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.
In preparation for classes at United Theological Seminary (UTS) next week, I received a list of questions to ponder before orientation. One read, “If you came with a warning label, what would it be?”
Which brought to mind a memory from my grade school years of standing on the slippery tiles at the base of the high dive at Kopp Pool in Des Plaines, Illinois. My friend Amy Ayers is next to me and she says with a sigh, “Laura, do you always have to be so deep? Can’t we just have fun?”
I don’t know what I said to garner that response, but given my intense fears about high dives and what others thought of me, my guess is that I was trying to make a philosophical case for why getting out of line for the three-meter board was actually the brave thing to do.
Even at age ten I warranted a label: Ill-equipped for small talk.
My making it to middle-aged as a relatively happy person has involved some combination of acceptance and balance and having good friends who can make me laugh. And when I think of that day on the pool deck in the context of my current work–writing Tending to Endings and volunteering for hospice and beginning a chaplaincy program–I do laugh.
Not everyone wants to address the meaning of life in every conversation, but I seem to have found places where it is the natural thing to do!
This month I return to College of Western Idaho to teach in the Social Studies Department, I start graduate school for the first time since the 1980s, and I begin hospice visits as a volunteer at St. Luke’s Hospice. For someone who writes about endings, I’m immersed in a whole lot of beginnings!
In preparing for this new work, I’ve come across so many things I want to share here. I’ll start with three finds that have been particularly helpful.
This American Life: In Defense of Ignorance
As I’ve prepared my CWI course, “Psychosocial Aspects of Death and Dying,” a friend reminded me of Lulu Wang’s story which first ran on This American Life in an episode called What You Don’t Know (30 min).
Wang is troubled by her family’s elaborate plan to keep a cancer diagnosis secret from her grandmother (the person with the cancer). Family members fake medical test results and quickly plan a wedding so that family members have a reason to travel to China to see Nainai (Wang’s name for her grandma).
In this short passage Wang explains how her aunt (named Little Nainai) justifies the secrecy:
Little Nainai told the doctor that Nainai is too old, that she couldn’t handle a blow like this. It’s not just that Little Nainai didn’t want to upset her sister with the news of her death. She actually believed that not telling her was a way to prolong her life. Knowing Nainai’s personality, Little Nainai worried that her sister would get overwhelmed with fear and depression. She’d stop eating. She’d stop sleeping. She’d lose interest in life. The Chinese believe that mental and emotional health are completely linked to physical health.
Mom with her sister, Carol and my sister, Amy.
The story reminds me how many factors influence how we think and feel and act about death: culture and generation and geography and personality and particular circumstances. And the part that resonated most with me was how even values that I considered foundational and clear looked different amidst the particulars of my mother’s illness.
If you asked me whether you should tell someone of their own terminal diagnosis I would say of course!
But when my mom was given a cancer diagnosis while she was also in the grips of Alzheimer’s, things didn’t feel as clear. Mom was in the room when the doctor explained that her cancer was not curable, so she heard it. But by the time we made it to the parking garage of the hospital, the information was foggy and by the next day, she had forgotten it completely. And it wasn’t just memory, but also her ability to process and cope with the information of her condition–both the Alzheimer’s and the cancer–was different on different days.
Before this I knew honesty and directness weren’t always easy, but now I didn’t even know if they were the right path. Do I keep reintroducing painful information when Mom would have to go through the pain of processing it again, and again, and again? What about when she asks why she is hurting? Do I tell her then? What about when she becomes more agitated after I tell her? Do I do something different next time? How important is it at any given moment that my mom understands she is nearing the end of her life?
I was never fully able to reconcile those questions in a way that was satisfying to me. Mostly, I bumbled my way through, doing the best I could to give my mom the information she seemed to want to know when she asked.
Towards the end, I sensed that at some level below the Alzheimer’s, my mom knew and made peace with her own leaving. But this was not a knowing that had anything to do with talking it through. Instead I felt it in the changed cadence of her breath, her relaxed brow, the way the corners of her mouth turned toward laughter in her particular Jane way. It wasn’t because I said the right thing, but it happened, and for that I am grateful.
Call to Care
I’m reading The Call to Care: Essays by Unitarian Universalist Chaplains edited by Rev. Karen Hutt (who is also our Vice President of Formation and Vocation at UTS!), and I could easily pull quotes from any of the essays, which tend to take on the very questions I have about the role of chaplaincy. But this passage from Nathan Mesnikoff’s “Lost (and found) in Translation,” has stayed with me:
Philosophers and theologians have debated for ages what knowledge we can have of the world, let alone for the complexities of another’s heart and mind. There is always a gap. Indeed, one of the first things we are taught [as chaplains] is never to say, “I know how you feel.” I don’t know how you feel, or how you understand death or God. I don’t know what this particular moment of suffering, which you happen to be present for, means to you in the context of your life and faith.
