Tending to Endings

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Choices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laura and Jane in Maui, March, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Would you like coffee, Mom?”

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

More Resources

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

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

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

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Fire, Thanks, and Giving

Tending to Endings (sixty-one)

“What fire?” I ask Patty.

I am at my computer where I’ve been all afternoon. Patty’s voice over the phone sounds concerned.

“Richard just got home and says there’s a fire by your trails.”

I stand to look out my office window and see billowy smoke just over the ridge. The ridge where Patty and I hike each week and I walk every day, a brisk two minutes from my backdoor. In between those two points, grows sagebrush, some native grass, and lots and lots of cheatgrass, all of it crackling and dry. It is October 6 and the wildflowers have long withered. I cannot remember the last rain.

I remind myself things on the horizon often look closer than they are. I open the slider from our living room and walk out back, Patty’s voice still up to my ear. The winds are erratic, the kind that sends tumbleweed tumbling; the kind that breathe flames to life. It is hard to tell what way the fire is moving.

“It doesn’t look good,” I say, “I’m going to try and get more info.”

I have one of those 21st century moments where I’m googling on my cell phone for information about the smoke I see with my eyes. I find nothing. I hear sirens. My heart rate quickens.

It’s never time to panic, some inner voice says. Think. Pray. Water.

I dial John while heading to the garage.“Call me when you get this,” I tell his voice mail, “There’s a fire in the foothills.”

John is playing tennis on the other side of town, his phone in his truck. I will continue to try to reach him every five minutes.

I go to metal box in the garage that contains the automatic sprinkler controls, aware of things I should pay better attention to, like when John shows me how to reset the sprinkler system in case I ever need to when he’s not home. I see an array of buttons and knobs. I flip switches, and turn dials until I hear the familiar whoosh running through the lines and the start of the rotation.

I walk to the backyard and crank open the faucets on the house, flop hoses as close to the stupid junipers as I can get them. We are grateful to Beryl and Otto who built this house in 1980 and cared for it until we got here a little more than three years ago. The house is sturdy and came with fruit trees in the back and tall pines on the western edge of the yard.

But the junipers—which will take heavy equipment to yank from the soil—are not on my gratitude list.  We’ve been meaning get rid of them ever since we moved in because they are scraggly and overgrown and, as the fire-wise websites inform us, they are among the least fire-resistant plants due to their lacy leaf structure and volatile oils.

I walk into the house and I grab my computer and John’s and set them in my car. I pack passports and car titles and the wills John I just signed. It turns out in a crisis, I’m not sentimental–I do not pack photo albums or my mother’s tea set–but I know how much I despise bureaucratic paperwork, and I don’t want to redo it.

I back the car out of the garage and turn it around for a quick exit, toss keys on the seat. Patty has pulled in the drive and is asking what she can do. We walk to the backyard and she picks up the hose and sprays the junipers, the dry grass.

My neighbors, Rob and Daryl are next door in their garden. Rob, walks over.

“What are we doing?” I ask as though there is a joint plan.

“If the flames come over the ridge, we’re going to leave.” They have dogs and two daughters and turkeys and hens that lay eggs in our yard. “Mike says, for now the winds are in our favor.” Mike another neighbor, has worked for the Bureau of Land Management.

“The winds feel all over the place,” I say.

“Right!?” Rob nods, “And you and I both know this is a tinder box back here.”

Finally I hear a helicopter overhead and look up to see it pulling the tiny bucket of water towards piles of smoke and flame. A police SUV makes its way up the wide trail past our backyard and the officer tells hikers and bikers to leave the area. It has been about twenty minutes and the calvary has arrived. I notice how small they seem up against the long giant cloud of smoke and the vast expanse of brown hillside.

I see the glow of orange flame licking the ridge.

We might be homeless, I say to myself. Though the word, doesn’t quite sit right. We might lose our house. That is true. And I have the twin sensation knowing how awful this is and how lucky I am at the very same time.

