Tending to Endings

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Give Away

Tending to Endings (forty-seven)

I am in Maui after a quick decision to fly here a little over a week ago when travel to the island became possible with a negative COVID test. It’s still a strange holiday with other family members in various other small pods. But it’s a beautiful place to be thankful, and I am most thankful for seeing my dad again.

I find a book on the shelf that I gave to my mom a few Christmases ago and decide it will be a nice thank you gift to bring to Tom and Steve who are hosting us for Thanksgiving. Bright Wings, a collection that includes sketches of birds adjacent to poems. I am excited to bring it to them. They loved my mom. Steve shared at her Maui celebration of life and he and Tom continued to reach out to my dad all last spring when the island of Maui was on lockdown, and my dad was alone. I think, yes, this is just right! The perfect gift!

I flip through the book and read some of the poems, and then, the impulse to give this book catches on something. Not this book, I think. I really like this one. What if I want to read it when I’m here in Maui?  What if I want to hold it and imagine my mom holding it and the way she would talk to birds who came to dine on the lanai during breakfast. The way she would brush crumbs their way, so they knew they were welcome and loved!

And I think, maybe they don’t even like poems. Or birds. Though this second seems especially unlikely.

I might mention here, that I have a copy of this book in my own bookcase in Boise. Also, my dad still has shelves heavy with books at his home in Illinois. Mom created a resource room so she could loan books about the environment or social justice or parenting or just good writing to anyone who was interested. She tried not to be pushy about her opinions, but she never hesitated to share a good book!

I have an abundance of things from my mom. I am wearing her white and blue jacket with palm trees on it, and I have the dozens of photo books she made the kids over the years. The whole ocean is currently in front of me, which, being her favorite color, never fails to remind me of her. I have her wide feet and pointy chin and love of children. Anyone who reads this blog would agree, I’m not at risk of forgetting my mom. A year and a half after her death, she is still a daily presence in my life, a touchstone.

So I wonder at this slight anxiety, this hesitancy about handing over this one book?

Ron and Jane Stavoe at Mala in Lahaina, January 20, 2019

When my friend Pat died in 2015, her daughter Sandy and I continued our tradition of having lunch together on Pat’s birthday, which also happened to be my birthday. When Pat was alive, it always delighted her, the symmetry of each of us having the joy of buying lunch for the other. 

It was during lunch, about a year and a half after Pat died that Sandy brought with her a folded blue sweater and handed across the table. “This sweater of my mom’s made me think of you, and I thought you might like to have it.” 

I pulled it to me and buried my cheek in the pale blue weave. I thanked her. I know exactly where that sweater is in my house in Boise now, folded on the top shelf of my closet. I don’t wear it often, but when I do, I feel especially close to Pat.

Now I remember Sandy handing me that sweater and think I notice that same catch, that instant of hesitation, as if a small ache was woven into the joy at gifting me the sweater.  Or maybe I am inventing that and adding it to the memory now that I know what it is like to lose a mother.

Giving is also releasing. It is an act of generosity, and it is also an act of trust. 

I know I will bring the book with me to dinner. And I know Tom and Steve will cherish it. This will be true even if they aren’t a fan of poems or birds. Even more, I know that I will be ok. And that my mom will continue to return to me just as waves continue to roll ashore.

Have a beautiful Thanksgiving weekend,

Laura

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Naming Loss

Tending to Endings (forty-six)

I read articles on grief about the importance of naming losses and I think how hard it is to do that for 2020. Not all of course. Some are utterly clear. Just yesterday I talked with a friends who lost their father at age 57 to COVID. He lived in Guadalajara and they are in Maui. They could not travel to see him when he was in the hospital, nor could they or their children (his grandchildren) make the trip to attend the services.

I have lost two friends to heart attacks and a childhood neighbor to Alzheimer’s since the pandemic began. We did not gather. I have to keep reminding myself that these people are gone. Which is heart wrenching and wrong. There is the loss of the person, and then the loss of the ways we have had to walk through that loss. We don’t get to fall apart together and it his hard to know how to comfort each other.

Liesl and Bailey’s wedding, May 2018. Dylan singing at Mom’s celebration of life, April 2019.

And celebrations are lost too. We missed a long awaited reunion with my extended family and the annual trip to San Diego with John’s. His niece’s wedding was postponed, and graduations were skipped. The retreat I attend each October was canceled for the first time in 21 years.

