Death

Many of you are familiar with Dr. Randy Pauch’s Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. For those of you who have not seen this amazing lecture, informed by his journey with terminal pancreatic cancer, here is the YouTube video of the lecture:

In his book, he ends it with a request for information from those of us whose own parents died when we were young. My mother suggested I write to him; the letter follows. I do not expect him to read it, for I am sure he is deluged with mail of all kinds these days. I did, however, think the letter was a good summation of my own thinking about how to help children who face the death of a parent.

Dear Dr. Pausch,

I am writing to you because I understand you seek first-hand reflections from those of us who lost our father at a young age.  I was six when Daddy died from a MI following a year of being in the hospital off and on due to viral myocarditis.  I can remember my mother coming and taking me on Fridays to see him at lunchtime.  We would stand outside of the ICU in the grass, and the nurse would open the window so I could see Daddy and talk to him.  Thankfully, the ICU was on the first floor!  In 1977, children were not allowed into the ICU proper, but my mother wanted me to see Daddy with my own eyes.  She is a nurse, which I think helped inform her understanding differently than the prevailing wisdom of the time.  Now, unless there was an issue of infection, we would never keep a child out of the ICU.

You may wonder how it is that I know this fact.  I grew up to become an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and have worked as both a hospital and hospice chaplain.  I did my Residency in Clinical Pastoral Education at RUMC in conjunction with the JMSHCC.  My clinical rotation was as the first chaplain for their stand alone Trauma Unit.  Prior to that, I worked at the UNCH and with CDS, where I helped families facing the brain death of a loved one.  In January, I left Hospice and became the Support Services Director for the CCA.  I offer to you my credentials for two reasons: 1) I want you to know I understand grief and bereavement issues as both a mourner and as professional; and 2) I want to spark your imagination about the potential to use the deep shit of one’s life for good–even if that shit happens as a young child.

Daddy’s death taught me some very fragile, yet important lessons, at six.  Freud would call it my “primary narcissistic trauma.”  I call it the moment my DNA changed.  Whoever I might have been without his death at that moment, ceased to exist.  The only potential future before me included the loss of my father.  I would travel without his presence.  Period.  Every moment of the time of being told about his death is real to me still, but so is Daddy.  In today’s grief lingo we speak of “continuing bonds.”  Even death does not end our relationships with those most dear to us.  One need not believe in an afterlife  in order for these bonds to exist. (I dream of one, but I do not know one exists.) The way I put it to the families I care for is this: The love in our hearts keeps them alive within us.  Nothing can separate us from that love.  It never dies as long as we remember.

Remembering is the greatest gift.  I know your children are young, but I remember more of being 0-6 than any of my peers.  Why?  My mother was keen to ask me to continually retell my Daddy stories.  Even as it broke her heart, she listened and cajoled.  I am 37 now, but I still remember being on a National Airlines flight at 3 months of age.  I cannot, however, remember what I did last Friday night!  Why?  My theory is that my young memories became reinforced by the storytelling so much they became marked within my mind and saved as permanent not temporary.  When I was six, it was not a big deal to think back two years and remember playing with Daddy at the park.  Now, I would be hard pressed.  So, my first thought is your wife needs to be committed–even when she cannot breathe or hardly get out of bed–to ask your children to tell her stories about you.  The whole extended family would also need to be encouraged in this regard.

Secondly, leave for your children as many personalized letters and videos, etc. as you can and make them age appropriate through college and young adulthood.  I know this will be the most devastating thing, but I suspect you have already begun this process.  My father did not do this at all.  In fact, I have a rock in my living room with his penciled “Jack” on it as my only reminder of his handwriting.  (He sent the rock to my Grandmother as a joke because our dog kept bringing her rocks as tokens of love when she visited.)  I often ask Mother if he would be proud of me…what he would think of my work…if he loved me?  Although in my heart I believe these things to be true, how much the better to have them before me.  You come across to me as a man of good humor and realism–don’t forget that in these remembrances.  Your children will look to them to decipher who you are, and who they are that is you.  They will be both mirror and guide, so set reasonable expectations for their life coupled with a humor-filled dose of “Daddy was a human being, after all.”  Losing a parent at a young age immortalizes the parent–Daddy died and climbed onto a pedestal in short order.  Some of this is inevitable, but I also think you can show your tender underbelly.

So many parents I have worked with as they are dying want to protect their children from the inevitability of the pain of their loss.  They want to delay it as much as they can.  This is not helpful, because then the death appears as a trauma.  When someone is sick and dies–as in your case and in my own story–warning shots can go across the bow so as to make the death (loss) expected and not a surprise.  Children over the age of four can usually handle some form of warning shots, especially reinforcing that you are indeed sick.  Depending on emotional maturity, the ages of four to six may be able to handle the possibility of death.  Over six, in my opinion they need to know death is not only a possibility, but also a likelihood.  I often use the analogy of giving your child Motrin for fever: You never give the whole bottle, but a dose at a time helps them to heal.  In the same way, I suggest dosing out these warning shots.

Lastly, I urge you to write letters to your children for when they are 25.  In these letters you need to say one very important thing: Goodbye.  I wish I had been able to say that to Daddy.  My father was healing at the time of his death, and as a result, we went on a little vacation before he was to go back to work July 5th.  He died on that trip the morning of June 28, and so I went from seeing him leave with Mother for a few private days one morning (I stayed at my Grandmother’s.), to having Mother tell me of his death the next.  Most of the 400 deaths plus I have attended afforded some opportunity for the family to say goodbye, which our death rituals do as well.  But the opportunity for the one dying to say it rarely is taken, if even there is the time and space for it.  “Goodbye” is powerful and healing.

