Tending to Endings – 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

March 2, 2023March 4, 2023

Old Growth

Tending to Endings (seventy-one)

My Question for You: If your life has been impacted by Alzheimer’s, do you have a book or other resource that helped with some challenging aspect of the disease? Support groups, podcasts, memoirs, novels, films, anything really, that helps you or your loved ones on that journey? Please include a sentence or two about what you found helpful. You can share with the community here by putting it in the comments section, or send them to me at laura@laurastavoe.com.

I’ve recently picked up one of May Sarton’s journals, The House by the Sea (1979), and am reminded how, like the proverbial river, good literature is never the same story twice. The last time I read Sarton, I was probably in my twenties and she spoke to me about creativity and the writing life (she still does). But now, at age 58, I come upon this passage and am newly grateful:

“Growing old…what is the opposite of “growing”? I ask myself. “Withering” perhaps? It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it. But there is an opposite to growth which is regression, in psychoanalytic terms going back to infantile modes of being. And maybe growing old is accepting regression as part of the whole mysterious process. The child in the old person is a precious part of his being able to handle the slow imprisonment. As he is able to do less, he enjoys everything in the present, with childlike enjoyment. It is a saving grace, and I see it when Judy is with me here. (27)

Having learned much more about Alzheimer’s and dementia since the 1970s when Sarton was writing, I now know that the particular kind of childmind Sarton sees in Judy–who she lived with for many years earlier in her life–is illness rather than a universal symptom of aging. And yet, it is true, that everyone who lives long enough to die in old age, eventually experiences physical limitations of some sort and for one out of three they will include dementia.

Sarton’s focus on the word grow makes me aware of how I have often viewed aging as something to resist or fight and only give into as a last resort. Something to conceal. There is that exception, the woman described as aging gracefully! But to me that sounds a little like a pedestal for the person who ages without making anyone else uncomfortable! Honestly, it sounds a little lonely!

My son Gabe at Capiland Suspension Bridge Park in Canada

Growing takes an ecosystem, and for humans that means a community. This year I’m hoping to fold the topic of aging into the mix of Tending to Ending posts because I have lots of questions. What does it mean to face this inevitable transformation of our physical, emotional, and spiritual selves with clear eyes and curiosity rather than shame? Does denial of aging help us or hurt us, or both and in what ways? Are there a ways in which community and cultural connection could make this transition feel more supported and the idea of growth into old age be more possible?

In another entry, Sarton includes a passage from a letter she received from a friend, Eugenia, expressing grief over Judy’s decline:

“…always there, sensitive, receptive Judy. She was so wonderfully kind and accepting in those years of pain and mess. Death comes in installments but sometimes the first installments can be very steep, perhaps much more painful to those around them than to the person. I do cherish her so; can one maintain the image of love when so much is gone?”

Sarton responds,

I guess the answer to that question is, yes, because one has lived with someone for years, as I did with Judy, something quite intangible there, as though in the bloodstream, that no change in her changes. (45)

And I am right there with May Sarton, more than a quarter century after her own death. In the end stages of my mom’s illness after so much was lost, in quiet moments when I would draw close, there it was, that something “that no change in her changes.”

My mom, Jane, with her sister, Carol and my sister, Amy, February 2019

In chaplaincy school, one question I’ve been carrying is how we can stay in relationship with those whose very sense of self is shifting sometimes from day to day due to Alzheimer’s or some other form of progressive dementia? After years of meaning to read Pauline Boss’s work, I finally read Loving Someone with Dementia: How to Find Hope While Coping with Stress and Grief, and it speaks to that very question and is now at the top of my recommend list for anyone impacted by the complicated journey that is Alzheimer’s! It’s also an excellent resource for those who want to be helpful to friends who are caregivers. These words from the first chapter of the book rang true for me:

…it’s time for all of us to acknowledge, appreciate, and directly help caregivers—the ones down the street, the one in your congregation, the one in your family—because simply put, it takes a village. One person can’t do it alone and stay healthy. What often endangers the emotional and physical health of caregivers is their isolation. Unlike dementia, this problem can be fixed.

If you have a book or other resource that helped with some challenging aspect of the disease of Alzheimer’s or aging, I would love to hear about it. And if you’re willing to say a sentence or two about why it is helpful in the comment section below, And, as always you can send thoughts, ideas, questions, or suggestions to me at laura@laurastavoe.com.

Thank you for being here.

Love,

Laura

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December 24, 2022December 24, 2022

Shades of Alone

Tending to Endings (seventy)

This year John and I are spending the holiday season pretty much the same way we have since his surgery on October 1, hunkering down away from the various viruses that are out and about this season; his immune system is still drawn down to make his body more hospitable to the donor liver. Things are going well, and he will likely be able to stop many of the medications at the end of the month, but we don’t want to take unnecessary chances. For the holidays we plan to bundle up for walks with family members or connect over zoom.

While we look forward to the day when we can gather again, it feels like a festive holiday even with just the two of us. I even put up a tree, which is not something I do much now that the kids are grown. We are still basking in the afterglow of his having made it through a life-or-death story spectacularly well. He is even gearing up to (hopefully) play tennis in January!