First we postponed everything until we could do it right. And then as COVID lingered or surged, we found work arounds—zoom funerals and birthday parades. But we haven’t grown into our new ways yet, nor have we been able to return to the old, and so much is lost in the cracks between. Grief has always been awkward in our culture, and now it feels almost impossible, COVID one more reason to avoid facing what is already hard.

And then there are the everyday losses that seem small, but strung together change the way I live and I suspect change my body chemistry as well. Hugs. The ability to know what we do for the holidays. Pulling friends’ kids onto my lap to read stories. Walking side by side close enough to bump shoulders. The freedom of deciding to do anything without having to weigh COVID risks. Seeing strangers smile.

I miss going to live theater with the grand girls and our annual November birthday lunch with dear friends.

I’m low on laughter this year. I think back to lunches in restaurants with friends, and it is not the food I long for— it is being with smart, funny people who I can count on to make me laugh. I am not nearly funny enough on my own, and the comedy channel is not the same. It is communal laughter I miss most. All of us in the same room with tears streaming down our cheeks.

It’s so easy to shift here to the I’m actually very lucky. Shelter in place came at time in my life where we have the finances to withstand it. No one in my immediate family has gotten sick yet. In my extended family, all have recovered well. I like having time alone to write. I live in a place where I can walk outside on trails daily. John and I have a loving marriage and we are good friends. I get to see friends from far away now because we all learned zoom. There is a vaccine on the horizon!

All of this is true, and it is also a trap, this slight-of-hand, this socially acceptable attempt to outmaneuver grief. To call sadness by another name—to call it whining, or not being grateful—as if grief and gratitude are not intertwined.

Grief held at bay does not wait patiently behind the gate. It comes out sideways when I speak sharply to the pharmacist and then feel terrible because isn’t her job hard enough? It emerges as me scrolling on my phone instead of going for a walk. Grief settles in my chest and I swear if I wait long enough, in my bones. It aches at night. Slips through in nightmares and then insomnia or stomach aches. I don’t avoid grief. I avoid acknowledging it and letting it have its well earned place.

Last Thanksgiving our kids tiled our kitchen and then napped under the piano after Indian take-out dinner.

As the nights grow longer, I think of my friends who used to gather for winter solstice each December. We would drink hot mulled cider and eat beignets and toss sticks of wood into the fire with words written on them. Things we wanted to release.

I enjoyed the evening, but held some skepticism for letting go ceremonies. Surrendering old hurts or old loves has always seemed an act of grace that happens when I’m not trying, rather than something I do. It never happens for me when I drive to the top of a mountain to outstretch my hands to the sky or toss crumpled paper into the flames.

But I would join in and laugh with friends, watch their golden skin flicker in the light, see their smiles from across the ring. Some years winter came early and we would lean against each other to keep warm and stand so close to the fire my jeans would feel hot against my shins. I would dutifully write my word or phrase and when it came my turn, toss it into the fire like a prayer.

And now I see I may have had it wrong. It is in the naming that I acknowledge the empty spaces that have shaped me, those things that matter most, those things I love. To deny loss is to deny love.

And so in 2020 it is good to begin early, a full month before the longest night. I write the losses on wood or on paper. Paint them on stone. Type them here.

For I suspect it is not the tossing that transmutes great loss into something else. Rather, it is in the loving hold and the walk up to the fire: I see you—loss—I see you. You were here and now you are not. Much love.

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Living On

Tending to Endings (forty-five)

Legacy has always seemed to me a weighty word, reserved for the powerful or wealthy or famous. People who get buildings and scholarships and highways named after them. To think or write about my own legacy would seem pretentious and related to image or ego.

And then I think of Marian Pritchett who I met in the late 1990s, at what was then known as Booth Memorial School for Pregnant and Parenting Teens. The school was housed in a brick building in Boise’s leafy north end. Teenagers who were pregnant or new parents could learn child development along with algebra at a school with onsite day care, and guidance on college applications.

I was going to visit the school once a week through a relatively new nonprofit arts program called Writers in the Schools. I was enthused about this assignment. I had twin toddlers myself, and I knew how pregnancy and birth opened a huge opportunity for creativity.