You know, there really is no “right” way to do things here.  This totally sucks!  At the same time, there are things I learned as a child that helped me become a tender and intelligent woman and chaplain.  Truth and kindness go a long way–for yourself and for others.  I do not know what will happen when you die, for you or for them.  What I do know is that healing, which is coming to that place where a loss is integrated into our lives, and a rich and full life is possible with great and terrible loss.  Your death will change their future, their DNA.  The loss is that profound.  And with that change great potential will open for them to use that loss to make their lives more, not less.  This will be their choice, just as it was mine.  May the teaching and loving you do now and the legacy you leave them help inform this choice.

In kindness and solidarity,
Jacqueline Hope Derby

I find myself on a precipice. The mountain climbed…the sorrow of a broken childhood, of a broken child behind me. The battle scars emblazon my side, my hands, my feet. I carried the first most horrid of crosses. I survived the plunge of the sword, for John tried to take my very life away by stealing my spirit, my youth, my hope. I did not die. I would not die.

I waited a terribly long time to open to the nakedness love and intimacy require. I ventured first with those safe, manageable, less. I thought I met my equal; I was wrong. In choosing to look away when he lied, I pretended he would not lie to me. He did. I almost died, and almost spent the wellspring of my hope on the despair I became enveloped in when he lied and left. I did not die. I would not die.

Hope; she is my constant friend. She stands with me on this ledge between the past and the future, so uncertain but always imagined. I see us standing against the wind, which whips through our hair. We laugh. We cry. We dream the most amazing of dreams for my life. The sun blazes and the sky dances with colour as we put to bed the despair of this last season of my life. How strange I find it that the setting sun seems to fall so much faster than the heat of the noonday sun. Why?

So my dear love, here I come. Are you ready?

Let us be clear about what I need from you, for I am completely clear about what I will offer you. I need fusion. I do not pine for fireworks shattering the sky with a million stars here for only a moment. I do not desire the rapid fast burn of a nuclear love. I survived one of those, and the apocalypse devastates everyone in its path. No. Give me fusion. Give me two whole people coming together creating a fire between them impossible alone. Leave the divided spirit, the divided desires, the divided will, the divided atom behind. Join. Merge. Intertwine with me. Let us be more than we could have ever imagined on our own. Leave the ashes of simple fireworks to fall back to the earth. Let us be a galaxy all our own.

I will give you creativity. Nothing will be boring. I will always find new ways to laugh and play. I will give you integrity. I will tell you the truth. I will be kind. I will be generous. (Shall we compete to see who can be more so?) I will embrace you as you are, and dream your dreams of all you can do and create for this world. I will give to others. I will not forget you. I will write my name on your heart. I will cheer you on towards your prize. I will pray for kindness and doors to open to you. I will place a soothing balm on your wounds when the doors crash into your broken body. I may not pick you up–for you will have to do that for yourself–but I will lay beside you and kiss you sweetly until you have the strength to rise. I will question. I will fold the laundry. I will be my own person. I will have my own life and friends. I will be good to your family and friends. I will forgive. I will believe in you no matter what they say. I will trust you. I will honor the man you are. I will value your gifts and never think you a pansy. I will fight for you, and at times with you. I will apologize. I will seek your forgiveness. I will deserve it. I will love you. I will fuck you. I will lay you down. I will tenderly caress you. I will make love to you and discover your body anew even as the years pass us by. Every wrinkle, every laugh line, every sag, every cell will be counted with affection. I will embrace your changes. You will be mine, and I will be yours.

Are you ready? Here I come.

Please let me into your secret places. Let me see you. Let me love only you. I know we have it in us to do this together and to create something more than we can possibly imagine.

I stand on the precipice with Hope beside me.

Acknowledgment: The inspiration for this piece comes from Sarah McLachlan’s song “Answer.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Philip Brooker

Mother has a favourite Cynthia Clawson song that she is unable to find anywhere. She only remembers one line and sings it regularly, “I am on a journey Lord.” Over and over again I will hear her lilting and crackled voice sing this line to me. She longs to hear the song again. Where does the longing come from? Does she feel like she is perpetually on a journey? Is she clinging to God when the going is hard and tough? Is she asking for understanding as she continues to grow (and grow up), even at 70? Is she letting God know she loves the process more than the destination? Is she staking her claim?

I do not know what it means to mother–this song, this line–but I do understand what it means to stake a claim on the journey of life. I feel I am there too. Life is change, but it often comes with pain. In order to grow up or morph, we have to tear down the old and bring in the new. I find myself in the tearing down phase right now, which feels amazing and hard and painful and hopeful–all at once! I feel pulled in, introspective, jumbled, lost, searching. Not unlike the butterfly in its pupal stage, I find myself a pupil at the feet of those who are teaching me now. Some teach me through interaction; others through reading. I am also being taught by my memories. “I am sitting here wanting memories to teach me; to see the beauty in the world through my own eyes,” is how the group Sweet Honey in the Rock put it in one of their songs.

