Thank you to all of you who sent your good wishes! John’s surgery went well. His new knees are healing well and he has started physical therapy.
This week, I’m sharing an eclectic collection of media related to the theme of endings that I have found interesting or helpful or moving. Also, since there are quite a few new subscribers to Tending to Endings, I’m sharing a few links to early posts on various topics you may have missed.
Goodbye to All This is a new podcast I was introduced to through Death, Sex, and Money (which I recommended a couple posts ago). Sophie Townsend tells the story of losing her husband to cancer while her kids are still young with heart wrenching honesty.
In Case You Missed Them: A Few Early Tending to Endings
On Grief was written when the COVID stay-home order first started in March. And, Body of Grief (February 28) was about my surprise at the emotion I had about my mother’s ashes.
Love in the Room (January 24) explores ways to show up for someone even when you can’t be physically present.
Tell me More (March 13) is a post about things I learned (sometimes the hard way) about loving someone with Alzheimer’s.
I Hear You (February 7) and the inaugural post, Tending to Endings (January 3) offer ways into the conversation about death.
And, more recently, if you missed my conversation with hospice chaplain Norm Shrumm a couple weeks ago, Words and Wishes (October 9) is full of warm wisdom about end-of-life planning.
Have a beautiful weekend,
Laura
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On Monday, John had bilateral knee replacement surgery. It’s COVID times and so this means I pulled up to the circular drive of the small hospital and hugged him at the curb like I was dropping him off at the airport. Only this time, rather than luggage, he walked through the sliding glass doors carrying a collapsible walker and an Iceman cooler pack.
Then I drove home and watched the phone.
It was an hour before the nurse called me to let me know he had gone into surgery. “We know you can’t come see him, so you can expect a call from the surgeon in about two and a half hours, maybe a bit longer since it’s both knees.”
Sitting in hospital waiting rooms has never been my thing, and yet now that my husband was in surgery, I felt something important was being kept from me. It’s what we do when we can’t do anything to help a person suspended between life and death—we wait as close by as possible to hear news.
My wording may sound dramatic, I realize. They weren’t doing a heart transplant, after all, only replacing his knees. Still, certain experiences remind me of our vulnerability more than others and surgery is one of them. I admit to feeling a similar sensation each time I am on a plane, and my sons have received many texts over the years: The plane is about to take off! I love you very much!
This is not John’s first knee surgery. That happened nineteen years ago, during the first months of our relationship when John skied into the trees looking like the expert powder hound that he is and emerged, much later than expected on one ski, the other leg dangling limply behind.
“I forgot I wasn’t 18,” he said, with a look of despair. He had taken a jump and landed on the side of his ski and busted an ACL.
When John’s surgery was scheduled about a month later, he asked whether I would help him during recovery. We weren’t living together at this time, and this would mean him staying at my house for a few days.
Sometimes people send me nice notes about this blog and tell me how empathetic I am. Sometimes, I start to believe it. And then I remember that my first reaction to anyone needing anything from me is so often self-centered. This seems particularly true of nursing opportunities. On occasion, for instance, I would attempt to talk my kids out of being sick when they were young. Once—as my sons are fond of reminding me—this resulted in Gabe throwing up on the bus on the way to school and me having to come get him in the nurse’s office.
When John asked if I would help him post surgery, I said, “Sure!” It seemed the right thing to say.
But what I felt was very reluctant. I wasn’t even sure we were at the pick-each-other-up from the airport stage in our relationship. The weekends when my kids were at their dads was supposed to time to catch up with my own life and work and to have some semblance of social life. I liked John, but my priorities were my kids and healing myself, not a serious relationship.
My counselor pointed out that helping someone post-surgery did not actually mean we were at any particular point in our relationship. It could just mean I was helping out a friend. That seemed slightly more realistic than my perspective which considered helpfulness as a sort of gateway drug that could result in my ending up accidentally married again.