But my enthusiasm was no match for Marian’s whose eyes lit up at our planning meeting when I told her about writing poetry with the students and putting together a book at the end of the semester. She smiled widely and said she was just sure the program was going to be wonderful. She couldn’t wait for me to meet her students.

What I thought next was that Marian must be a new teacher.  All that positive energy and no shadow of skepticism or the edgy humor I was used to in veteran teachers, even the most caring.  Teenagers have a way of breaking your heart, after all.

When I was getting ready to leave, I asked Marian how long she had taught at Booth. “This is my twentieth year,” she said, “Before that I was at Boise High.” Marian, it turns out, was also the school principal.

The school was named after Marian Pritchett in 2002. Photo Credit: Chris Butler, Idaho Statesman.

Over the next few years I visited Booth every Wednesday, and the students and Marian and I all wrote together. I learned that Marian’s enthusiasm was not just demeanor. She backed it up with unwavering support for her students. She showed up for them whether they were showing up for themselves or not. She called them when they didn’t make it to class. She sat with them as they filled out college applications. When they read their poems aloud after our writing time, her eyes often glistened with tears and pride. Marian consistently reflected back to her students their own intelligence, and strength, worth.

I was writing for parenting magazines during that time, and I worked with one of the young moms who had graduated from Booth to write her story for American Baby Magazine. Jaimie Skinner wrote about the transformation that happened after she arrived at the school:

One of the awful things about being a pregnant teen is that just when you’re feeling the worst about yourself–guilty, ashamed, afraid–people tend to confirm that view…

After almost being expelled for poor attendance and very low grades, I transferred to Booth Memorial High School. I was even having regular thoughts of suicide. It’s ironic that a woman can feel most isolated when she’s carrying a life inside of her, but pregnancy is lonely when it’s not celebrated by the people around you.

The head teacher at Booth, Marian Pritchett, called my house every morning to make sure I was heading in…I spent a lot of time with Marian, who understood what I was going through. As I began to care about myself, I also started feeling compassion for my baby.

Marian’s death in 2002 of a brain aneurysm was unexpected and devastating for her family and her students and all of us who knew her. I attended her funeral still heavy with shock and grief. When I entered the church, it was already full of so many young women with children by their side, and some not so young anymore. The crowd grew and grew–her family and her students and former students and their families and her colleagues and leaders in the community–until people could no longer squeeze into the pews.

I do not remember much of what was said at that service almost two decades ago, but I remember all those babies on all those laps and the way their coos and their cries lifted us. It was the first time I had that strange sensation at funeral or memorial service, of grief being matched with gratitude. How empty the loss and how full the love left behind.

Later that year, the school name was changed to Marian Pritchett High School, and teachers continued to help many young women and eventually young fathers, too, to continue their education after becoming parents.

Last year, the campus was sold and after some attempts at moving the school the district instead combined it with another alternative high school. It was a heartbreaking loss for the community. But I will always think of Marian’s legacy not as any building or school but as all those women and their children and the lives they are living.

To me, this is the most profound form of legacy, the way we become a part of each other’s stories. On this count, Marian outdid herself.

Jaimie and Marian

I reached out again to Jaimie, when I started working on this post. We hadn’t talked since we met at a coffee shop all those years ago to plan the story. She is now mom to two daughters and two sons. The daughter she wrote about in the magazine article has recently graduated college. Jaimie is a teacher having worked for five years overseas and now back at a high school in Boise where she teaches English to new immigrants including refugees who have resettled here.

Last year, she and her husband founded Rising Phoenix a youth leadership organization with an international service-learning focus. They sponsor children in Rwanda and the Congo.

Jaimie and I talked about Marian and how she influences us still. She talked about the idea of legacy:

I don’t really care if I’m remembered, but I want to make a difference in my student’s lives. I talk about Marian to my students all the time. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t had someone like that in my life at that time. In that way I want to continue her legacy.

And maybe that is why remembering people matters. Not so much to give credit, which I doubt would have mattered to Marian. But so that we remember what they have given us that we can now carry forward.

Marian, who was never officially my teacher, may have influenced my teaching more than anyone else over the next twenty years. Through her example, she gave me permission to enthusiastically believe in my students even when the odds might not seem in their favor. She lived the adage that love is a verb by showing up for students each day in big and small ways. If I ever questioned the effectiveness of this philosophy, all I had to do was think back to that afternoon in that church and that strong beautiful community who gathered to say thank you and goodbye.