I seek transformation and transcendence. I seek love unlike I have ever known it before. This love flows to me, in me, around me, beyond me. I do not want to be the same Jacqueline–not because I do not see the beauty of my being and life to this point, but because I see it and its innate potential for so much more. I see how I step away from extraordinary for good enough. I do not seek perfection. However, I do want more from myself than to simply get the deep connections, I also want to put the plug in the wall and let the juice flow! I see all the time I invest into understanding, but not into the actual living out of my dreams due to the cesspool of fear left behind by those who broke my heart and my own frail ways of coping at times. I keep unwinding the spool of thread, but I feel I put it back on the shelf neat and tidy. I live to the fear of it all falling apart, coming undone, getting painful and messy too much of the time. I need to hurl the ball of string off the bow as a streamer of joy in my life!

I find myself in the stillness of my own quiet temple, yet with an ever present messy messy mind. I have such a messy mind! I unwind the spool, and cringe at how I need to let it go free. The only reprieve or solace I find is in the quiet. I do not watch television. I do not listen to music. I hate talking on the phone. I avoid friends and family. I play quietly with Emma. I delay at answering personal emails. Not completely–for when I need them, I draw them all close, but for the most part I find these days rather isolated. I find I need so much time to think and to heal, for this is my ultimate treasure now.

In the stillness I find healing. Not a panacea, where everything has been righted and the planets aligned again. No. Healing where the tilt exists, but I know how to lean into it now and not lose my balance healing. For some reason, when I received this photograph my friend sent me from his time in the woods of France I felt I was IN the photograph. No, not there physically, but in my heart. In the stillness of the stream. In the stories hidden beneath its loam. In the fold of the branches. In the seeking of the leaves for a bit of light. In whisper of woods. In the heartbeat of nature. In the strength of the root. In pride of the tree trunks. I am in the song, in the breath, in the scurry, in the ache of life right now. I am in that place of chaos and clarity. I am in love–with my own heart, with life, with others.

I am on a journey Lord…

PHOTO CREDIT: Philip Brooker

As I have been pondering the strange working of my inner child, who at the moment seems to be more of an “outie” than an “innie,” I began to wonder what she looks like. In my mind’s eye, I do not have me at age seven fixed. If anything, I would tell you how I was so much taller than everyone else, awkward, not as pretty, frumpy, and that I had big feet. I set out all my picture boxes and began to look for this girl, only to find a sweet looking beautiful seven year-old with hair the same colour I pay to achieve these days. She looks no different than her friends, although her smile is often more genuine. She seems to laugh from the heart. She does not look frumpy, and by today’s standards rather cute. She does have big feet though–some things never change! Mostly, what I notice about her physically is her eyes. When I was little people would often comment about what big eyes I had–Red Riding Hood style. Here is my formal Seventh Birthday Photograph, where my big eyes really are noticeable:

This is also the same little girl who met a man who would molest her for the first time when he asked her if it was ok to marry her mother. Accepting the molestation went hand-in-hand with the proposal–”I will be your Daddy, and you will let me touch you.” The deep earth shattering need to be loved and accepted by a father after my own real Daddy’s death was met with this bittersweet promise from John. Here are Mother, me and John running through a deluge of birdseed on their wedding day:

Looking at these photographs brings the tears–they flow so easily right now–but these photos also evoke in me a sense of my own strength. I am just a little girl. A sweet lovely child who would write to her Grandmother letters about how her Grandmother was a “doll” and her “very best friend.” This is also the same little girl who stood before her whole congregation with her hands clenched around the microphone and prayed her friend would not die, who laid close to death in the Intensive Care Unit, because she just could not take one more person she loved dying. This little girl ingeniously went away to Summer Camp and made her mother a ceramic dog, given her Mother swore to ANYONE who would listen that her next dog would be ceramic. Jacquie Turner gave her present to her mother, accepted the bestowed gratitude, and then asked, “Now that you have your ceramic dog, can we please get a real one for me?” The Lhaso God would bring her–Mindy–would become her companion and confidant. They would hide together in the closet away from John and snuggle. Is it any wonder having a dog represents life to me still?

gratuitous photo of Emma

This little girl also survived. Can you imagine that? I think now of being harmed in some way, and I do not know how I would make it through except that I know I can because I already did! Somehow–luckily–the gifts of the happy accident of my birth, combined with my lifelong desire to listen to the Still Small Voice of Love inside me, have given me the courage to fight for my life again and again. The most vulnerable and youngest version of me was assaulted in the most vile and vicious ways. And that child–she lived! She fought her way out with the hope–the imagination–that things would change and not always be the same way. She found beautiful ways to express herself, mostly through art. The same love and imagination about God and God’s creativity and love for humanity still beats in my own heart today. She was full of gifts–so am I.

When I look at these photographs of little seven year-old Jacquie Turner I am in awe. This child survived so I might have this precious life I now live. This child survived so I might thrive. This child survived because love is stronger than death–or all of the other ways we seek to destroy ourselves and others. This child survived the best way she knew how, including eating ice cream to try and make John go away and to make the bad feelings go away too. I owe her my very life, so when she is running around on fire and screaming for cupcakes, I understand. I just owe it to her to comfort her with compassion and with honesty, and only every so often a yummy dessert. I owe our future better than just hiding in the closets of my life with Emma, hoping the bad men won’t come and hurt us.

She survived so I could have a real life. I owe her living mine to the fullest.

