Tending to Endings

Tending to Endings (twenty-four)

In November of 2016 I visited my Mom and Dad in Maui. One evening I asked them if I could read a letter:

In recent years, I’ve become more aware of how some of my actions in the past were hurtful. You have always been so generous and loving to me that it didn’t even register how unthinking I was sometimes, even well into my adulthood.

When I pull that letter up from my computer now, I have a number of responses to the timing. One is that I can’t believe it took me so long to see how some of my actions affected my parents. The things I wrote about in the letter were more than fifteen years old in 2016. They weren’t secrets to them or me, I just had not discussed them directly.

Secondly, I am struck by the timing because any further hesitation and I would’ve been too late. My mom’s cognitive abilities were declining, something that happened slowly at first, but accelerated after her second cancer surgery. Had I waited even one more year, my mom would not have been able to receive the information without it causing confusion and probably distress.

Life prompted me to do this work. My summer had been marked by loss. My friends Susan and Ellen had each died unexpectedly in July, Susan of a brain aneurysm and Ellen a two days later of an infection. These deaths of friends who were near my age and who I was very close to brought my own mortality into focus. They also gave me insight into particulars of death related to relationships.

For example, Susan’s husband and daughter were incredibly welcoming to friends and colleagues and extended family when Susan was in a hospital on life support. The time there was very difficult because we were losing Susan, but I also witnessed an ease in the relationships among those who came to help help and to express their love and to say goodbye. When Susan was removed from life support, she was surrounded by friends, colleagues, step-children, her daughter and son-in-law, her husband, and her ex-husband, Katie’s father.

Susan and I had been friends for many years, and I knew what I was witnessing was a result of her commitment to the work of nurturing and mending relationships. Even the medical staff commented on how rare it was to have so many caring people lending support.

Susan had lost her own mother to cancer when she was in her twenties. And in that hospital room in Portland, I knew that the single most important thing to Susan that day and going forward would be that Katie had her dad by her side and a circle of strong support around her.

This experience prompted me to take stock in a more deliberate way. What I needed to tell my parents was that the distance I had put between us during hard times in my life was never because of them but because of me. For much of my young adult life, I made a habit of pulling up stakes and starting something new whenever things got too painful. I would leave jobs, relationships, whole states behind and then throw all of my attention into something new.

I would talk to my parents about these changes after everything was back together again, and I felt on stable ground. Or, on those occasions when things were so bad that I needed their help, something they always graciously and lovingly provided. This pattern continued until 1999 when I was going through a second divorce at the age of 34.

I had many relationships to mend after that and a lot of work to do. Certainly in the fifteen years between that time and my amends, my relationship with my parents had already grown much closer due to those changes. 

Still, I had never directly acknowledged how the distance I created hurt them. My mom had made a practice of never guilting us about anything, and it was fairly easy for me to remain in my self-centered haze. But now I had adult children of my own. I was freshly aware of how difficult that time of distance must’ve been for my parents, when they knew their daughter was struggling.

I am deeply grateful for the nudge that prompted me to write and read that letter. I was able to tell my parents that I saw how much they loved me all along and that they had always made it easy for me to come home. I told them that their loving support made all the difference in my life when I finally was ready to grow. I told them thank you. 

My mom told me she knew all that and that she loved me and that I was a beautiful writer, which is exactly what my mom would say. My dad folded the letter and thanked me and told me he was going to keep it in the nightstand to read again. I could tell that it mattered to him that my mom got to hear my words.

Often my amends lately have been recognizing and receiving love, sometimes belatedly. Many people besides my parents have been good to me throughout my life, and I at times have been too self-centered to notice the depth of their care. I think of my friend Louise who I only recently reconnected with about two years ago after having lost touch in 1991 when I moved from San Diego to Idaho.

When I was going through my first divorce, I was in a great deal of pain and fear. I was also in graduate school and pretty much avoiding feelings by staying very busy taking 22 units and student teaching and commuting on the weekends between San Diego and Los Angeles.

Louise knew I was struggling and that I was more isolated than usual, and so she mailed me a letter every week that I received at my rented room in Los Angeles. I only remembered this now because while going through boxes during quarantine time a few weeks ago, I found piles of handwritten cards and letters and artwork she had mailed me. One for every single week of the year I was away. I am someone who resents having to find a stamp and envelope when bill arrives that I can’t pay online, so I was impressed by her commitment!

I’m sure I appreciated Louise’s notes at the time, but I hadn’t even remembered this act of love. I was so glad I found them and that we are in touch again so that I can say thank you for reminding me during that time that I wasn’t alone.

This work of righting wrongs of course takes many forms in spiritual and religious traditions as well as programs for addiction recovery, counseling practices, and justice groups. Sometimes it is called reckoning or reparations or amends, all of which imply an admission of wrongdoing, an attempt to repair, and a commitment to doing better going forward.

Going forward, I made that commitment to remain open and available to my parents. I became more actively engaged in their lives, and I showed up when I could be helpful. Which of course ended up being the greatest gift of all for me. I was able to be present during the years when my parents needed me most and to be by my mom’s side when she died.

Frank Ostaseski writes in The Five Invitations, “as people come closer to death, I have found that only two questions really matter to them: Am I loved? and Did I love well?”

The second question in particular was one my mom asked in different ways during the last weeks of her life. Had she given enough? Had she shown enough love? My dad and my sisters and I took turns reminding her of all of her grandchildren she nurtured, the children she taught, the daughters she’d raised. We read to her all of the stories her friends had sent about her teaching and activism and book groups and gardening. My mom was a sharer of ideas and enthusiasm and love. What a gift to be able to crawl in bed beside my mom during those last days and whisper to her about all of the ways she loved us.

More Resources

Most books I’ve read recently about death and dying spend at least some time on addressing the topic of unfinished relationship work. One that went into more depth and approached the work from a variety of interesting contexts is The American Book of Living and Dying: Lessons in Healing Spiritual Pain, by Richard F. Groves and Henriette Anne Klauser.

I also want to mention that one of the reasons this topic came to mind this week is because like many, I have been reading antiracism scholars including Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo both of whom speak powerfully to different facets of antiracism work. One thing DiAngelo’s White Fragility offers related to amends are examples of ways to acknowledge and take responsibility for times we fall short in a way that does not put more pressure on the recipient or do more harm.

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