Tending to Endings aims to build conversation and community around end-of-life matters. You may subscribe or comment below. You can also reach me at Laura@laurastavoe.com. Tending to Endings runs each Friday and is ad-free and cost free. I will not share your info.

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Future Tendings

Tending to Endings (forty-four)

I mentioned in my last blog that I was going to write something about legacies this week. I have moved that post to November 13 because I wanted to give you a heads up about some changes to Tending to Endings and a few new projects.

When I started this blog in January, I had recently left my job of ten years in order to care from my mom at the end of her life. Afterwards, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next, but I had a feeling it had something to do with death. I was surprised at how much I did not know going into that experience and it had been a profound one.

I gave myself this weekly research and writing assignment an exploration into end-of-life matters, planning to write for at least six months. By June, I wasn’t running out of ideas and I was enjoying writing the posts each week. Plus, the pandemic was in full swing. I saw no reason to stop.

I am grateful for our small but caring readership. There are currently 129 subscribers, plus the others who find their way to my website, often due to subscribers sharing the link on social media sites, thank you!

Tending to Endings will continue as a weekly publication through December 18 and then it will move to a once-a-month schedule.  I still haven’t run out of ideas. Everyone dies and hardly anyone talks about death, so there is more material than I can possibly cover. But with the new year, I want to make room for some new work as well.  

Beginning January 1, subscribers will receive Tending to Endings on the first Friday of the month. It will still be free.  I hope you continue to find it relevant and readable, and that you continue to share your thoughts and ideas and stories with me. I love receiving your comments and mail!

New Work

About a year ago a friend asked me if I ever wrote stories on commission. She had been meaning to write something about the birth of her two daughters born through invitro fertilization, but she was never finding the time. She wondered if I could write it for her so that she could save the stories for her daughters when they were older.

I was intrigued. I had written my own pregnancy and birth story for Parents magazine, and I have always been grateful to have that story. It helps me remember all those moments of worry and hope and grace. It gives me a window into that time and reminds me of all we went through at the start of my sons’ lives. I loved the idea of helping another mom capture those moments. Plus, it sounded like fun.

Darcy and Mike were able to share their journey with me through a series of conversations and then we worked collaboratively on a beautiful book. They made twenty copies for friends and family and of course saved two special copies for their daughters. For me, there was a gift, too. I found a new kind of magic happens in the deep listening required to write another’s story. I was hooked.

I took out a business license for Story of My Life last January and planned to launcy a personal memoir service. When the pandemic hit, I backed off on these plans. It seemed the wrong time to begin a business for anything other than essential goods and services.

Still, a few projects have serendipitously made it to me, including a couple stories about caregiving and end-of-life. It has been such an honor to receive these sacred stories, and I am very excited to continue this work. If you are interested in learning more, please visit Story of My Life. I will continue to add information about process, pricing, and gift certificates in the next day or two. Also, feel free to reach out with questions anytime at laura@laurastavoe.com.

Story Workshops

Maybe by the time you read this, we will have final election results, and maybe not, but regardless of the outcome a great deal of uncertainty remains. Uncertainty about the pandemic, the economy, and maybe most of all, uncertainty about how we will rebuild trust in our systems, our processes, and most importantly, in each other. I of course don’t have answers for all this. But I know the work will take a great deal of courage and love. I don’t know any other way to build trust.

My years of teaching helped me to know the way I come to love people I do not understand is to listen, not to their opinions, but to their stories. This is one reason I have been missing teaching during this time that I’ve called my accidental sabbatical. I’ve had the luxury long walks and creative work each day. But I am at my best when I am also teaching, in part because I have access to so many living stories.

And so, I’m planning to launch two workshops starting soon after the holidays. One will be a writing workshop for who want help writing and saving their own Family Stories. The other will be Storytelling and Storylistening with the aim, not on performance, but on building connection and community. The first round of these workshops will be online and I will post more information soon.

Also, I wanted to share one of the things that helped me to get through Thursday, Who We Can Become, the most recent episode of On Being. I found it calming and hopeful, and thought you might appreciate it as well.

Have a beautiful weekend.