This little piece is what I presented to my congregation March 30, 2008 for Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month. Please check out the American Cancer Society and the Colon Cancer Alliance’s websites for additional information on this “Preventable. Treatable. Beatable.” disease.

Good morning.

The purpose of my coming before you today is threefold:
1. To help engage your imaginations about the ministry I am a part of on your behalf working with those who suspect they have or who do have Colorectal Cancer. I began in January after leaving my work as a hospice chaplain.
2. To talk to you about the importance of routine screenings for colorectal cancer, given March has been Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month.
3. And thirdly, to keep my promise to Pastor Laurie to not talk about the poop too much! Of course numbers one and two are all about the poop!

You know, talking about the poop is what makes being in this church—and in our denomination—unique and special. We try to face our fears when it comes to the tough stuff. I grew up in churches where women were told to deny the call of God on their hears just because of their gender. Yet Congregationalist woman Antoinette Brown was ordained by her congregation in 1853. I stand before you today talking to you as a woman minister because of the witness of this congregation in my life these last 13 years of my membership. I am here because of our willingness to come and reason together about what the faithful life entails for our whole person, and because of our covenant together to support one another when the poop hits the fan!

And at some point, it always does.

My work puts me in contact with people from all over the country dealing with the messiness of life.  Some may call me with simple questions about screening, while others face terribly hard dilemmas about the efficacy of continuing treatment when the colorectal cancer is devouring their liver, their lungs, their body. I counsel people about where God is in their suffering. I hold their story as sacred, even as they struggle to understand how Cancer came to their door. I guide. I educate. I listen. And every single day I stand at the threshold of our failed medical system, and often out of compassion school people without insurance or means on ways to work the system to get screening or treatment. Even as I stand here today, I fear my message will strike a chord in someone who needs to be screened but cannot afford it. “Here, at Coral Gables Congregational Church?” you might ask. For at least six years of my membership here I was one of the millions of Americans living without health insurance. Did you know me then? “So, yes. Even here.”

When we are willing to talk about the poop, we are willing to acknowledge that it is not a problem someone else has “over there” that we might sweep in on our white horses and save them from, but instead we acknowledge that it is right here in our midst. Or as the bestselling children’s book by Taro Gomi points out, “Everyone poops.” And because of that, each one of us here is at risk of developing this terrible disease. That is the bad news, but the good news is that with routine screening—starting at the age of 45 if you are African American or age 50 for everyone else of normal risk—colon cancer can be found before it is—well, cancer. Getting your routine colonoscopy every ten years does not just tell you if you have cancer, but can actually be both preventative and curative if you have polyps or one of the early stages of this disease. Even though colorectal cancer grows slowly, getting it out early helps to ensure that it does not have any time to pierce the wall of the colon and spread, which is most often fatal.

Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer related deaths among men and women combined—only lung cancer beats it. Yet the only way we see a decrease in deaths is due to screenings. Why don’t people want to get screened? Fear. Dave Barry summarized this fear in a recent essay as, “You don’t want a doctor to stick a tube 17,000 feet up your butt.” And for him, it was only when his younger brother—who did not put off getting screened at 50 like he did—announced that he had colon cancer that Dave finally went to be screened. As Dave pointed out: What if his brother had put it off like he did?  Sadly, he most likely would have had a terminal version of the disease.

The beauty of our faith and our faith community is that we come together to grow to be whole people of God. Whole people. God is still speaking to us, my brothers and sisters, in our day and age with our advances in being able to help prevent this disease. The number one commandment in the Bible—said over 60 times in both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures—is, “Do not fear.” So I tell you today the same thing, “Do not fear the poop! God will be with you!”

And I will be in Fellowship Hall after the service with brochures and to answer any questions you might have.

Thank you.

Working as a hospital and hospice chaplain over the last eight years, I can trace certain themes I repeatedly hear from my patients and their families. These themes include: questioning of why bad things happen to “good” people; the meaning in suffering; the timeliness or “out-of-time” sense when someone dies; trust issues with the medical community; causality; God’s intervention (or lack there of) in our lives; and the meaning of hope/feelings of despair. You know…the light stuff! The most common spiritual intervention I provide directed at a single place of spiritual suffering centers on the popular myth: “God never gives us more than we can handle.”

I write the word “myth” intentionally because indeed this is just that–a myth. We human beings created this idea out of our own hope that it might be true, but not based on any ancient sacred text we might hold to within either the Jewish or Christian traditions. There is a text in the Christian Scriptures that does have somewhat similar language, so the popular consensus is that it has been misquoted just enough to get the other idea into our popular lexicon. The text comes from I Corinthians 10:13 where the Apostle Paul writes, “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.” The part that is interesting four our discussion is where he writes, “[God] will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.” I guess we could call this “Biblical Telephone!” One person after another tweaks it just enough that over time we ended up “God never gives us more than we can handle.”

The problem comes from when we go around spouting off this myth as Biblical truth and live our lives by it!  Worse yet, we often tell this to people truly hurting as a way to try and assuage their pain.  Would you feel better to know that when the most horrible pain of your life is upon you–and you feel like you are going insane from not being able to bear it, yet having to anyways–to know that God had allocated this pain for you knowing you could handle it?