I walk back in. This time I grab underwear, sweat pants, tee-shirts, my contact solution and glasses. If I have to stay at someone else’s house, I at least want to have clean underwear and clear vision.

John has finished tennis, seen my twenty-three missed calls. I tell him over the phone that I have turned on the sprinklers and Patty is here helping water. I have packed our computers and paperwork. I ask what else.

“It sounds like you have done all the right things,” he says. “I’m on my way.” He assures me it will take time even if the flames come over the ridge. I don’t quite believe him.

“Anything else you want me to pack in the car?”

“No.” he says, and then, “Did you get my guitar?”

I walk back in the house. The wood from the piano flashes at me from the living room, the piano my sons learned to play on. Out of the corner of my eye I see the tiles John’s daughter fired in her kiln and that our kids set into the kitchen wall during our last Thanksgiving together, pre-Covid. The year we dined on Indian take-out while the grout dried.

I see now, but I cannot afford to think of all we will have to grieve. I walk out the front door lay John’s guitar in its black case across the backseat of my Subaru.

Thanksgiving at the Prairie House 2019

By the time John gets home, there are bulldozers on the ridge and the plume of smoke is making its way northeast of us towards other homes. A stray spark from the smoldering embers could still set fire to the hillside, but our house is no longer in the direct line and at least four city fire departments have arrived. 

By 8 o’clock we are without electricity but feeling out of danger for ourselves. We worry about neighbors to our east who have had to evacuate. John and I play Scrabble by flashlight. We realize the network news has aired when friends from all over the Boise Valley text me to see if we and our house are ok.

By ten pm the flames are out and all the residents are able to return home.

This was not the first time I packed a bag to leave home with my heart racing and fear for my well being. The other is a story I don’t tell often or even think of much anymore. But it came forward during those moments I spent packing and illuminated things I don’t think I saw decades ago, when I left my first marriage and before I had children. And of course this is very pared down version of a complicated story:

While in my twenties living in San Diego, I was driving home from my new teaching job one afternoon trying to figure out if my husband really might kill me or if I was overreacting. A thought came that was more like the bright flash before a migraine than an everyday thought: I’m wondering if my husband might kill me. That’s not normal.

When I got home, I called my mom in Chicago from the back bedroom, whispering into the phone even though I was the only one home. My mom asked only one question. Did I have somewhere I could stay that night? This surprised me. I hadn’t told them much. It was a marriage after all. I thought there would be more questions. She told me to grab only what I needed and leave. I took random clothes and my wallet and headed to a friends.

For a few months I did not have a stable address. The threats and stalking continued for some time, and for years I remained on hight alert and half afraid. But I had so many friends willing to give me a guest room. I had access to counseling. I had parents in Chicago who would’ve gladly had me move back. I always had a kitchen table where I could unravel, places where I felt more at home than the apartment from which I’d run.

Eventually less than two years later, I moved to Idaho rather spontaneously and for variety of reasons. Once here, I noticed I was less afraid. I stopped looking for a particular shape of headlights in the rearview mirror. I made new friends, taught in a new school, grew a new life.

About two weeks after the fire, rumors were confirmed. The blaze was started by teenagers setting off fireworks. Thanks to multiple fire crews, no homes or animals or people were lost. Four-hundred and forty acres of land and trail system burned. The brush and sage will recover. We were all very lucky.

When I walk along the ridge now, I see scorched earth on one side and the beauty of Boise’s autumn trees on the other. There is something—not comforting, exactly—but grounding about having both so clearly in my view. I almost wish the scar from the fire was more visible from town. You have to hike up the ridge to see how close this fire came to the edge of us. It’s easy to think the danger has passed as if it couldn’t happen again next summer or tomorrow.

We are all vulnerable in the face of wildfire or hurricanes or the threat of violence or cancer or Alzheimer’s or death. And yet, in moments when this frailty comes most into focus, I am also aware of what I have. The things that won’t burn down.

