Tending to Endings – Page 9

August 14, 2020August 14, 2020

We’re Here

Tending to Endings (thirty-two)

Are you taking care of yourself?

This is a question friends, acquaintances and even strangers would ask me after learning I was a caregiver for my mom. Everyone was aware of statistics about how stressful caregiving is on the health of the caregiver. This is especially true of spouses of Alzheimer’s patients for which the trajectory of decline is often long with care needs increasing with time. For years, I had been asking my dad the same question.

When I left my job to live with my parents to help with my mom’s care after her cancer returned, I no longer knew how to answer the question honestly and succinctly. Do you mean have I eaten or showered in the last few days? Well, yes, probably. Do you mean am I physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually in balance? Of course not, and it would take too much energy to explain why that is not possible. During those days, a trip to the grocery store was self-care. It offered a change of scenery and time for a short phone call to a friend outside of the walls of the condo.

I have numerous friends who are primary caregivers for a spouse or parent, and I have been worried about them during these COVID times. They are caring for people who are already in fragile health and so they are more isolated than usual. They don’t have anyone coming in to give them a break. They are not able to go to yoga or play tennis; they can’t have company over for visits. Groceries have to be delivered! There is no break.

Ana and Patty were always only a phone call away when I was caring for my mom.

Early in March, my friend Debbie received word from her dad that her stepmom had cancer that would require six weeks of radiation therapy in Colorado. By the time Debbie arrived to help, Colorado was already on lockdown. The medical situation was dire and my interactions with Debbie were only through occasional texts. She sent pictures showing the snowstorm that almost kept them from radiation therapy.

I was worried about my friend and longed to talk with her, but she had little time for phone and her step mom could not be left alone. COVID protocols meant others couldn’t be called in to help.

Debbie texted me,

As soon as I get a chance, I’m going to cry. But it will have to be after a split feeding, a doctor appointment and the last feeding after which I need to keep my stepmom upright for thirty minutes while she is miserable because all wants to do is go to bed.

Oh how I understood that place. I sent my friend hearts and let her know I loved her.

Debbie has been home since mid-May and her stepmom is recovering well. The crisis has passed. When I asked Debbie about caregiving during COVID, she answered by comparing it to another time she was a primary caregiver at the end of her Mom’s life.

I’m not sure this will be helpful but what I felt this time was that the whole world had similar feelings as I was having, albeit for different reasons. This time, I didn’t feel so alone. When taking care of my mom, I felt isolated because others lived as though nothing had changed. For me, everything had changed.

It reminds me that I never know the particulars of a caregiving experience except for my own. I have a tendency to fill in the details with the worst possible scenarios. Debbie’s experience was full of difficulties and graces, too, much like my time with my mom.

Friends from work made a poem book for me to carry with me when I went to care for my mom. I treasure it still.

I’m not a fan of articles that tell you what to say in difficult situations as though we can short-cut our way to empathy. Whether Are you taking care of yourself comes across as a loving question or a pat cliché has to do with context and tone and whether I’ve had enough sleep.

But what is true for me is that I would rather my friends ask pat questions than back away out of worry about saying the wrong thing. Whether they say the right or wrong thing is not going to change the gravity of the situation. But their presence in my life, even from the sidelines, can make all the difference in how supported I feel.

At times I have been that friend who has backed away. I told myself I was giving my friend privacy (without asking if that was what she wanted). Usually that distance was born of fear. As a result, I have missed opportunities to learn, to grow, to be a friend.

Sometimes being a friend to someone in dire circumstances is difficult not because there is so much to do, but because there is not much that can be done. I couldn’t give Debbie what I thought she needed most, which was a break and some rest. I often felt like I was bugging her when I would ask things like have you been able to go for a walk? And I felt like the words I had to offer were far too small to match her situation.

It doesn’t always feel helpful to stay in touch with someone during critical times. But looking back at Debbie’s and my long thread of texts which sometimes were despairing and sometimes philosophical and sometimes funny—texts that sometimes involved her telling me, no, she really could not fit in a walk that day—I am very grateful we stayed in touch.

There are definite advantages to having young mom friends who can send photos like this one of Josie! Photo Credit: Jenna Petrykowski.