Just recently I spoke to a woman on the Helpline I answer who struggled with this notion. She had just been diagnosed as Stage IV, and she was shattered. She endured more grief and loss in the last twelve years than most, and now with hardly any emotional, physical, spiritual, or financial resources must wage war on this horrific disease–after being Stage Zero a couple of years ago and given the “all clear.” In our conversation, the issue of why would God be “giving” her the cancer came up. Why? Because she had been taught (most likely at church!), “God never gives us more than we can handle.” The implication is that God is giving the cancer for some higher purpose. She told me she believes in a loving God, which led me to ask, “Is a loving God then the creator of your heartache?” I reminded my caller–who is a Christian–of Jesus’ own words on the cross, in which he quoted the Psalmist saying, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” I believe those words are the cries of someone who intimately knows what it means to endure much much more than they can handle.

If the ancient Hebrew and/or Christian Scriptures are important to you, let me direct you a gem from Proverbs 18:14: “A man’s spirit sustains him in sickness, but a crushed spirit who can bear?” I do believe that feeling supported, loved and cared for while we battle the diseases within (and the dis-ease without) help us to heal in body, mind and spirit. This is why it is so important to surround ourselves during our healing journeys with those who can listen and hold the most fragile of moments–those times of despair, anger, hurt and loss–and celebrate with us the moments of life, hope, love and laughter we will experience even with disease. No one can bear our pain or illness for us–in that we are totally alone–but they can carry us while we bear it by carrying our spirit close to their own. Without that, our spirits will be literally crushed, and that is too much to bear.

My encouragement to you today my dear friends is this: God is not the author of our heartache or our broken bodies. We are fragile and live in a fragile world where brokenness is par for the course. God (or Love, if that fits your spirit better) is, however, always wanting to be part of the circle of support cheering us on, believing in our power to create goodness and beauty in a place where there is pain, and encircling us with comfort in the living we are doing right now…even when it is truly more painful than we can bear.

In the recent past, everytime I went to lose the rest of the weight I gained as a kid, not to mention the 10 “Post Apocalyptic” (aka post-break-up) pounds, I gained a tiny bit of weight instead. The earth would feel like it was shifting beneath me when someone would mention how I looked thinner, and then the cupcake eating would commence. After dropping over 70 pounds, to find my weight creeping back up with repeated attempts to lose weight was more than discouraging–heartbreaking would be the right word. I knew I was not gaining weight because I longed for The Bean to come back or felt some sense of unresolved emotion towards him. No! I was doing this to myself when I would feel the earth tilt. But why the tilt?

Here is my mental loop: I lose more weight, I become more attractive and desirable to men. I become more desirable, I could even end up dating someone more than three times (my limit last year before booting someone to the curb), and fall in-love. I fall in-love, am vulnerable, and then I could get left. Again. I do not want to go through that again–even as a deep part in me acknowledges this is always the risk of love–so I put on the weight to be less desirable, less attractive, and more safe. Build the walls. Keep out the love. Stay safe.

I could see it, but I felt utterly powerless and without creativity to address the issue. Since December, I could articulate this, and since December I have had at least 5 cupcakes!!! (I could go for one right now while writing this…and let me tell you that if you are in the market for a cupcake the ones at Fresh Market are TO DIE FOR!)

Did I mention that I really am not a big cake or cupcake person? I think (under normal conditions) that they are too sweet. I prefer soft serve ice cream or yogurt to any other dessert. Sweet, but not too sweet. Cold, smooth, creamy. I do not really like cupcakes! Yet here I am CRAVING cupcakes every time I drop a bloody pound.

Everyone has their own way of dealing with their problems. Amongst my loved ones we have a smattering of potato chip munching, cigarette smoking, workaholic, motorcycle riding, Jesus loving, Diet Coke drinking, scrap booking, gambling alcoholics. And those are just the ones who live on the West Coast of Florida! I believe in having a multitude of tricks–mostly healthy–in my arsenal, so when one fails another is at the ready. I ride my bike like a feign; I ration the chocolate; I talk to friends and family; I go for a walk; I play with Emma; I write this blog–but those fucking cupcakes kept calling out to me. “Don’t lose weight! Stay where you are! You will feel so much better and more calm when you have one! Everything will be fine if you just get up and go have a cupcake! Drink it with skim milk–then it won’t be that fattening! You rode your bike twice already today–have another cupcake!”

Fucking cupcakes.

The cupcakes are not the real issue, so having run out of other RATIONAL coping skills I marched myself back to therapy. Now to appreciate my current therapeutic experience, you must first picture a Datsun 280 ZX driving aging Hippie with a “No Nukes” bumper sticker and a Grateful Dead “quilt” (don’t ask) on his wall with his diplomas. The ponytail, vintage Danish/early 80’s office furniture, and Converse canvas sneakers round out the “ambiance.” This is a guy who sits back, listens to every word, is so non-judgmental and smart you suspect he had you figured out when you made the appointment, and then talks to you in such a practical gentle manner that you wonder why the hell you are paying him to tell you what you already know. But then again, knowing is not my issue. Figuring out what to do next is.

Like any therapist worth their salt, Obi-Wan Kenobi (the therapist) poked around in my past in order to get to know me. I did mention to him on the phone that I needed help in the “here and now” and that I had “dealt with a lot of the shit of the past, and really was not looking to dredge up that stuff or start again looking at it.” Uh-huh.