Had we lost our house, I would have many kitchen tables where I could be myself as I wept. House or no house, I have places I belong including inside my own body, my own marriage, my own community.

The truth is that the winds have always been in my favor. I have had and always had layers and layers of safety net, many of them since birth. I have to participate to maintain relationships, but I have had one hell of a running start.

Loss in these conditions is different than losing a home when everyone you know is also living on the edge of poverty. Or when you are new to a country. Or when you have fled abuse and no one in your community believes you.

My questions for myself these days have less to do with how do we build emergency shelter and more to do with how can I help make sure that in my community people have places where they can be themselves in good times and in times of loss. It feels like a complicate question that will take me time to know.

November is a month of giving thanks for many of us. It is also my birthday month, having made now fifty-seven trips around the sun! What a gift it is to be here.

As a small way to celebrate, I am making donations to nonprofits in my area committed to providing community and support as well as secure housing to those in Boise going through challenging times. I welcome you to join me! Or to give in your own community in whatever way is most meaningful. In the meantime, I will be following my question about what my own role is in nurturing a beloved community in my home town.

With love and gratitude,

Laura

Catch: Every Family. Every Person. A Home.

Idaho Coalition Against Sexual & Domestic Violence

Boise’s Agency for New Americans

If you would like to receive a post from Laura each month, please leave your name and email below. Tending to Endings is free and aims to build community and conversations around end-of-life matters. It will arrive in your inbox on the first Friday of every month. I welcome comments below, or you can also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com.

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Conversations

Tending to Endings (sixty)

The first Friday of October snuck up on me! I thought of postponing Tending to Endings. I have many ideas to write about. Just less time to go through my rather organic process, which begins with a big sprawl of words and ideas and tangents and then slowly over a number of days becomes shaped into something that others might be interested in and able to read!

Writing Tending to Endings also feels weighty this month. Death is a relevant and painful topic in Boise and much of Idaho. The ICUs are overwhelmed with COVID patients and the coroners and hospital leaders are past pleading. They are in despair.

If the models are correct, cases will not peak until mid October. I am frightened by the trauma so many in our community have had to face, especially our healthcare professionals. I don’t understand the mental rift that has happened in my own community, and I don’t yet know how to write about it other than to say please get vaccinated if you have not already.

I am so very sad about the unnecessary deaths, and how many have occurred isolated from family and friends because of COVID. And I am worried about how these experiences are going to affect the people on the front lines who have been carrying so much of the weight for eighteen months and are now facing the worst conditions yet. I have nothing wise or helpful or new to say about this, but it felt wrong to not say something.

Prayer wheel at Sawtooth Botanical Garden in Hailey, Idaho

I knew you’d understand if I postponed. I feel like I have the kindest readers on the planet.

But then my students started turning in one of their assignments for my Aspects of Death and Dying class this week, and I have to say it felt a little like magic. I gave them a simple assignment: sit down with three people they know (one at a time) and ask each to tell an experience about a time they learned something about death. I asked students to record their conversations and turn in recordings between five and fifteen minutes each.

To provide a model for my students, I asked John to tell a story about an experience where he learned something about death.

John talking about his mom’s death.

As soon as I began listening to what my students turned in, I realized that it was fulfilling a little dream of mine. They talked to their parents and neighbors and classmates and their own children about some of their most important stories.

I often include a tagline at the end of my post: Tending to Endings aims to build community and conversation around end-of-life matters. Yet I admit, mostly this blog has been a lot of l me talking! Comments features are clunky and asynchronous. We have been more isolated than usual. It’s hard to actually find ways to converse. But I suppose my hope is that what you read here might help you open conversations with those who are in your daily life.

Along those lines, I want to invite you to this assignment, and I hope you’ll dive in! It is not a new idea, of course. Story Corp has been capturing conversations for decades now, and they have helpful info on their website.