And so, after John’s surgery, the boys stayed at their dad’s for couple days, and John stayed at my house. I don’t remember having to do all that much nursing. Mostly I remember having a relaxing weekend and making it through couple seasons of the Sopranos that someone loaned us in box set.
Top: Our wedding guests included our parents, our kids, and my friend, Jen, who married us. Bottom: For our honeymoon we floated the Colorado for 18 days with a world class string quartet (but no showers) through the Grand Canyon.
All this comes back to me in a rush of memories as I try to do simple chores while I waiting for the surgeon to call. Much has changed. John and I are married, something we did very much on purpose about four years after that first knee surgery. He has helped raise my kids and I’ve gotten to share in the joy when two of his daughters each brought a beautiful, new human into the world.
There has been a little sickness, but so far, mostly health. And ’til death is a more of a comfort to me these days than it used to be when it brought on a sensation akin to vertigo. Admittedly this may be in part because our life expectancy suggests only two to three decades to go. But also, I know I have a pretty sweet deal.
And I’ve learned some things the long, hard way. Caregiving, it turns out, is not one-sided. The times I’ve been needed the most—with my sons at the beginning of their life and with my mom at the end of hers—have been the most profound experiences of my life.
The prayer wheel at the Sawtooth Botanical Garden where we married contained 10,000 prayers of Tibetan monks and the blessing of the Dalai Lama. We and our guests went around three times to release blessings: once for our closest loves, once for our community, and once for all beings on earth.
Of course we need each other. We need family members or friends to nurse us back to health and a midwife to welcome the baby and the pilot to fly us over the ocean to be with our dying parent. During COVID times we need staff at hospitals to say reassuring things to our loved ones as they go into surgery.
And we need the surgeon to call. Which he finally does after a little more than three hours, by which time I have stopped doing my half-hearted chores and am instead putting all my energy into staring at the phone and trying to remember to breathe.
“It went really well,” the doctor says, “And, wow those knees were worn out. Some of the worst I’ve ever seen!” I know this will please John, both because it confirms his rugged lifestyle, and because it means we didn’t waste time, pain, and money on unnecessary surgery.
I text his daughters and my sons and all the other people in our life who made me promise to let them know how surgery went. And then I go into the kitchen and my own knees buckle a bit, and I weep. This surprises me. Of course it is relief, I’m feeling, and also a recognition of all those blessings circling in the breeze. Of so much love.
Reader Question
I’m planning and upcoming post on resources for those who are primary caregivers for family members. If you have resources to share that have helped you through the day-to-day experience of being a caregiver, please email them to Laura@Laurastavoe.com. These can be books, podcasts, films, groups, websites, or even stories of your own experiences. I’m also interested to know whether COVID protocols have changed caregiving for you and how are you getting through. And as always, I’m interested to hear thoughts, questions or suggestions about Tending to Endings either by email or in the comments below.
If you would like to receive Tending to Endings each Friday, please leave your email here. Thank you for your interest!
Even with all of my writing and thinking about end-of-life matters, it is not easy for me to open a conversation with family members about death, mine or theirs. With friends, it’s easier, but interestingly, our conversation often turns to how difficult it is to have these conversations with family!
This week, I had the opportunity to visit via Zoom with someone who has far more experience with end-of-life conversations and who knows firsthand how important they can be. Norm Shrumm has devoted many years to hospice work and is currently Chaplain for St. Luke’s Hospice in Boise, Idaho.
Asking for Help
Many find it difficult to discuss end-of-life matters until a parent is already in a serious medical situation. By that point, it’s often the medical staff driving the conversation. Do you have anything to help us begin earlier, before there is a health crisis?
I think people are nervous for a variety of reasons. For one, there is grief in opening this conversation. Also people may fear that they will somehow get it wrong. One thing to know is that the elderly also feel the awkwardness about talking to their loved ones. As we approach the conversation, I think it helps to assume everyone is uncomfortable. Because everyone wants to protect everyone else.