During the last months of my mom’s life, when my father and I were living in the caregiving bubble that sometimes felt like chaos and other times like a cocoon, I had no energy for friendships. And yet, I needed my friends more than ever.

And now thinking back to that time, I see my friends as being central to how I got through. They sent cards and texts and voice mails. They responded to the sunset photo I sent them with hearts. They answered when I called on my walk and let me spill my sadness and exhaustion into the short time we had to talk together. They sent me poems and really good pears; they took online Scrabble turns late into the night; they sent photos of their babies they knew would make me smile.

What I needed from my friends during that time was not privacy so much as grace. I had very little to give. Still, my friends stayed. They were thousands of miles away, and yet I remember them as being with me in that cocoon of a condo during that sacred time. It made all the difference that they kept reaching out, each saying, one way or another, we are here.

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August 7, 2020August 7, 2020

Poem Gifts

Tending to Endings (thirty-one)

Coping with loss has never been my strong suit. There have been times in my life when I have gone to great lengths in an attempt to avoid the repercussions: move across the country, take up a new obsession, fall in love. Sometimes I’d do all of those at once, as when, in my twenties, after fleeing a destructive relationship, I took up triathlons and found a new state, a new job, and a new boyfriend. Major changes provided temporary distractions, but of course ultimately were not up to the task.

Grief waits. One day you are plodding along an empty road in Nampa, Idaho, with only the high pitch of grasshoppers and the heat of high noon to keep you company. You are the sixty-fourth mile of a half Ironman, and the only thing left in your belly is loss. Your soul knows, you have not left anything behind—not the fear or the anger or the grief.

My friend Stephanie used to say it was time to worry about her when she would break out Mary Oliver’s book of New and Selected Poems. Oliver’s poems are something I turn to as well when my life is in transition, which generally means I’m in the midst of a great deal of loss.

Poetry gives relief but not distraction. Solace, maybe? A way through things that cannot be easily understood. Certain kinds of poems remind me in the middle of my grief that I am not alone. That wholeness lies beneath this hurt, the way a hummingbird coming into view on a long walk on a sad day reminds me that joy, too, is mine.

Since poetry is one of the ways I get through grief, I have wanted for a while to share some of my favorites. I realize poetry is not everyone’s thing, but years of teaching writers—third grade through adult—has made me think that poetry has a broader audience than many think with the right approach.

My friend, Mary Ellen, a poet who also taught middle and high school English for many years, once shared with me that she taught her students that poetry was not something to figure out like a puzzle. Instead it was a place to discover things, more like playing in a mud puddle where you might find a beautiful quartz stone and feel the cool earth squish beneath your fingers. I love this analogy of seeing poems not as problems to solve but as places to play.

Play cannot be rushed. In fact, play has to be an immersive experience in order to actually be play. Which leads me to another reason poems sometimes are forgotten. They take time. They aren’t skim-able. To receive a poem, I must slow down and open up. Which may be poetry’s other gift. The slowing, the opening as much as the poem.

My students and I would read a poem three times before we started talking about it: first silently and then aloud together and then again while we would underline words we liked the sound of or star things that jumped out at us or circled words we didn’t know. We always began talking about the things we noticed and things we felt rather than jumping to what the poem means. I have found this same process useful with art forms that I find more intimidating such as classical music or visual art. Rather than try and figure it out, I try to notice things, to take it in.

These days even the first couple lines of a well-loved poem calms me, meets my grief halfway, makes me feel known.

Before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things.
Kindness, Naomi Shihab Nye

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,…
Mending Wall, Robert Frost

August of another summer, and once again / I am drinking the sun…
The Pond, Mary Oliver

My favorite way to read poetry is not on a screen, but rather, from a book in the dark of early morning as part of my meditation time. Currently, one or two each morning from Linda Hogan’s Dark. Sweet. Hogan has been writing gorgeous poetry and prose for decades but she is new to me. I have a feeling I will carry her work within me like I do Mary Oliver.

To be held / by the light / was what I wanted, / to be a tree drinking the rain,
To Be Held, Linda Hogan

The world of poetry is vast, and I enjoy reading many different kinds for different reasons. The ones I’ve included here are some that have particularly helped me during hard times. And, of course, if you find one you love, all of these authors have collections available in print for you to read in the dark hours of morning.

Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way

Another favorite by Mary Oliver

A Ritual to Read to Each Other, William Stafford

Tear, by Linda Hogan

Widening Circles, Rainer Marie Rilke (translated and read by Joanna Macy)

Marie Howe wrote a gorgeous collection about grief and loss, What the Living Do. The title poem from that collections is here.

Donald Hall’s book Without is a full book of poems about his wife, Jane Kenyon, and their journey through her cancer. The title poem is here.

And here is one by Jane Kenyon that has long been a favorite from her book Otherwise: Let Evening Come, and another, Twilight: After Haying.

I subscribe to Brainpickings a weekly newsletter by writer Maria Popova. Most issues include at least one poem that would fit well in this collection as well as many other gems. Most recently an issue includes Patti Smith reading Emily Dickinson.

If you have poems or other forms of art you turn to during times of great change, I’d love to hear about them in the comments. You can also reach me at laura@laurastavoe.com.

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July 31, 2020July 31, 2020

Being Here

Tending to Endings (thirty)

Last Thursday John and I slipped inflatable kayaks off the bank into Marsh Creek and the rain came pelting down. We were paddling a couple miles of water to the camp we had saved for our family gathering. Our kids would arrive the next day and we were floating this section hoping it would be tame enough for the grand girls to paddle over the weekend, and also, a bit of adventure for ourselves.

Marsh Creek which borders the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness has long been a magical place for me. The first summer we were together, John and I paddled this stream during higher water, stuffing tents and food and sleeping bags into our hardshell boats. We slept at Big Hole camp where creeks converge to become the headwaters of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. It felt right to return to this water nineteen years later during a year filled with so much tumult and change.

The current of river beneath my boat has a way of bringing me to the place my body is. The water this late in summer is sometimes only ankle deep. I needed to pay attention to avoid perching the boat onto rounded stones or careening into the marshy grass. About a mile into our float thunder rolled through the mountains and echoed throughout the valley. The sky darkened; the air cooled; rain fell hard, turning the surface of the water into a percussion instrument. I let my boat spin in the current, the rain fall on my face. I could breathe.

We were about a mile into our float when the rain made a new, more rapid sound. White pellets gathered in the current. John and I yelped and then broke into laughter as we paddled through the hailstorm, our skin stinging, our bodies leaning towards the deepest channel, eyes squinting towards shore, looking for camp.

I was not laughing when we left town early that morning. I was weary and unsure whether we should even hold our family campout. One of John’s daughter’s and her husband decided to stay home due to Covid concerns and we didn’t blame them. We would be outside, but still, there were fourteen of us (now twelve). Boise’s cases were surging and hospitals, filling.

Also, George, a close friend of ours and a mentor to John was in the hospital having suffered a serious heart attack only days before. He had been without oxygen for ten minutes before his wife, Melinda, found him and gave CPR. He made it to the hospital where the doctors induced a coma. Given the amount of time he was without air, doctors did not offer much hope for recovery.

It did not seem right for us to be out of cell range during such dire times.

Like so many decisions, lately, this one felt confusing and ethically fraught. Whether to camp, whether to march, whether to go for a walk with a friend, whether to support schools opening or staying closed.

I didn’t even know what to write for my column, not because I was out of ideas but because a foundational premise for Tending to Endings is that sometimes the difference between a tragic end of life and a difficult but beautiful one is in the intimacy that comes from paying attention to one another. It comes from community.

But, how do you show up for each other when hospitals must institute no visitor rules in to keep Covid from spreading and family who are primary caregivers must isolate to protect the fragile health of those they care for? My blog was one more place I felt ungrounded and confused.

There is a tendency I have to want to skim the surface of life during chaotic times. As though I can skip over the hard part without feeling it, like a stone skittering across the surface of a lake. I can tell when I am living this way when I have the sense of my life being on hold until things change, presumably for the better. It feels like half living.

We did not cancel the campout. We let Melinda and other friends know that we would be in the mountains for a few days, but we would be back and ready to help in whatever way possible on Sunday. We dropped a note and a jar of apricot jam on their doorstep. We continued to pray. All of it seemed so flimsy in the face of so much.