But, as I reminded my students, those stories are edited and produced and aired, whereas their recordings have the aim of opening a conversation and saving it for their own purposes. Stumbles and backtracking are fine. All they really need is a person to talk to and recording device, which these days usually means a smart phone.

The results so far have been beautiful. When I listened to my students’ stories, I knew they were hearing things they might not have heard if not for this assignment.

Or maybe they would have. I have talked with John about his mom’s death many times during the twenty years we have been together, after all. But this conversation and the others I’ve recorded have felt different. As though setting the record button to on is a way of marking sacred space. We speak and listen more intently. I listen again. We tend to this story, and find it worth saving.

More Resources

For you, there are no requirements or deadlines! But if you want to know the details or where this is going, here they are. (You’ll have to expand the text if your eyes are like mine).

I’d love to hear any feedback from you about how your own conversations went!

Thank you for reading Tending to Endings. If you would like to subscribe, please leave your name and email below and you will receive it by email on the first Friday of every month. Tending to Endings aims to build community and conversation around end-of-life matters.

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In the Gap

Tending to Endings (fifty-nine)

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.

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Opening

Tending to Endings (fifty-eight)

These things happen…the soul’s bliss

and suffering are bound together

like the grasses…

–Jane Kenyon, “Twilight After Haying”

A woman in a ponytail offers to take John’s and my photo if we’ll take a family portrait for them, the family still tumbling out of the van at a pull-out along Going to the Sun Road in Glacier. John and I pose in front of the rocky peak that cradles traces of ice, and then five girls, also freckled and ponytailed and looking like various-size versions of Mom, assemble with their parents on the edge of wilderness. 

I snap the photo, we pull together to talk about our adventures. The girls laugh and shiver in their sweatshirts even though it is 70 degrees out and will soon get up to 90. “We’re fresh from the humidity of Alabama in July,” dad explains. Two of the girls rattle off the parks in a duet. So far they’d been to Badlands and Mt. Rushmore, and next will be Yellowstone and Grand Teton.

Usually when John and I travel to wild places, we search for the most remote spot to camp. But on this trip—our first to Glacier— we decided to stay in a park lodge on either end of the park and take, what John dubbed, The Funnel Tour. Which means, we drove from one end of the park to the other stopping where everyone did, and we ran into a lot of families.

Honestly it was fun after so many months in segregated quarters during which time all the families with young children never got a break, and the rest of us went long months without hearing endless knock-knock jokes or the spontaneity of kid laughter.

We lunch along McDonald Creek and meet two little boys from Colorado standing ankle deep between their parents, mesmerized by the colorful stones in the clear water. I feel my spirit lift, much like when we spotted a moose standing in St. Mary’s Lake, or the mule deer in velvet who posed for photos.

When the boys open their palms to show off their finds, John shows them how to hold each stone in order to get the perfect spin. They practice and look to us and their parents to make sure we are appropriately impressed whenever a stone gets three hops. And we are!

“There are so many sweet kids here,” John says as we climbed back to the car.

And I know what he means. Where I expect whining and eye rolls, kids and parents seem lighthearted with one another. Teenagers play card games with their parents on the lodge porch as the sun goes down. One boy, I guess to be in middle school, shouts from the lake, “Mom, I found you the perfect rock! You are going to love this one.” And—rather than shaking her head and yelling back, “No more rocks!”—she wades out to admire his find.

I don’t mean to make this sound overly idyllic–I heard complaints, even tears. Something was just slightly different. Family members seemed connected, not in a clingy way, but by some invisible thread joining one to another.

Was it that eighteen months without a vacation made everyone more grateful? Or that a year and a half of togetherness forced us all into a choice between utter boredom or learning to enjoy one another?

I thought about the gentle shifts in my own relationship with John, the way both times of solitude and togetherness seem more natural. We are more in tune with each other than we were at the beginning of COVID.