The framework that has been useful for me with my dad that I offer to others is to ask one’s parents for help. We often say that we don’t want to be a burden to other people. And so, I would say to my dad: In the normal course of events, at some point I’m going to be in the position of having to make decisions for you. What would make this much less of a burden for me is if I had some idea of what you would want.
So, I’m the one who is asking—not, how can I help you—but, would you please help me because it is likely that I will be in that circumstance. I think it helps people realize that everyone has a role.
Another thing that can help is to make sure it is a two-way conversation. When I would sit with my dad, I would ask him want he wanted, and then I would also say, let me tell you what I would want.
One tool my family and I used that I would suggest for anyone who wants help with this conversation comes from a nonprofit organization called Five Wishes. They offer resources including the language of a living will, naming healthcare decision makers, and also questions that lead to discussions about values and priorities at end-of-life.
I brought copies of the handbook up to Seattle, where the rest of my family lives, and we set aside a couple days to page through it together. In this way, it wasn’t only about my parents. My siblings and I were all middle aged and so it was certainly relevant to us as well as our parents. And of course it happens sometimes that parents unexpectedly end up being the ones to have to make these decisions for their adult children.
That document let us walk through this process together in a way that was very tender. It was an imperfect process, and not everyone even finished. But it didn’t feel grim. It felt very loving, and it brought forth stories and lots of laughter as well as tears.
I would add that during this time where COVID has changed hospital protocols, it is even more important to have these conversations. Right now, the expectation of people gathered around a hospital bed making decisions for someone is not happening. So, all the more reason for people to have a conversation ahead of time. We need to be able to say to each other—I need you to help me with something. Because, to do nothing is not a good option.
Since the COVID crisis, Norm Shrumm has begun end-of-life conversations with his son, Kevin.
Allowing for Natural Death
And can you say more about why doing nothing is not a good option?
One of the questions I ask when people come onto hospice care is, How do you see this going? Help me to help you have the kind of ending you envision.
Most people will say they want to die peacefully at home and to be kept comfortable. But if decisions are not made clearly and communicated ahead of time, there is a danger of taking a very different course.
When the EMTs come upon a 98-year-old man who is unconscious with no pulse–unless they have more information–they have no choice but to begin pounding on his chest to try to get him back. This is because the healthcare system is driven by these defaults and driven by people avoiding liability.
One of the positive changes I’ve seen is in the language about how we talk about medical interventions. Rather than having a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) which to me sounds like I’m saying–I give you permission to abandon me if I’m struggling–the forms are beginning to use the language Allow Natural Death (AND), which seems a far better description of how most of us might want to be cared for in our last moments.
So the question is not, “Do I want to live or want to die?” Choosing CPR is not necessarily a choice to live, but it is a choice to get beat up en route to possibly waking up in ICU on a ventilator. The likelihood of getting someone back to baseline, especially someone elderly, is not good. And so there should probably be an acknowledgment that this question is not choosing between life and death but rather, what kind of treatment they want to experience.
If someone tells me, I want to die in my own home with my loved ones around me. Then, I say, You want an early hospice referral. That way, we can get you home with a team of people around you who are ready to stay the course and won’t intervene and do something that will bring about more difficulty.
Yes, No, Maybe
Sometimes I found the questions on the Advance Directive forms difficult because they seemed so definite. “Do you want to be on life support?,” for instance, seems more complicated at 55 than 98.” I always want to say, “Well it depends.” Can you say something about that?
Yes, first, all of these documents offer an open box that allows for modification. It doesn’t have to only be yes life support or no life support. You can include preferences in an Advance Directive such as, I am only willing to be put on a ventilator if there is a reasonable likelihood of my return to a good quality of life.
Of course, as we get older, what we mean by quality of life keeps changing and we can keep modifying that. I visit people in nursing homes who don’t know their families due to dementia and yet from what I observe, they have a good quality of life. So we have to be careful about being too hard and fast about our judgements.