So I reach out across that gap and do three main things. First I bear witness through unflinching presence. I don’t turn away from your suffering, remorse, guilt, or anger. Second, I ask what this experience means to you. Where does this episode fit in the narrative of your life? Third, I try to help you connect with sources of strength and hope, whatever they may be: organized religion, disorganized religion, hiking, schnauzers, grandkids, whatever. Many people have no one who can effectively do these three things, these acts of human love and compassion.
One of the things I loved most about this quote is it named things I can practice in my relationships today that don’t require any special degree or certificate. They require a deep breath, maybe, a little courage, a willingness to be present with another in the face of uncertainty and pain and the things we cannot fix. Given how much is going on in the world and in the lives those I know, it’s good to have a place to start.
Heart & Soul: St. Luke’s Home Care and Hospice
Writing has long been my creative outlet, but so often words fall short. The above article in Heart & Soul: A Newsletter for St. Luke’s Home Care and Hospice Volunteers, reminds me there are other options.
After years of service in the downtown St. Luke’s hospital, Barbara Beck began sewing memory bears for hospice patients and their families in 2005. Since then, she has sewed over 1000 bears. Suddenly, I wish I knew how to sew! What are words when you could have a bear made from the soft garments worn by loved ones?
Many hospice providers have programming around the arts. Volunteers sing in traveling choral groups. High school students interview elders about their favorite music and bring iPods with special playlists. People gather to create prayer shawls or quilts or memory boxes. And of course there is a long tradition of friends and family bringing comfort food to the porch.
I currently am not practiced in any art form other than writing, but I would love to have an alternative for those times when there truly are no words. I don’t think I have enough time left on earth to master the sewing skills necessary for bear making, but it is a goal of mine in the next year to explore some other small (imperfect) offering I could create that doesn’t rely on sentences. I’ll let you know how it goes!
It means a lot to me that so many of you keep returning here! Please feel free leave comments or add your own resource suggestions below. You can also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com. If you would like to subscribe leave your name and email below, and you will receive Tending to Endings on the first Friday of every month.
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!
My mom’s last clear words were, “You know, we’ll probably need to laugh about this.” She said them days before she died, when she was no longer eating or drinking. When the most we usually got was a wince for pain, or a puckering of lips when she wanted us to come in close for a kiss.
That morning, upon awakening, she noted our dismay at the state of things—her wound, the need to turn her to relieve bedsores, our pain at seeing her pain when we did. The words sounded exactly like what my mom would’ve said pre-Alzheimer’s, pre-cancer, pre-dying. They were a balm for my despair. Mom was still herself.
Mom never ever forgot that life for all its sacredness was also very funny and she worked hard to not let me forget it either. My tendency to be sensitive and serious–or as she would say it, to feel things very deeply–was what she liked best and least about my personality.
When I was young, and my sister Sandy (two years younger) was being difficult, she would tell her to go play out in the middle of Highway 83. Sandy, would grin, eyes sparkling. And I would burst into tears because my mom never told me to play in the middle of Highway 83, which I took as evidence that they had a special something.
Mom, Amy, Sandy, 1973
When my mom would recount this story later, she said, “I couldn’t say that to you because you would’ve gone and done it!”
Sometimes when I think of the writing I do about my mom and how she would feel about it, I think she would remind me to include more funny parts.
I am better at laughing at myself and at life than I was as a child, but it has taken a village to get me there, a village led by my mother.
This was true even throughout her illness. When we were caregiving, and she would notice my father or sisters or I getting serious and sad, she would emerge with some quip. Part of this may have been distraction from pain. But, more than that it seemed she was saying, hey, it’s me. I’m here!. My mom was never one for melodrama, and I suspect our moments of intense emotion made her feel a little lonely.
Ron and Jane, January 2019
On the morning my mom died, we called our hospice nurse, Noelle. She came and helped us bathe my mom one more time. It was an unexpected task that felt emotional and sacred. Also, I am a kinesthetic learner, and it was good for me to have something physical to do, something that held me there in the room while the fact of my mother’s death caught up with me.