That night, the rain paused while John grilled steaks over an open fire and we set up our tent on the bank. The moment we pulled our sleeping gear into the tent, the clouds let loose again with a ceaseless rain.

Throughout the night, John and I woke again and again to the world brightening in a flash of light, our hearts thumping in the pause, thunder cracking and rolling through the land. The rain drummed on bark and leaves and ground and our dome of tent. Beneath it all was creek song. We slept cradled in earth and each others arms. It was a spectacular storm that that lasted until morning.

The crew at the trailhead. Caroline and Gabe ran up the mountain from the other side.

By the time the kids arrived that afternoon, the sun burned off the fog and the air felt clean. Still, true adventures rarely run smoothly. Saturday we planned a two mile, family friendly hike up to an alpine lake. Only after we passed the three mile mark and the trail continued to rise over another ridge, we pulled out the GPS and learned we had .8 miles more to go up to 8400 feet. We had underestimated the climb by half.

We hadn’t brought lunch. Knees ached. Stomachs growled. Everyone was tired and cranky. John and I split a measly Lara bar that bragged on the wrapper about how little it contained. The grand girls ate their Pringles before they made it to the top.

Just about the time I was ready to nap by the side of the trail, I heard the loud whoops ahead and Tesla came rushing back down towards us, her eyes sparkling.

“Worth it?” I asked.

“So worth it!” she waved us up the last few steps. “The lake is huge!”

Before long, John and Dylan were catching cutthroat one after another, and Jay was cleaning fish and starting a fire. We scooped tender white fish off the warm rocks with our fingers. We filtered water from the lake and refilled our bottles. We swam in the cool water and lazed on shore. We reveled in abundance, in serenity, in togetherness.

Brains are excellent for some kinds of knowing: science and data and insights based on prior experience. But for me to feel whole, or even, if I’m honest, to get through a day well, I also need intuition. Maybe you call it spiritual guidance or energy or flow. For this kind of knowing, as my friend Louise says, I need to be where my feet are.

I don’t always have to get to wilderness to drop back into my body, but it helps. I know which way to lean by paying attention to where I am, not only with my head, but with all of me.

It was a beautiful four days. Once we were in the wilds, I never questioned our decision to camp. Not because I knew we were completely safe, but because I felt connected again to the whole of things. Intuition and spiritual reliance do not promise error-free living. Only that it will be life; and nothing will be wasted.

When we arrived home tired and happy, John pulled up his email. There was a message from George who was very much alive, and able to write at length about his adventure. The subject line read: Your prayers helped/I got out of the hospital last night! George was home. We could hardly believe it.

He began by writing, “I don’t want ANYONE to feel they did not have a part in my continuing to live.” He listed the doctors, the friends who showed up, the ones who left voice messages, the 911 operator who guided Melinda through CPR and reassured her she was doing fine. He was brimming in that very thing I was so sure was missing during this Covid time–that feeling of community, of being loved.

Nothing was fixed in the world after our trip. Well, maybe George. But he, too, will have a long recovery. We will be here to help in ways that will feel flimsy and far too small.

Maybe that is the biggest illusion when I get ungrounded. That the small things don’t matter and aren’t worth doing in the face of impending tragedy or global crises or systemic injustice. In the face of perpetual uncertainty.

How many times have I learned they are exactly what matters? A day, a heartbeat, a step. I just don’t get to control when or how or in what way they matter. A spectacular storm in the mountains reminds me: of course I do not carry this world on my shoulders. And it would be silly to think that was the point. I keep showing up with my kind note, my little story, my jar of jam. It’s how we weave a cradle for one another. How we know, we are all here.

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July 17, 2020July 17, 2020

Band of Brightness

The little band of brightness that we call our life is poised between the darkness of two unknowns.

— John O’Donahue, Anam Cara

Tending to Endings (twenty-nine)

This week I am sharing a short passage from the manuscript I wrote following my mom’s death. This section comes from the final chapter of the book and covers the time early last summer when I was spending my days hiking and grieving and writing and making apricot jam.

Maybe it is because I’m back making apricot jam that I returned to this section, but when I did, I was reminded of how much my mother’s example helps me still, particularly through trying times.

