rather than trying to figure where I am going, maybe I should retrace my steps.

This brought me back to a moment in my kitchen when I did know what I wanted to do next and began moving towards the end-of-life field. The full arc of the story, of course, is longer than one moment, a series of deaths of women I was close to in a few short years. The moment of decision that comes to mind, though, was when I was sitting alone at my new kitchen that John had remodeled it to bring in more light; I had just returned home after six months living the confusing, beautiful, excruciating journey of my mom’s decline, and her leaving. I felt like I had visited terrain I had been unaware even existed. I could’ve used a guide, I thought, some preparation, a few anecdotes from those more familiar with the landscape.

When I imagine where this place is, Alaska comes to mind—or what I imagine Alaska to be as I’ve never been there, either. I envision land steeped in ruggedness, days so long they are surreal, nights that never end. I envision weather that changes without notice and beauty dangerous enough to require guidance to enjoy. Or even to survive.

Only, this place that I had now visited three times was somewhere we are all destined for. For most of my life I was okay not thinking about that very much. And then I stood next to the bed as Susan and then Ellen and then my Mom crossed that rugged, strange terrain and death got my attention.

That day in the kitchen I had some vague notion of eventually providing a space for resources and workshops and community. I’m still unclear. There are practical and emotional and spiritual questions surrounding death—all of which seem to overlap on top of one another during times of crises and loss. There are a thousand small decisions and a few big ones and you have no idea which ones you’ll get until they start to glimmer into view. It seems we could help each other with that but it would require acknowledging that someday we will die.

I am from a family of passionate readers. When I was a child, my grandparents read to all the grandchildren regularly and its one of my fondest memories of time with them. I can still hear the unique cadence of each of their voices as they read. My grandma died when I was a teenager, but my Grandpa Vic lived until I was in my thirties, and we often traded book titles and talked about writing and literature over the phone or through letters. When he died of cancer, I was in the middle of reading Stegner’s Angle of Repose and I so wanted to be able to send him a copy. That is what death is, I thought. It’s not being able to read the next book no matter how good it is.

And as I write all this down I suspect that the other reason I can’t decide what to read or where to camp or what I want this post to be about is because with mortality so vividly on the horizon, I want to read and write and live all of it. And I want to do so meaningfully. And deeply. Which of course is an impossible order, but also casts this indecisiveness in new light. There are worse problems to have during a difficult time than to want to be fully alive.

This retracing of steps did not divine my future or even clarify which project I should start next. But it reminded me that this journey I am on started from a place of desire–to be helpful yes–but also because for some reason, I’m really interested in in Alaska.

More Resources

This month I listened to two audio books recommended by friends. The first is Ann Patchett’s Precious Days which is beautiful and honest and includes a number of essays about loss and mortality and love. Her writing reminds me that one of the reasons we need more stories about end-of-life is that people are different in how they experience similar events. There are plenty of places I identified with Patchett, and then others where I am reminded of how different we all are, too, and how a talented, honest writer can help me see and understand a wider emotional range. This makes me feel more empathetic, but also more connected. It is such a generous book.

And then, interestingly, the day after I finished Patchett’s essays someone else recommended What We Wish Were True: Reflections on Nurturing Life and Facing Death by Tallu Schuyler Quinn. Quinn also lived in Nashville, and Patchett’s bookstore hosted an event for her family and her book just last month. What We Wish Were True is a gorgeous love letter that Quinn wrote after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis at age 40. I have to remind myself to breathe while I’m listening; it is exquisitely beautiful and painful in turns, and it is full of wisdom. There is so much more I want to say about this book so I will likely dedicate a Tending to Endings post to it in the future.

Thank you for being here,

Laura

Tending to Endings aims to build community and conversation around end-of-life matters. If you would like to receive Tending to Endings each time I post, please leave your name and email below.