Afterwards when we had mom dressed in a silky blue top and the shorts she liked to wear, and covered her in a prayer shawl Amy brought, Noelle said she would call the mortuary and we could either have Mom’s body picked up right away or we could spend some time with her. Amy and Dad and I kind of looked at each other. It was one of those moments where we weren’t sure what we were supposed to want, much less what we did want. Did we want more time with my mom’s body?
And then my dad looked at the clock and saw it was 9:30. And the three of us remembered, the dishwasher installer was coming sometime between 10 and noon.
“Let’s wait a bit,” my dad said, “I need to figure out what to do about the dishwasher delivery.”
I wished my dad didn’t actually named the reason. It seemed wrong to have a decision about my mother’s dead body hinge on an appliance repair schedule. But, Noelle had been our hospice nurse for five months now, and she knew and accepted us with all our quirks. Also, she was aware our mom and wife had just died, so we might not make much sense.
Before Noelle left to visit her next patient, she told us to turn the air conditioner on high. She said she would never ever forget my mother, and I could tell she meant it. She hugged each of us.
February 2019. Photo credit Carol Buick
At first my dad and Amy and I decided since it was likely on its way, it would be simplest to just close the bedroom door and wait for the dishwasher. We knew how hard it was to get things scheduled in Maui, and admittedly, we were tired of doing dishes by hand. Given all the care my mom needed, it had been the least of our worries, but now, was it wrong to want one thing to be easier?
Amy, as though reading my mind, said, “Mom would definitely want us to have a working dishwasher.”
But as soon as I went to pull the bedroom door closed, the whole thing felt wrong. Like I was hiding something. (Maybe even a dead body!) Like the incongruity between having something as mundane as a dishwasher installation in one room while my mom’s body was in the other might make me explode. Would I even be able to keep the secret? Or would I burst like some character out of a story by Edgar Allen Poe?
I returned to my dad and said, “Maybe we should track this guy down and see if he can come this afternoon?”
My dad was even more bereft than I and thus open to suggestion. He called to get the number of the driver and left a vague message about a death in the family (not specifying the death was in our condo). He said, “I know it’s probably already on the truck, so maybe come right away or late this afternoon?”
“Should I call the mortuary?” I asked.
“Let’s give them a couple minutes to respond,” my dad said, setting down his phone, staring out to the sea.
I made phone calls to family members and found myself compulsively explaining to my Aunt Gail the complication of the dishwasher delivery being scheduled at the same time as the mortuary pick-up.
Gail, a nurse, is good in a crisis. “I don’t want to be bossy, Laura,” she said with a small laugh, “But cancel the dishwasher.”
“I know,” I said, making a firm commitment to myself to do so as soon as I was off the phone. Who cares if we ever have a dishwasher? My mom was dead.
Then the doorbell rang and its seven tolls echoed throughout the condo. “Well, hello! You’re here, come on in!” my dad said in his cheery midwestern voice, as if this was any old day.
And then a man wearing a Blazing Saddles baseball cap introduced himself as Rocky, and made his way towards the kitchen followed by a quieter, skinny man rolling a dolly with the giant box containing, I assumed, our new dishwasher.
I leaned the guest bedroom door closed and crept to the very back corner of the room hoping my aunt didn’t hear and wouldn’t judge us for not immediately cancelling the dishwasher delivery the moment my mother died.
After my conversation with Gail, I made calls from the lanai, where I could compete with the sound of the surf rather than the sounds of the old dishwasher being extracted.
I called my aunt Carol who had been in Maui helping to care for Mom the month before. We were both teary and somehow unbelieving of the news we had known was coming for months. While we talked, my eyes were trained on the water the way they always are in Maui, and I told Carol when a sea turtle swam to the edge of the coral reef in the water below.
“A good sign,” I said.
Then two men walked from the beach up to the seawall and as one stepped up the stairs, I saw the other reach for him to turn him around. At first I thought an argument, and then the reacher dropped down on one knee in the sand, extended a hand with a small (not-a-dishwasher) box.
I narrated all of this for Carol.
“Your mama is loving all this life happening,” she said.
I turned around to the bedroom to my mom’s body on he other side of the glass slider. Saw her chest not rising or falling with breath. Saw her not laughing or wincing or wondering or talking, not thinking, not breathing.
Carol and Jane, 2017
I said goodbye to Carol and slid open the glass door and went to sit with my mom. Or rather, I sat in the room where my mom’s body was and where I looked from pastel corner to corner and then out at the blue water and then asked, Where are you?
I talked to her wherever she was. We laughed about how my dad was playing host, probably offering the worker guys iced tea. I told her my sisters and I would make sure my dad was ok. I sat and breathed next to her not breathing body.