Given how my past includes the issues of disease, death, abandonment, molestation, threats of suicide and homicide, stalking, rape, and trust–I tend to be wary of beginning any new venture in therapy despite how much good it has done me in the past. I always feel defensive and want to shout at the new therapist, “I am ok! I have worked really hard! I am not as fucked up as you will assume I am! Please give me some credit! Please validate my journey before I met you! I am strong! I will kick your ass if I need to!” And under my breath I whisper, “I am totally scared shitless that the past will haunt me again and the next time I won’t make it. I worry that I am a failure at this healing business because I still am working on the weight stuff and because despair still finds me. I cannot control being vulnerable. I hate being in a relationship because I know there are no guarantees. I want to be loved because I have a lot to give, but trust seems like to high a price to pay. I am lonely sometimes. I want someone else to validate my worthiness to be loved, although I know I must believe that for myself first…but sometimes I am so full of doubt I don’t know how to.”

I cannot help but wonder: Why do I feel so creative, capable and strong and also feel so stuck, inadequate and fragile sometimes?

Obi-Wan listened and listened well. He told me my life has been made up of the big issues–not the small ones. They will always be with me. They will always be tinder for some jerk to come along and set fire to…or just life will set them on fire. Life is hard after all. I was vigilant with The Bean, but next time I need to pay better attention to the signs that someone is not healthy. A healthy person and an unhealthy person equal an unhealthy relationship. The Bean left, and my old shit got set on fire.

“Your inner 7 year-old is running around on fire screaming her head off inside of you. You will need to help her heal from The Bean before you can find your way to transcendence and then losing the weight.”

I love this image because it fits. I got it instantly. The Bean is only the second person since Daddy died my inner 7 year-old ever loved and trusted. John, my molesting murderous stalking step-father was the first. After not loving or trusting any man, she loved The Bean. He was fun! He gave her bike, promised to teach her how to do a cartwheel, saw all the good in her–the capacity to trust, to love, to experience, to excel–encouraged her to play, liked how smart she was, and he let her know in a myriad of ways that he would not betray her trust in him. And then he did, which only happened because I–the grown up Jacqueline–let him get close enough to her for her to get hurt. He hurt her. I betrayed her.

Obi-Wan pointed out to me that with The Bean seven-year old Jacquie finally went to sleep and rested. She still would wake up and cry sometimes out of fear, but the fact that I allowed myself to get so close to The Bean that I would allow myself to imagine really being with someone demonstrated my just how far and healthy I am–with her as a part of me. I had earned her trust enough to work through her immature and naive fears, which are never placated with rationality. Nurture yes, but logic no. More than anyone, she trusted me to keep her safe and to tell her who she could trust. More than anyone, she feels I let her down.

Seven year-old Jacquie only knows one way to deal with her terror when she feels she is in a trap where she will lose BIG again. She builds walls…walls of fat. These walls keep the fear at bay, the bad men away, and her safely protected against anymore betrayal or abandonment. They work for her–she is seven after all–but they do not work for me. I am on a journey now to comfort her, build up the trust with her again, and help her to let go of cupcakes making the world tilt right again.

My Dear Faithful Reader,

We have come to the first anniversary of my blog. First of all, thank you so very much for the affirmation of reading my blog (some of you more than my own Mama!) and sharing with me the places my writing touched you and your story. I must say I am rather surprised by all of this! What started as a way to post photos of my then six week-old puppy Emma–who was still living with her Birth Mother at the time–transformed into something I never expected. I grieved the loss of a meaningful relationship. I worked through much of what it meant for me to work as a hospice chaplain. I highlighted the hilarities of my dating life. And, most importantly, I educated you on men in tank tops!

Given Top Ten Lists are so passe I say, “Nine is Fine!” Here are my favourite nine posts from this last year:

9. I Heart Atheists! This post is dedicated to my patient “Hank,” of whom I wrote. I am glad he is no longer struggling to breathe or to find love.

8. Posting My Big Secret This post received the most private email because people were worried about me. In many ways it was the hardest to write. I reveled an important secret, and in so doing found a way to tell my closest and dearest just how much despair (my definition of anti-hope) I felt following the break-up. This post continues to have meaning for me due to my continuing love of Post Secret, and because I hope by exposing my pain–even as a minister–others fearing the only way through is out might feel comforted.

7. I’m Coming Out: Jesus Know About My Vibrator The year’s most embarrassing and second funniest post. I still cringe when people ask me for my website address thinking about them reading this particular post. Of course this is exactly why it is on this list–I am a glutton for embarrassing myself on this blog with the bitter truth. For the record–and thankfully–I have had sex since I wrote this post! (Once.)

6. The Whispering God Where is God when bad things happen to good people? In part, this post contains my answer to this question and my own thinking about God’s intervention–and lack there of–in our lives.

5. 40 Reasons I Make A Great Girlfriend (and her evil twin 40 Reason I Will Drive You Crazy & Am Not Perfect) This was so much fun, and I met my friend in Austria through putting up the “Great Girlfriend” list on craigslist.

4. A Rose Garden Relationship I continue to think about what I wrote in this post. If there is such a thing as your own writing being a gift to you, it would be this post. I feel it helped me clarify what relationship values continue to remain important to me and also what I ultimately have to offer all of my relationships, including the one I have with myself.

3. You Play, You Pay This post about my prayer for my Aunt Charlyne to come to terms with her cancer and still remains at the forefront of my thinking about her. She finished her second round of chemo, and she will find out next week the results of her latest PET scan. She told us at Christmas she feels the cancer is spreading.  All my work with patients has taught me our bodies tell us the truth–even long before the tests and doctors do–so I cannot help but wonder if hers is telling her a truth now. I do not know what will happen with her body, but I know she will be surrounded by love regardless of the outcome. This is what matters most.