I have a story from a chaplain I work with. A woman was on life support, and she and her husband had had this conversation ahead of time about what they each wanted. She had told him, she was only willing to be on life support for three days. On that third day, the husband tearfully told the team that by the end of the day, they needed to remove the ventilator because he had promised her that he would follow her wishes.
The doctors let him know they believed there was a chance for her recovery with a couple of more days of support. But he felt it was important to keep his promise. Ultimately the team and the husband decided to reduce the woman’s sedation, which is unpleasant but which also might give her the opportunity to interact. Within a few hours the woman was alert enough that she could answer questions on a white board. Someone asked her, “Do you want to stay on a ventilator for a couple more days? We think it could help.”
She wrote on the whiteboard, “Yes.”
And the husband was beside himself because she had been so adamant. He said, “Honey, what do you mean? You always said, only three days.”
She took back the whiteboard and wrote, “Change in perspective.”
So you can include preferences in your Advance Directive that allow for these changing circumstances.
Keep Talking
It seems to me that these examples point to the importance of continuing the conversation rather than answering the questions and sticking the paperwork in the drawer?
One of the things I asked of my family members during our Five Wishes gathering, was rather than saying no to any life support, would they instead allow for being placed on life support long enough to give time for family to gather. I was the one family member who no longer lived in the Seattle area, and I wanted the opportunity to be present if I could. At that time, my parents were in their eighties and my mom was already experiencing heart and kidney problems and needed dialysis.
About a year after that gathering, I visited my parents again and this time my mom looked even more frail. As I kissed her goodbye, I said into her ear, “Mom, I know a year or so ago I asked that people in the family be willing to be on life support until I get here. But, the fact that I live a half days journey away is on me. That is not your problem.”
I thought she would answer, Oh honey. That’s ok. I’ll still do it. But that’s not what she said. Instead she kissed me, and she said, “We have had a wonderful life.”
So, these ongoing conversations really invite us to complete our relationships while we can.
Art and Mildred Shrumm
Understanding Surrogacy
Can you say something about selecting a health surrogate and maybe especially something for those who have family members who have lost cognitive capacity due to Alzheimer’s or serious dementia? For me it felt more complicated because my mom could converse but not necessarily understand the context of her situation or her choices.
For a variety of reasons, naming a health surrogate, which may also be called a health agent or a medical power of attorney, is even more important than the paperwork. To have someone show up to talk with the medical team who knows your mind and who understands your wishes is a much stronger support to the team than a piece of paper. Medical professionals are more likely to follow the directions of a health agent than words on a piece of paper, and in fact, they will listen to them over the paperwork.
And it’s important to talk to that person about the decision. Some people who you might be inclined to select—maybe a sibling or a spouse—might say, “I could never take you off life support.” Stranger things have happened in the hospital. So it is important that the people around you and especially the people you select as healthcare decision makers understand your priorities.
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.
So, coming back around to that original question that we started with saying: Will you please help me because I may be in a situation to have to make decisions when you cannot, and I would rather have that information. That way, when the time comes, I won’t be making decisions about removing life support. Instead, I can be with you, sharing those last days with you and helping you towards that soft landing.
Laura and Jane Stavoe
More Resources
Thank you to Norm Shrumm for sharing his time, experience, and wisdom. Here are a few resources he recommends for those who want to learn more.
Dying Well: Peace and Possibilities at the End of Life, by Ira Byock, M.D. A palliative care and hospice physician shares his own insights with an aim at helping people experience less trauma and more peace at the end of life. Published in 1997, this book begins with an emotional and insightful account of Byock’s experiences during the death of his father. He is also the author of The Four Things that Matter Most and The Best Possible Care.
The Five Wishes website includes handbooks with guidance on a broad range of end-of-life issues and includes guidance towards finding information specific to your state.
For those who live in Idaho, the website Honoring Choices Idaho offers a number of templates and guides you might find useful.
If you would like to subscribe to Tending to Endings, please leave your name and email below. It is cost free and ad-free and I will not share your email. Tending to Endings aims to build community and conversation around end-of-life matters.If you don’t see a comment box below, you can get to the comments at the end of the post here. You may also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com. Thank you for your interest!