Then I went back out into the living room to be with Amy who had also finished her calls. Rocky was swearing and then grumbling in the kitchen. Finally he announced to my dad, “This opening is not made to specs.” In other words, the new dishwasher—guaranteed to fit —did not fit.
Amy looked to me and we sank lower onto the couch laughing quietly shaking our heads at the strangeness of it all.
“You know this is Mom,” Amy said. “She really didn’t want us to be sad!”
Me, Mom, Sandy circa 1969
Eventually Rocky and his partner wheeled the old dishwasher out of our condo. It had taken some dismantling of tile work, but the new dishwasher was humming quietly, its red signal light on.
I called the mortuary.
My dad went to the bedroom to sit next to his wife. Or rather, to sit one more time next to the body of the wife he lived with and slept next to and laughed with for fifty-six years.
Mom would’ve liked that the reason we kept her body close to us longer, was not because we couldn’t bear to let it go, but rather, because we couldn’t bear to do dishes by hand one more day. That is how she would have told the story, preferring that detail even more than the sea turtle or the marriage proposal on the sand.
Maybe this is one of the things my mom and I did for one another in our longstanding love. I eventually learned to laugh at myself, and she made space for more deep feels, and we each reaped the benefit of wider vision, a better story, a fuller life.
More Resources
Last weekend I facilitated a workshop on writing about grief and a woman in our group told us about a podcast I had not heard of calledGriefcast. Each week, the host, Cariad Lloyd, talks with a different comedian about someone that person has lost. The conversations are honest and often sad, but also of course, they are people who have a talent for seeing the humor in everything. As Cariad says in the introduction, “It’s bleak, but you’ll laugh too.”
My next writing workshop, Beyond the Obituary: Writing End-of-Life Stories is schedule for Saturday, March 6, 10 am-1 pm. The workshop is free and is offered with support from Idaho Humanities Council. Donations to the McCall Arts and Humanities Council are welcome.
That writing workshop is also part of McCall’s Cabin Fever Series: Conversations on Aging and Dying which includes workshops and panels on a variety of topics including grief, end-of-life planning, and caregiving. All events are online and participants do not need to live in McCall to join.
Thank you for reading Tending to Endings. I would love to have you as a subscriber! Leave your name and email below, and Tending to Endings will arrive in your inbox on the first Friday of every month. Thank you!
I am incredibly grateful for all who have joined me this year for what I initially called a gentle expedition. End-of-life is not the topic I ever saw myself writing about in the past. Sure, the idea of death has come into my mind often enough. I am a ponderer. However, most often, thoughts of death arrived as a fleeting fears that I tried to contain or make sense of or explain away. Most of all, I tried to avoid them.
As a child, I was even afraid of words associated with death. There was a road sign near my house marking a Dead End, and when alone, I always pedaled faster past it. I was concerned to attend what my mom called a wake (did the dead person ever wake up?). The word cremated seemed especially icky, and the concept utterly terrifying. I found funeral homes unsettling and strange, all the windowless rooms and thick upholstery; the shiny wood coffins lined in satin brought to mind images of vampires. Cemeteries were places to visit on Halloween and only if you were very brave.
I was a child who was easily frightened for sure, but going through this list, I also notice how often our cultural representations of death are paired with images of horror and fear.
Even as I got older, I rarely attended funerals or memorial services, and when I did it was because I felt obligated. They were something to get through. I didn’t know what to say to people I was close to who had lost someone. I didn’t know how to grieve when someone I knew and loved died. Often my experience of grief felt solitary.
Throughout my life I have written about my obsessions which went, in rough chronological order: swim team; boys; nonviolent activism; pregnancy, birth, and motherhood; wild rivers and wild places. I was not interested in the actuality of death, and for the first fifty years of my life, I had the luxury of not being faced with it too terribly often.
Then, within a four year stretch, I experienced four deaths of women who I was very close to: Pat Lambert (November 13, 1933 – February 2, 2015), Susan Gardner (March 25, 1959 -July 17, 2016), Ellen Erksine (November 6, 1952 – July 19, 2016), and Jane Stavoe (August 28, 1939 – April 9-2019).
Pat at her 80th birthday party; Susan holding a future sled dog; Ellen on game day.
I was present for the deaths of three of those women. Susan and Ellen each died unexpectedly and within two days of each other, one in Portland the other in Boise, and I somehow made the seven-hour drive along the Columbia and over the Blue Mountains to the bedside of each in time. I saw the body of each of my friends go from inhabited and alive to uninhabited and dead.