Sometime soon I plan to collect stories from readers about people who help them through hard times. Please feel free to send me yours. Who serves as your teachers even after they have gone? And thank you to my friend Patty for getting my started by sending me a story of her uncle, which I will include in that installment!

Next week I will be taking a break from digital sites including my own, so there will not be a post of Tending to Endings on the 24th. I will be back with an essay for Friday, July 31.

Excerpted from Band of Brightness, “Home”

I carry my mother with me. I always have. Sometimes I have attempted to extricate myself from her out of fear I would never hear my own voice or I wouldn’t be able to distinguish mine from hers. Strong mothers are a gift—they show us we can be strong. But sometimes they also make it hard to know ourselves.

All of us raised by mothers carry at least some of their secrets. We are watching our mothers before they are even aware that we are separate from them.

My mom always loved and cared for me, but during some of my youngest years, I thought she did not like me as much as I wanted her to like me. Today I see that time in such different light. I believe what I sensed was her fear of the soft places in herself that she learned to make sturdy through intellect and values and humor and distance. Places that my young, sensitive self was trying to pry open.

My mother was a survivor of her own childhood. And I was a daughter who arrived with no knowledge of her past and with the belief that anything I witnessed had something to do with me.

It took me well into my thirties to recognize that I had an exceptionally good childhood. It took me until her death to recognize how consistent and compassionate and rare her form of strength was. She wanted her life to be an example. And it was.

In the late eighties Mom went through this time where she joined an organization called Beyond War and strengthened her commitment to nonviolent action. She got involved in many projects and she hung a photo of the earth taken from space in our living room. Into almost every conversation she would eventually inject the statement, “We are one,” as though it was the obvious conclusion to whatever we had been saying. To her the words were profound, but I was a literature major at the time, and to me it sounded like a trite cliché with awkward grammar.

Thirty years later, I realize that even though she stopped saying it with such frequency, Mom lived—we are one—like a practice. She lived it in the quiet way she connected to people she met on the bus or in a restaurant. In the way she fed the birds outside our kitchen window and then sprinkled seed on the ground for the squirrels. In the way she would bring neighbors to our patio and children to her garden even after her children had grown. She lived it in the way she would not criticize someone who disagreed with her. She would speak her mind, but she would not try to take someone else down. Friends who disagreed knew where she stood, and they loved her.

Not that everyone loved my mom. Mom was a letter-to-the-editor writer and one time she wrote a letter to the local paper making a case for peaceful negotiation rather than military response to some international crisis that was escalating. It was in the early days of online comments, before the concept of trolls and before I understood how mean comments would eventually get. Someone wrote a response to my mom’s letter calling her a stupid old lady who believes fairy dust was going to save us.

I was hurt and worried for my mom. I was angry someone would say something so disrespectful. I called my mom hoping she didn’t even see the comment. But she just laughed and said, “That doesn’t hurt me, Laura. I think it’s funny that someone would think something like that. They clearly don’t know me.”

My mom was strong.

When I meditate or hike in the foothills or stand on my yoga mat, I sense a connection to people and animals and rivers and sky. I sense that oneness with the world.

But, my mom went further than that. She treated people on a daily basis as though that connection was true. She knew that what hurts one, hurts all. What nurtures one, nurtures all. She spent her time on earth living the nurture part of that equation, the best she knew how.

I think back to that planet earth photo in my childhood home, now, during a time when our global situation is bringing home my mom’s mantra to us all. Maybe fast enough, maybe not, but it is becoming obvious, our connectedness. We can argue if we want.

Still, we are one.

Thank you for reading Tending to Endings, and I will look forward to posting again on July 31. If you are new here or interested in a rerun, Room For Grief seems relevant though it was written in March when we first went into quarantine.

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Much love,

Laura

July 10, 2020July 16, 2020

Heart Art

Tending to Endings (twenty-eight)

When the towers in New York were hit by airplanes, I was the mother of twin six-year-olds and an English teacher to classrooms full of middle and high school students at a community school in Idaho. In the days that followed the tragedy, I set aside the planned for curriculum and instead, my students and I wrote poems. We eventually turned it into literary journal that included contributions from each student and faculty in the school. The theme of the first annual RiverRock Review was hope.