My journal entry was dated August 2017. John and I had finally gotten around to our anniversary camping trip though we married in June. I was journaling next to Marsh Creek when I wrote: I did not say goodbye to Elkhaven, and now the new owners are already in.
Elkhaven was the home John built in the mountains outside of Boise that became our family home for seven years during Gabe and Dylan’s grade school and middle school years. The boys were seven when John and I met, and they helped finish building the house before we moved in. After a day of work and play, we would grill steaks and potatoes over the fire. Then we would line our sleeping bags on the new house deck and look for Orion in the night sky before falling to sleep.
It was a storied place, the way all family homes are full of stories, some common and some more unique, like having to carry snowshoes in the car so we could climb up the ridge to get home in a storm, or waking up to a herd of elk outside our bedroom window, or spending weekends making an archery range or a tobogganing hill in the yard.
It was a home surrounded by trees and sky and trails and solitude. There were challenges and inconveniences. Friends considered it a wilderness adventure to come visit and at some point each spring our driveway would turn the consistency of cake batter. It was the home where I felt most at peace and most myself. I felt lucky to live there every day.
We left Elkhaven in 2011, but we didn’t know we were leaving for good. We decided to rent a small house in town for a variety of practical reasons: gas prices were high, and my teaching job became full-time, and the boys had busy high school schedules and had just learned to drive. I didn’t want to worry about them taking icy mountain roads to get home.
We figured, we would live in both places. The mint green rental house we found had pink carpet in the bedrooms and pheasant light fixtures in the entryway and an odd floor plan. But it was our part-time, temporary house. Elkhaven was home.
Only, life continued to pick up its pace, and over the next couple years, we spent but a few nights as a family up at Elkhaven. Eventually, when the kids started college and we decided to rent out our mountain home.
In the spring of 2017, when we put Elkhaven on the market, I spent long hours at the college and Gabe and Dylan were graduating from universities on opposite ends of the country. There were concerts and track meets and graduations requiring travel to attend. My mom was having cancer surgery and so after Gabe’s graduation in Lexington, Kentucky, I rented a car and drove to the hospital in Evanston, Illinois to meet my parents and sisters post-surgery. I didn’t have time for grief.
And so it happened in August of 2017 that I was sitting next to the creek with John on our belated anniversary trip and our only outdoor trip of the summer, when it occurred to me that a home I had loved more than any other was already gone.
Getting Elkhaven ready for sale (2017). Laura, Dylan, Jane, Gabe in front of the mint green rental (2011)
There are many reasons I don’t always honor losses in my life when they happen. Sometimes it is fear of the pain. Sometimes it is that I feel I need my energy for something else. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m losing until later. Sometimes it is old habit. Elkhaven was probably a combination of all of these. It certainly wasn’t the first time I postponed grief.
During my high school years I abruptly stopped swimming. Before that, I had spent many hours each day in a pool with a team I considered my family. Swim team went from being the most important part of my life and the holder of my biggest dreams to being nothing at all. There were a variety of reasons for that change that involved alcoholism and an eating disorder and a great deal of shame.
By the time I turned seventeen I began recovering and let go of much of the self-destructive behavior. But it would be years before I would get back in a pool again to swim. During those years, each time I thought or my swim team memories, I felt some combination of sadness and regret and longing and shame. Mostly I did my best to not think of it at all.
By the time I got in a pool to swim laps again, I was in my twenties and living in San Diego. A friend was competing in triathlons and I thought, why not? I began swimming masters swim workouts at the Carlsbad Pool and I remembered what I loved about moving through water. Swimming had been the one sport I tried as a kid that came naturally to me. And I found that even as an adult I enjoyed all of it: the hard work, the rhythm of swimming, the laughter with other swimmers between sets, the fluidity of moving through water.