We know we have a wide circle of friends and family who have kept abreast of our story and journeyed through much of this with us in spirit. All of this makes us feel less alone even though we don’t see many people and when we do, we are masked and six feet away, or outside in the cold walking briskly!

Thinking of all this during the holidays has reminded me of how some of my loneliest, most grief-filled days have been in December. The holidays didn’t cause the loneliness, but they certainly accentuated it, and this is true even though I don’t think I ever once was actually alone on Christmas.

There was the loneliness of the first Christmas without my grandma Bedingfield (1983). Throughout my childhood, Christmas morning was defined by going to my grandparents’ house for cowboy coffee cake and oranges halved (each topped with a maraschino cherry) and gifts opened one at a time from youngest to oldest grandchild. How could Christmas even occur without my grandma?

There were the first holidays post-divorce (1999) when Gabe and Dylan were preschoolers and their dad and I entered the era of scheduling two Christmases in two different houses, each marked by absence and filled and with heartache and grief. That one took a long while to transform into something new, and the shadow of it still rears its head from time to time.

Grandma Jean Bedingfield readying the Christmas bacon.

The loneliest of all, though, was in 1981. I was seventeen years old and had just returned home to Illinois after a failed attempt to move to Colorado for my senior year in high school to get residency so I could attend college in Boulder. Well, that was one way to tell the story. Another was that I moved to Colorado to outrun my drinking problem and the wreckage it was causing at school, at home, with friends, and even with myself. I was hoping for a reset, a new start in a new place with new people. A chance to do everything differently. Those familiar with addiction and recovery will not be surprised to hear that in Colorado my drinking and relationship problems only got worse.

That year, I sat with my parents and my two younger sisters, around the tree decorated with ornaments from our childhood. I opened a box from my mom that held a full-length puffy winter coat that I instantly hated because it emphasized how ugly and huge I was (I wasn’t ugly or huge). I am sure after Christmas I returned it the way I returned everything my mom gave me during those years.

What I felt was not the magic of Christmas or the love of my family, but shame and fear and loneliness so deep I couldn’t see a way out. I carried secrets, a tangled mess of my own risky behavior and sexual trauma from abuse and fear that I was pregnant (I wasn’t). I carried the terrifying knowledge that I couldn’t stop drinking even when I tried, even when the stakes were very high.

And, there was a deeper secret below all that. I didn’t see how stopping would help. Alcohol had been a solution for all my unsolvable problems: for anxiety, for an eating disorder, for a pervasive sense of self-loathing that used to come and go and now just stayed. Alcohol had stopped working; it no longer took away the pain. But where would I be without it?

I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone all of this on that morning. Certainly not my parents. I think back to that time now and wonder why. I knew intellectually that I was loved, even when I couldn’t feel my parents’ love. Was it fear of being controlled? Or of hurting them? Disappointing them? Maybe all of the above, though the last rings especially true. I also sensed that in the that telling, I would acknowledge the problem was real.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to start with telling those who loved me most, and I didn’t even have to start with everything. I called an acquaintance from high school who I heard had stopped drinking through a recovery program. On Christmas, he called me back and connected me with a group of people who were not at all baffled by the fact that I kept drinking even when I didn’t want to.

While 1981 may have been my loneliest Christmas, it also ended up being my first sober day, which is to say, it was also my best. It was the beginning of finding a new way of life and a community of friends and a sense of purpose and eventually a way to repair most of those damaged relationships. It led to a long string of sober days that continues today.

It might be tempting after all these years to view that time as a teenage stage that I was bound to outgrow. But overcoming addiction is no sure thing, even for a middle-class white kid in a home filled with Christmas lights and love. Alcohol poisoning, car accidents, suicide–all of them were quite possible. Not every teen makes it through such dangerous terrain. I never take it for granted that I have.

If you have been reading Tending to Endings for any length of time, you know I am all about sharing our stories. It is not because I think talking fixes everything. It doesn’t. But for me storytelling and storylistening with those who understand—whether it’s the experience of addiction, or what it’s like to share custody of kids, or the grief of losing a grandparent or a mom—is one way I find sturdier, more expansive ground for the next step.

There is a saying that has become popular in the recovery community in recent years: the opposite of addiction is connection. That seems right to me. Healing has meant connecting in an honest and imperfect way to people both inside and outside of recovery circles including my family. It has meant connecting to my own intuition and the natural world and a mysterious and creative thrum that is more than me, and also, me.

Jane, Dylan, Gabe, and Laura (who could use warmer coat!) circa 2000

And it has led me to find new meaning and purpose in old stories. Sometimes they can be helpful to others who are going through their first post-divorce holiday season or their first sober one or the tenth where there is a particular, empty chair at the table. And even my own stories change with time. When I think back to that huge, puffy, warm coat my mom gave me, all I see now is how much she loved me!

This year while John and I hibernate in the warmth of our most recent story, I am wishing you communion with all that brings you peace and meaning this season. Whether you are worried about someone, or joyously gathering, or sitting this one out, or grieving a hard loss, or some combination of all these things, I wish you connection to community that understands and to whatever inner voice sustains you.

I wish you peace, and I send you love,

Laura

More Resources

Al-anon Family Groups at al-anon.org

Alcoholics Anonymous at aa.org

Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988lifeline.org

Resources on loss and grief: https://grief.com

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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