2. Tank Top Wearing Man Candy? The single funniest thing I have ever written! I cannot see a man in a tank top without thinking: “Baby, if you only knew how I felt about THAT!” If you love it too, please go out to Urban Dictionary and suggest “The Tribble Factor” for a word/definition.

1. The Mango Tree My homage to my father and the continuing bonds of love death cannot separate us from and how these bonds continue to inform our present and propel us into our future.

Here is to a wonderful Year Two!

This is the Eulogy I wrote for my patient I called “My Love.” Maybe you will see a small part of yourself in times of great struggle when you read this:

As I began to think about what I wanted to say about my dear patient—whom I loved greatly and who I know loved me as well—I kept hearing the song from “The Sound of Music” in my head where the nuns sing: “How do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?” “Maria” was definitely a firecracker and a moonbeam! In all honesty, I did not meet the same Maria her family describes because in many ways that version of her never existed in the same way after she after her hospice admission in April of 2005. Maria never could fully accept the myriad of her life changes or heal into the person who rose from those ashes. And yet, her spirit—that “moonbeam”—could not be stopped by COPD or hospice…even if Maria struggled to see that for herself at times.

I once asked her to describe her life before she took that long last final terminal turn. She told me how much she “enjoyed her children” and how they had “always been [her] heart’s desire.” Children and animals…Maria drew close to her the tiniest and the most tender. She described herself as being handy, artistic, creative, fun, funny, and “a pleasure to be around.” She also felt like the disease not only was choking the life out of her body, but also that the process had stolen all the life out of living in the here and now. This was the Maria—“My Love” as I usually called her —whom I met in September of 2006. I met a woman ravaged by a disease and full of dis-ease as a result.

It was love at first sight. You may find this so odd given I am standing here breaking the cardinal rule of Memorial Services and talking about the tough stuff! Knowing My Love as I did, I think she would be proud of me for being willing to be honest about just how “shitty” this was for her these last few years. And no, she would not mind one bit that the Minister said “shitty”—it was a favourite word of hers after all! (She also had a way with the f-word, something I appreciated, but let’s have a tiny bit of decorum here.) I also know she would be proud of me for seeing into her—into her deepest most beautiful and hurting heart—she liked to say to me, “Intimacy means “into-me-see.” And I did see her intimately—broken, anxious, hurting, longing, suffering, grieving, wanting, hoping, searching, funny, smart, creative, insightful, wise, kind, loving, honest—brutally honest. I heard her laugh, rubbed her back as she cried, kissed her cheek, had her frail arms embrace me, and her hand cup my face—not to mention I have been the recipient of her pointed right finger on more than one occasion! I am so sad that I will not see her again…and I am so happy for her that she finally has the peace she sought and needed so desperately.

Part of why I love her so much relates to the tenacity she showed to stay her course no matter what. We all suffer in prisons of our own making, but even in those places where we are literally marking the days on the wall, life is possible. I read about how Nelson Mandela kept a garden on Robbins Island, where he was a prisoner for 27 years. He said it was his lifesaver. Maria kept a garden of her own in many ways. From little rituals that defined her life, to meaningful friendships where the introduction was based on her decline, not her beauty, wit or brains. She tried to sort out the story of her life, to try and find meaning with the terribly unfair thing that had happened to her. She tried to grieve all she lost on the way to losing her life. She sought peace. Maria showed unparalleled strength and courage in the face of devastation. She held on—tightly, mind you—for so much longer than most of us could even imagine doing if we were in her place.

Like all of us, she would often ask me why this had happened to her. She blamed herself for ever smoking, but I am here today to promise you that none of us “deserves” to have our breath taken away from us by a terrible disease. I know it is such a normal human desire to try and make sense of things by figuring out the cause-and-effect. Let me tell you the universal truth of why we suffer: We suffer because we do…it is part of what it means to be human. Human beings break—mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. The Blame Game never leads to healing, and when we break, to have courage to try and heal in the face of that brokenness—well that is true bravery. Maria had a brave spirit because she tried, and she held on, and she continued to laugh for as long as she possibly could—even when it was through her panic and tears. Yes, even this last month of her life when she became too weary to talk most of the time, she would carefully spit out each and every word of a zinger and make her family laugh!

Maria was not a superhero; she was just a woman…a human being like all of us here. She never walked on the moon. She never received a miraculous healing and lived to tell about it on Oprah. She never won the adulation of the masses or had her words or artwork revered. But she was a ray of light—a moonbeam to those of us here—and that was something her disease never stole from her. As each of us carries some part of her humor, her love, her life, her mischief, her spirit, her story in our own hearts, she continues to live on and bless us. I don’t think she would want it any other way.

Closing Prayer for Maria’s Celebration of Life:

God, we possess great imagination about who you might be, and we cling to the ideas about you our brothers and sisters share. Our brother David said you know everything about us…that you examine our hearts. Do you know each moment we sit or stand? Do you really count the hairs on our heads? We need you to, for we suffer and need to know you are with us even in the darkest place or the deepest valley. Find us and comfort us with your tender embrace.