 With love,

Laura

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Devotion

Tending to Endings (forty-three)

This week I’m including a short passage from the book I’ve been working on these past two years. It explores many of the themes I’ve written about it Tending to Endings, but from a perspective closer to the experience, before I knew all that would happen with my mom.

Readers occasionally ask for more about living with Alzheimer’s, and so I chose this excerpt from November 2018, a few weeks after I went to stay with my parents (near Chicago) and a few weeks before we learned the cancer had returned. Mom was also receiving daily treatments in the hyperbaric oxygen chamber for pain associated with radiation wounds from her previous cancer treatment.

Excerpted from “Chamber,” Band of Brightness

My dad has written “Laura’s Birthday” on the whiteboard we keep on the kitchen counter to help my mom know what is happening each day. He has drawn balloons and a smiley face along with the two other agenda items: Oxygen Therapy and Sandy and Bill bring dinner.

“It’s Laura’s birthday,” mom says when she stands over the counter staring at the whiteboard. By her tone, I know she is taking in this information.

“Happy Birthday,” she says because she still knows what to say. In one of the books I read about Alzheimer’s, I learned that social skills are often strong even after memory and other communication skills fail because they are habit. My mom has always been very good with social skills. She is from the Midwest. Also, she knows a smile can connect people and it is important to her to make people feel welcome and liked. She has practiced a lifetime at smiling at children and homeless people and new mothers and the old woman on the bus. She still does this now that she is that old woman.

Even with her broad smile, I can see questions in her gray-blue eyes. How old? Are we doing anything special today? Did I get you a present? Are you my child?  I can feel my mother’s anxiety because I am her daughter and, also, I am practiced at fear. I wonder how to reassure her.

We are careful to not ask her questions because then she feels put on the spot. But it is hard to know how to bridge the gulf between us. She is so very aware of condescension. It feels wrong to assume she doesn’t know things and just ramble on all the answers for questions she hasn’t asked. Also, she can only process so much information at once, so giving her a long stream of facts can overwhelm her.

I say, “Thank you for giving birth to me, Mom. Thank you for taking such good care of me while I was a baby and ever since, for fifty-four years now!”

“Wow, fifty-four,” she says. “How did that happen?”

It is my birthday and I am here in the town where I grew up with my mother and my father who brought me into this world, a place I left at age 19 in 1984. Amy, my youngest sister, takes me out to lunch. My sister Sandy, two years younger, brings Szechwan shrimp for dinner. Friends from Boise send texts and cards in the mail. My dad assures my mom that they gave me my birthday check. I preorder Michelle Obama’s as a present to myself. Becoming.

This birthday more than anything else, I think about the vulnerability of being born. We don’t choose it. We just become. And at first, we are not able to do a damn thing to take care of ourselves. I remember watching my sons just after they were born and thinking— they cannot pull the blanket up if they are cold because even their arms are not yet under their control. Their need was so great it made me ache for them and love them more than my own heart.

There was a swath of time in my early adulthood that I took issue with my mom for not being as nurturing as I would’ve liked or in the ways I preferred. I was an emotional daughter and we had different ways of coping with emotion.

But today all I can think of is how much she loved me and how dependent I was on that love. It’s not the work of mothering or the pain of childbirth that awes me, it is the devotion. During that time when I could not live without care, my mother made sure I got from one hour to the next, first in her womb and then here on earth. Of course that is enough. That is everything.

Before dinner, I brave the early winter and cross the parking lot for the 4:30 hot yoga class. I stand on my mat in the heated room with other yogis and feel this body —this fifty-four-year-old body—that still moves that still breathes that still works pretty well. Yes, there is a pain in my sacroiliac joint that makes backbends difficult. But I am here, connected to earth, breathing.

At some point, the only logical response to birthdays is gratitude. I have lost friends my own age. My own mother is leaving or shedding her own self or some other process I do not understand, a little every day. The opposite of becoming.

I am here. I can do sun salutations and humble warrior and, on a good day, standing bow. I can relax into pigeon pose and feel those hips that have birthed twins open and stretch. I can breathe through savasana and sense my connection to the other yogis in the room and my sisters and my children and the tree outside the studio and the trail outside my writing room all the way in Idaho. I can sense my connection to my mom, the woman who carried this body into this world.

Thank you for reading Tending to Endings. Next week I will be posting something about legacies. If you would like to subscribe so you don’t miss these weekly posts, please leave your name and email below.

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