Does it still irritate me when the box of granola looks like a grizzly opened it first? Well, yes, but now I’m apt to laugh as I attempt to perform surgery to make it pour correctly. We tend to give each other a little more grace.

And this year, we didn’t let our anniversary just slide by, instead following the tradition we always meant to which started deep in the Grand Canyon on our honeymoon: to always celebrate by doing something outdoors together in a place we had never gone before. There have been years where in the busy-ness of life, it did not seem all that important to honor that tradition. This year, while John and I hiked to St. Mary’s Falls and kayaked rapids on the Flathead River, I was so grateful we could.

I’ve come to understand that for me, the question of getting through the hardest times is not how to survive them, but rather, how to get through them without tuning out or shutting down. Which might sound like an aspirational platitude. But, about a quarter of a century ago, that choice arrived in a very physical and immediate way when I went into preterm labor during the second trimester of my twin pregnancy.

It is a story I return to often, including here, because of how it it changed me. Up until that point, shutting down in the face of potential loss seemed a valid, even a wise choice! But the dilemma while on bedrest and medication and as contractions continued to roll through my uterus was that this might be all I had of motherhood. These kicks beneath my palm, these squirms, these aches. Did I want to miss it?

And so I sang songs to my sons and read stories of the hundred acre wood and I told them secrets. Although I had not officially met them, had not yet looked into their eyes or heard even one knock-knock joke, I loved my sons. For seventy-seven days, our connection grew.

First of many Grandma visits, April 1995 (Dylan, Jane, Gabe); Celebrating year 26 April, 2021 (Laura, John, Ali, Dylan, Caroline, Gabe)

Gabe and Dylan lived to be born and they live still and that will always be my favorite story. It has meant twenty-six years of days to get to know and love them. And yet, I quickly learned, even good endings include loss, and parenthood gave me extra practice. One day they are no longer in your belly, and the next they want to build towers with their preschool friends instead of you, and if all goes well, they eventually move to Kentucky or Seattle and are too busy to call.

Now, as an entire planet of people begin to open our doors and come out to take stock of the events we have endured during the last eighteen months, I wonder if families with young children have a leg up on the rest of us. That maybe their hearts have remained a little bit more open to all we have been through, and thus they are a bit steadier in the midst of what feels to me a whole lot of vulnerability.

We lost friends and dreams and school years and sports seasons. Some relationships did not grow closer; some marriages did not survive. We are finally beginning to hold the funerals.

No time reminded me so much of those days in preterm labor–where heartache and connection intertwined–as the months I spent with my mother during her dying.

One afternoon when things were particularly intense with my mom’s cancer and Alzheimer’s, I went for a walk and ended up at Whaler’s Village, an outdoor shopping area in Maui. I watched the people walking in and out of stores and felt entirely out of place.

Finally, I sat on a concrete planter and texted a friend of mine back in Boise whose husband had died from Alzheimer’s: Sometimes I feel that what is going on is so heavy that I am not fit for public interaction. I either feel fake because I’m staying on the surface, or, if I try to explain, there is just too much and I would overwhelm people.

Today I know that gap I felt had as much to do with the connection and tenderness towards my mom as it did the trauma. It is not only the pain of hard circumstances that makes me clumsy in the face of everyday life. Sometimes it is the intimacy.

And maybe that is why this opening at times feels stranger and more awkward than the shut down. We hesitate at the threshold because we don’t know what to expect of ourselves or each other or how to explain all we have been through. And maybe even because there are things from this experience we don’t want to lose.

At Glacier, smoke from distant wildfires shrouds the view and sometimes makes it painful to pull a deep breath into my lungs. On the drive home, a newscaster informs us of new fires in Idaho and variants of the virus wreaking havoc in other countries and our own.

There will be more endings. And beginnings, too.

My struggle seems to be—this day, every day—to consider both worthy of devotion, woven as they are with suffering, with love, with bliss.