Grief–the kind that moves me towards wholeness and healing–seems to involve some alchemy of stillness and action for me. I have to slow down enough to feel, but then, I can’t think my way through grief. It helps to do something that connects me to what was lost. In this case, to get in the pool and swim.
Swimming didn’t bring back my high school years or dreams. But those few years I competed in triathlons returned to me my love of swimming. Today I feel being a swimmer is always a part of me, the way I am always a writer and a teacher and a mom.
In this way, movement through grief seems more like an opening than a closing. Now when I think of my high school years, I do not feel regret or shame. I feel some nostalgia and a lot of gratitude. Memories of my swimming days make me smile. These days when I swim, whether I am in the surf near Maui or a lane at the West Boise Y, I am home.
The loss of my mom was new for me because I was able to grieve her in real time. I had left my job and my life was at a turning point and thanks to John’s work and savings, I didn’t have to rush back into a new career. Our society isn’t really set up to allow for this kind of grief process, so I feel incredibly fortunate it happened for me. I was able to spend days and weeks after her death falling apart and talking to friends and going for meandering walks on the hills and eventually writing a book.
The pace of my life allowed for such things and also for memory and sadness and gratitude and even joy to surface. Even now, small actions are the things that make me feel close to my mom: my hands in the dirt planting or doing a New York Times Crossword or pulling her jacket from the hanger to wear it on my walk.
Last month, we sold the last of the land that was in Elkhaven. I do not feel regret. We have a home we love on the edge of town with trails off the backyard and nights dark enough to see the stars. I feel grateful to live here everyday.
But Elkhaven is a loss, too. And this one I suspect is mixed up with the loss of those years when we still had kids at home and John and I were building a life as well as a house together.
And so, I asked the boys and John to drive up up to the mountains next weekend with me. Miraculously, they all say yes, Sunday afternoon is free. We will hike in the national forest that used to be our backyard and probably tell some Elkhaven stories and gather firewood for a friend. I will finally say goodbye to Elkhaven, and more importantly, thank you.
If you are interested in reading more about our Elkhaven Days, here is a piece that was published years ago in High Country News about the Perils of Spring.
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My first reaction upon hearing from my sister on Friday night that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died was noooooooo. It was resistance to the tumult and chaos that was about to ensue, still six weeks before the election. So many of us wanted her to hold on. She so wanted to hold on. My first reaction was self-centered fear.
But I have walked close to death recently and so it didn’t take but a minute to pull myself back, to pause and remember what this is. To whisper to the night: Thank you. Safe Passage. Much love. You were brilliant. Go in peace knowing what you gave us was more than enough. For, don’t we all deserve to be sent off on a wave of love? I want to be that love.
And then, what I knew next–RBG is still with us. We haven’t lost what matters most, so long as we pay attention.
I recently listened to a friend’s story of caring for her mother. Cat’s mother died only a few weeks ago and I got to sit on the bank of the Snake River in Hagerman and listen to her story of the long, hard illness and the quiet moments during caregiving, and the magic that happened between them in the days leading up to her mom’s death.
Cat said, “People keep asking if I’m alright, and my heart is actually OK. Grief is quickly followed by comfort and my relationship with my mom has grown even stronger. When I find that very quiet space inside of myself that’s where I can find her.”
And I knew what she meant. I do grieve the loss of being able to call my mom and talk through the election or the last book or whether the plant that surprised me in my yard is a flower or a weed. I miss being able to sit with her or travel with her or play a game of Scrabble.
But, also, I feel as close to my mom as I ever have. She is with me. So is my friend Susan and my mentor Pat and my grandma Jean. When I go to that quiet place within me, these soul friends welcome me. I rely on them.
It always feels tricky to write about things of the spirit that happen in such interior spaces. I worry it will sound like I’m trying to talk people into a particular belief, which is not my aim. So I’ll just say that my experience of death has changed as I’ve spent more time with those who are dying and especially since the death of my mom. One of the things I carry with me is that my relationship with my mom or my friend Pat or my friend Susan or my grandmother are transformed, but not ended.