I’ve been thinking lately about the the relationship between creativity and upheaval. When my foundation is shaken and nothing makes sense, creativity suddenly feels meaningful, worthy, even comforting. I always know art is important, but there is something about crises or loss or major life transitions that makes creative pursuits one of the few endeavors worthy of the conditions. Art doesn’t have to make sense.

During the years I taught creative writing through a nonprofit arts center in Boise, I often worked with students whose lives were in transition. Some of the most powerful writing came from students at the school for pregnant and parenting teens, the cancer unit at the hospital, the juvenile detention center. Having lost many of the things that had defined their former life, these writers were seeing things anew. It was a gift to bear witness to their journey.

Sometimes I think all of the cooking is going on these days is part of that same impulse to create during a time of collective grief. As Grace Paley demonstrates in The Poet’s Occasional Alternative, it is an art form that is more dependable in terms of satisfaction than writing a poem.

The painted rocks and crocheted hearts and sidewalk murals feel part of this creative energy, too. As does gardening, which has been on an upswing. My father, who spent much of the first spring after my mom’s death planting flowers, tells me this year he cannot find his usual plants at the nursery because so many people are growing gardens.

We aren’t always very good in our culture about encouraging creativity. We remind each other to exercise and eat and sleep right, but we really don’t remind each other to be creative very often, though I am sure it is as important as being intellectually and physically active. I don’t mean creating art for galleries or for the masses, but rather, exercising the muscle. I mean playing around with music or words or the dirt in the garden.

Especially when the ground beneath me is shifting, creativity helps me to get from one day to the next. One of the reasons I have so many details from my mom’s experience to use in these posts is that I journaled during the time I was caregiving. I didn’t know whether I would ever share any of that material publicly, but I found comfort in putting sentences around the experience.

I realize writing isn’t comforting for everyone. I love messing around with with words, but if someone hands me a colored pencil and tells me to draw something, I usually feel anxious. I know for many people, the opposite is true. When it comes to creating during hard times, I think it helps to pick a form that feels more like play than performance.

And now when so many people are separated from those they love most, it occurs to me that art is another way we find each other.

In The American Book of Living and Dying, authors Richard Groves and Henriette Anne Klauser tell a heart wrenching story of a four-year-old with leukemia on hospice care whose mom is incarcerated. The girl loves to draw pictures, particularly of sunflowers and she even paints one on her bald head, which becomes her signature. The mother, Angie, is encouraged to engage in art therapy from the prison, and the two begin to share drawings as a way of healing relationship wounds and connecting. Years later, Angie eventually teaches art therapy in a senior center using her daughters pictures and experience as a model.

Though my mom died the spring before Covid-19 isolations, she was separated by an ocean and a cognitive disease from many loved ones. The memory book we put together brought many of her friends to her during her final days. And people added their own projects. My aunt quilted a blanket using soft textures and my mom’s favorite shades of blue. My dad brought moms favorite Hawaiian flower arrangements to her bedside. My sisters made playlists from old favorites like the Carpenters “Close to You,” and Cat Steven’s “Peace Train.”

Hearing about how much my mom responded to music, my son Dylan sang a beautiful version of Iron and Wine’s “Trapeze Swinger” and sent the file to our phones so we could play it for my mom in her last days.

My mom received these creative offerings. Even after she could no longer talk, they would make her smile. They were a form of connecting when very little else held meaning.

Dad’s garden. Dylans music. Carol’s blankets. Creativity moves things. It feels good when it is hard to feel good about anything. It honors moments when everyday tasks, like turning to page 373 of the textbook after your country has sustained a tragedy, feel wrong. Instead, you write a poem about hope. You build a castle in the sandbox with your toddler. Plant a garden, make a quilt, curate a slide show. You sing a song.

Other Resources

Alive Inside, is a powerful and inspiring documentary about the power of music on those living with dementia.

The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, by Julia Cameron is a book that offers a path for reconnecting with creativity and shedding some of the obstacles that get in the way of creative expression.

Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem Making, by John Fox is a book about writing poetry as a way of healing. It offers information and exercises.

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