More Resources

Three Books I’m Reading Now

No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering, Thich Nhat Hanh

Nothing can survive without food, including happiness; your happiness can die if you don’t know how to nourish it. … We can condition our bodies and minds to happiness with the five practices of letting go, inviting positive seeds, mindfulness, concentration, and insight.

When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi

Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon, English major, scientist, and husband who wrote a memoir about his own illness that was published after his death from metastatic lung cancer:

I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.

Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care, Edited by Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast

This book includes writing by pioneers in hospice care like Dame Cicely Saunders and Elizabeth Kubler Ross, contemporary practitioners like Frank Ostasekski and Rachel Naomi Remen, and poets like Mark Doty and Marie Howe. There is an intimacy to this collection alluded to in the introduction:

There are pieces here to wake you up in the morning and pieces to tuck you in when it’s time for bed, pieces to hold your hand through long sleepless nights and pieces to watch with you when you don’t know what you’re watching for. There are poems to cry with you when you’re sad, and poems to lift you up when you need lifting up. This is a book to keep you company as you make your way to the bedside, and this is a book to comfort and console you as you make your way back home.

Three Kid’s Books

Tear Soup: A Recipe for Healing After Loss, by Pat Schwiebert and Chuck DeKlyen

A book about allowing grief to have its season:

Some people thought that the neighbor was eating too much tear soup. So Grandy, being an old and somewhat wise woman, called and invited her to a special soup gathering where it’s not bad manners to cry in your soup or have second helpings.

Drawing on Walls: A Story of Keith Haring, by Matthew Burgess

A biography about the mural artist from childhood to his death from AIDS at 31. The story focuses on Haring’s dedication to the creative spirit and public art.

After watching Keith work, a kid came up to him and said, “I can tell, by the way you paint, that you really love life.”

Frederick, by Leo Lionni

A story about the role of a poet during hard times.

“Close your eyes,” said Frederick, as he climbed on a big stone. “Now I send you the rays of the sun. Do you feel how their golden glow…” And as Frederick spoke of the sun the four little mice began to feel warmer.

Three Poems

Twilight: After Haying, Jane Kenyon

From her book, Otherwise, here are the opening lines to the poem quoted in the post:

Yes, long shadows go out / from the bales; and yes, the soul / must part from the body: / what else could it do?

A Ritual to Read to Each Other, by William Stafford

An old favorite I pull out during hard times as a comfort and a reminder to stay the course:

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, / a remote important region in all who talk; / though we could fool each other, we should consider–lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

The Affliction, By Marie Howe

I first came to know Marie Howe’s poetry from a book my friend Mary Ellen sent me after two friends died called What the Living Do. It is excellent and probably would appeal to many who read Tending to Endings. “The Affliction” is from a more recent collection, Magdalene captures the experience of presence after being, as Howe describes it, “outside–watching…as if I were someone else…”

Three Listens

The Thing I’m Getting Over, This American Life

All of the stories on last week’s episode about being in that place where you are in recovery but not recovered, are poignant and engaging. The last one, “Shot Girl, Summer in the City,” is related most directly to the idea of opening up post COVID precautions, and the strange awkwardness and changed-ness that seems to follow us as we rub our eyes and wander back out into the streets.

Conversation on Chödrön’s The Things that Will Not Die

Krista Tippett recently launched an app that contains conversations and coursework on spiritual topics. This short conversation with Devendra Banhart focuses on a passage from Pema Chödrön’s Things Fall Apart about practicing Tonglen:

This kinship with the suffering of others, this inability to continue to regard it from afar, is the discovery of our soft spot, the discovery of bodhichitta. Bodhichitta is a Sanskrit word that means “noble or awakened heart.” It is said to be present in all beings. Just as butter is inherent in milk and oil is inherent in a sesame seed, this soft spot is inherent in you and me.

When I Get to Heaven by John Prine

A poem, a song, a conversation, all in one. Enjoy!

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