A couple years later, I accompanied my mom up to that same door. The whole time my mom was on home hospice care, I was aware of what a gift it was that this was not the first time I had attended a death. I had far less anxiety about what might happen which made it possible for me to just be with my mom.
Mom and I in Maui, January 2019
On Sunday the New York Times ran two different stories about the physicality of death. “The Movement to Bring Death Closer: America’s Home Funeral Guides Want Us to Be Less Afraid and More in Touch with Death,” is a feature by Maggie Jones that I listened to on The Daily’s Sunday Read, but is also available in print. “What is Death?: How the Pandemic is Changing our Understanding of Mortality,” is an opinion piece by BJ Miller, a hospice and palliative care physician. I found them both compelling and Jones’s feature on home funeral guides particularly rich in story and resources.
Jones writes of home funeral guides,
Their goal isn’t to persuade every family to have a multiday vigil; it’s to support them as they choose the kind of goodbye they want. For some families, that’s as simple as asking a funeral home to wait several hours before picking up the body.
We didn’t have a home funeral guide when my mom died, but we did have a knowledgable and experienced hospice team who were able to suggest things that made a big difference.
I think there was a time when I would have said I don’t need to see my mom when she’s dead because I want to remember her when she’s alive. I certainly would not have known ahead of time that I wanted to help care for her body, but when our nurse Noel asked if my sister and I wanted to help bathe and dress her, we both very much did.
Even after Noel left, we waited a few hours before calling the mortuary. While I felt deep sadness, and the utter stillness of Mom’s body was profound, I was not frightened. In some ways my mom looked more like she did when she was well, free from the confusion of Alzheimer’s and the pain she had lived with for so long. And between the time of death and when the two young attendants came from the mortuary, stopping at the foot of her bed to bow their heads before lifting her, I had gone to be by her side many times. The memories I have of those hours we spent with my mom’s body are quite comforting to me now.
Mom and I in New York, 2012
In each of these cases, with my mom, and with Susan and with Ellen, I was not trying to be near mortality, but rather, be near my loved one, which is probably how most of us are eventually tricked into sidling up to death when we finally do.
And Pat’s death, too, which was the first of the four and the one I experienced from a distance, taught me a great deal. When I first learned Pat was in the hospital with pancreatic cancer, I hesitated rather than heading to the hospital with some of my friends. By the next day, Pat was not up for my visit, and when I called later, she didn’t feel well enough to talk. Pat died less than a week after her diagnosis, and I never had the chance to say goodbye. This still brings a lump to my throat.
Pat Lambert’s memorial rock on the Boise River.
After I returned to Boise after my mom’s Celebration of Life in the spring of 2019, I listened to a replay of an On Being interview with Joanna Macy, A Wild Love for the World. Macy was talking about climate change, and the idea that so many people don’t want to think about all of the ecological chaos right now because of how painful it is and how little we can do to stop it. She brings up the double-edged sword of this, and paraphrasing, she says, if your mother is sick and dying of cancer you may hesitate to go into her room because you don’t want to see her illness that you can’t cure. But you go because you love her, and she is your mother.
Macy continues, “…there’s absolutely no excuse for making our passionate love for our world dependent on what we think of its degree of health, or whether we think it is going to go on forever. This moment, you’re alive.”
Being with loved ones at the end of their life has changed my perspective on death. Instead of wanting to pedal faster, I want time, when it is offered, to say goodbye, to help where I can. I want to sit with the fact of it.
During my trip to Maui this month, I looked out at the ocean often and thought how a whole ecosystem exists beneath the waves. A world unaware of pandemics or the election season or me. A world, teeming with life. I am humbled by the face of death. I want to pause and take it all in, knowing there is so much life in the end.
Looking Ahead
I am tempted to share ideas I plan to write about for Tending to Endings in 2021, but then I remember how I thought this year I would be writing from the field–volunteering at hospice centers and visiting mortuaries and nursing homes! It was not a good year for field work, but it was an excellent year for reading and research and reflection and writing about questions big and small. Thank you for staying with me!
Recently I have received three part-time teaching opportunities related to death and dying which was unexpected and wonderful. Teaching has always been my favorite way to learn, and I’m sure it will add to what I will have to share here. I will let you know when I have more information about those courses (two are workshops and one is a full semester class) as well as the family memoir class I will offer online.
Tending to Endings will continue to be cost free and ad free in 2021. Please consider subscribing.