I don’t fully understand any this. Sometimes I wish I came from a culture where interaction with the souls of those who have departed is accepted in everyday life—where they show up in dreams and stories and across the dinner table—because I don’t always have the language to talk about these experiences.
But I know it is true that my mom helps me every day.
So why not RBG as well? True, I didn’t know her personally. But her work transformed our culture and the way many of us see ourselves and the world. She is with us.
Like many of us, I am troubled by the fact that we seem to be living out the plot to a dystopian novel lately. We are told we are polarized. And maybe we are. Or maybe the loudest voices are and we are living in a culture that has incentivized and thus magnified the extremes: those willing to take up arms, those seeking to confound rather than to understand. Or maybe sometimes the person we identify as the fringe is someone acting on impulse having a particularly bad day.
None of this is to say that we aren’t standing–collectively and individually–on a precipice or that things couldn’t tumble in a variety of directions. My own sense, though, is that the choice before us is ultimately not between left and right. And it is not about finding some happy middle. Instead, I suspect the radical choice that matters is whether we are going to dig deep and find the courage to choose love? Or are we going to let fear have the day?
Last week I included a link to a podcast of an interview between Krista Tippett and angel Kyoda williams, a Zen priest, activist, and author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace. During the interview, williams describes this kind of love that relies on internal work and action in a way that I found helpful:
It is developing our own capacity for spaciousness within ourselves to allow others to be as they are — that that is love. And that doesn’t mean that we don’t have hopes or wishes that things are changed or shifted, but that to come from a place of love is to be in acceptance of what is, even in the face of moving it towards something that is more whole, more just, more spacious for all of us. Its bigness. Its allowance. Its flexibility. It’s saying the thing that we talked about earlier, of “Oh, those police officers are trapped inside of a system, as well. They are subject to an enormous amount of suffering, as well.”
I think that those things are missed when we shortcut talking about King, or we shortcut talking about Gandhi. We leave out the aspects of their underlying motivation for moving things, and we make it about policies and advocacy, when really it is about expanding our capacity for love, as a species
Later in the interview, williams identifies the kind of action that comes from that place of love:
I think that if we can move our work, whatever work we’re up to, whatever kind of desire that we have for our own development in life, to be willing to face discomfort and receive it as opportunity for growth and expansion and a commentary about what is now more available to us, rather than what it is that is limiting us and taking something away from us, that we will — in no time at all, we will be a society that enhances the lives of all our species.
And that is the phrase that makes my heart catch: no time at all. Tippett comments on it, too, the hope inherent in that statement, and williams confirms it is exactly what she means.
…we are evolving at such a pace — even what we’re experiencing now in our society, we’re just cycling through it. We’re digesting the material of the misalignment. We’re digesting the material of how intolerable it is to be so intolerant. We’re digesting the material of 400, 500 years of historical context that we have decided to leave behind our heads, and we are choosing to turn over our shoulders and say: I must face this, because it is intolerable to live in any other way than a way that allows me to be in contact with my full, loving, human self.
My mom, too, believed in this kind of love and the power of it to transform. She might express it differently, at least to me, her daughter. For, when I bring my fretting about the election and about the supreme court seat to the quietest place in myself, Mom responds with her half smile and a glint in her eye, Oh, Laura, so you think the fate of equality and our nation rests on one 87 year old woman staying on the bench?
And she is not trying to diminish RBG’s work or the importance of this election or what follows. She is reminding me that strategy and politics will not be enough to save us. For that we need a Love that includes all of us.
A Question for Readers
Thank you for reading Tending to Endings. In a future issue I am planning to write about ways to begin conversations with parents about end-of-life planning. Have you had conversations with your parents that have gone well or not so well? What did you learn? Or, have your kids brought the discussion to you? How did it go?
If you are willing to share your experience or thoughts or questions on this topic, please send an email (or a voice memo file if that is easier) to Laura@laurastavoe.com.
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