God, we wonder if you know our thoughts when we are far away from you? Come quickly and hear them now sweet Shepard. We are full of love, remembrance, humor, and longing for our dear beloved Maria. We are so grateful she can breathe deeply now because her lungs, spirit and mind are at peace, and we are so sad that we will only hear her laughter in our memories. Comfort each one here—especially her family—and may the promise be true that if we ride the wings of the morning or dwell by the farthest oceans, even there your hand will guide us and your strength will support us. And help us to hold tightly to all of our stories, memories and love of Marsha, so we might speak of her and keep her spirit alive within us for as long as we live. Amen.

Sometimes I fall in-love very easily and shamelessly with my patients. I do not mean to speak of romantic love, but instead of how a special spark will exist and you just love instantly as a result. I recognize how common threads from my life and theirs act as catalysts, but sometimes I am at a total loss for why I feel so compelled by them and their stories, loved ones, life, illness, etc. I had two different “Jacquelines” this year, so I think we can easily trace why they were special to me right from the start! My nurse Wendy and I fell in-love instantly with “Yoda” and for no other reason than the man was a complete gentleman. I also think the way he would speak of his wife and how he longed to see her again touched me deeply–both in my understanding of how death does not end love and in my own longings to have a man feel that way about me. And then there is my patient I always referred to as “My Love.”

Whenever I would come into her home I would say, “Hello My Love, tell me about you today.” If I said, “How are you?” she would always reply, “How the hell do you think I am?” I always met that with a snappy, “Shitty for sure, but better now that I am here!?” (smirk included free of charge) She would snarl and laugh all at the same time! My Love suffered with COPD and with the horrible box of living with a terminal disease. Dis-ease all around her, I felt from the very beginning of our time together in September 2006 that she suffered from Complicated Mourning. The DSM IV (the psychological diagnostic Bible) basically says one suffers from Complicated Mourning when after a year from the initial time of the loss one still experiences the loss in the same way as when the loss first occurred. In other words, one never moves beyond the initial grief reaction. Imagine if you learned of the death of your closest friend…hold that thought, feeling, body trauma for just a moment. Now imagine never letting that feeling morph and heal, but instead staying exactly the same always. Complicated Mourning occurs most commonly after sudden traumatic losses, including but not limited to: homicides, death of a child, multiple losses or concurrent losses, and/or suicide. In the case of My Love, the person she saw herself to be died when she entered hospice in April of 2005, and she never could fully grieve the myriad of her life changes or heal into the person who rose from those ashes.

I can remember feeling intimidated walking up to her large home for the first time…what turned out to be a very pretty prison of her own making. I greeted the most beautiful woman. In her mid-sixties, she could have passed for being in her forties but for her hands, which belonged to a woman thirty years her senior. Her hands told the story of her weakened lungs, weakened resolve, weakened resilience. I always notice people’s hands–even as a child I would compare my own to my Mother’s and Grandmother’s all through the church services. Her hands continued to tell her story in that they were most often clenched. She would sit in her recliner, leaning back to her left with her left hand tight and her right arm locked out straight to her seat. She would wag her right index finger at you to make a point, but the rest of her hand stayed firm. Her hands never lied about how desperately she was holding on, and they never lied about how desperately she was living.

I think of my “Patient Zero” as a mother from when I served as a Youth Minister in North Carolina. She and her husband–both lawyers–engaged in one of the bloodiest divorces I ever witnessed, and I only saw the aftermath. She also had Breast Cancer with mets to her liver. I visited her at Duke after a surgery to help with the spread of the cancer in her liver. Her goal simple: Live until her 10 year-old turned 18. God forbid her former husband raise her or interact with her more than the bare minimum the court ordered! She too held on tightly. She told me as I stood by her bedside following the surgery how she prayed God would help her to let go of holding on with such vigor and desperation. She did not pray for her whole hand to unfurl, but instead she asked God to come and loosen just the tiny tip of her pinkie finger so she might breathe a bit easier. With this image in mind, I often find myself praying the very same thing–for myself and for my patients.

When I left My Love’s home after our first visit, I leaned in close to her and said, “My prayer for you is that you will have just one minute of peace each day. I am not naive. I do not think a feeling of peace will just overtake you out of nowhere. But I do believe one extra minute per day is possible. This is my prayer.” She gripped my hand with her right hand and said, “You understand. Thank you. Yes; pray for that for me.”

See My Love was so terribly stuck. She was near death when she came onto hospice in 2005, but after a drug allergy diagnosis and correction she rallied. When the old version of herself died, so did all her dreams of  this being something she could and would beat. Imagine a plane circling the airport–which in this case represented death–day-after-day but never flying anywhere either. She was terrified of getting sick, and subsequently her precious grandchildren represented the kiss of death. She also missed them terribly and longed to hold them, play with them, and witness the intricacies of their growing up. This is just one example of the ways she held onto her life but never really lived. My Love was so terribly stuck.

My Love never could consciously release herself from her ritualistic hovering over death. A fall a few months ago, and a series of events began to unravel her desperate hold onto a life she hated and hated to have any change to. At the beginning of December her husband moved her to an inpatient facility when her death became more imminent. I visited her there often, and would look painfully upon her still clenched hands. After her death this past Thursday, I sat in the same Family Room where she lived in isolation for these last two and a half years…a room without her chair, hospital bed, commode, mirror, eye brow pencil, pashmina, blush, and oxygen. A room without her. Her family looked at me excitedly and her daughter related something they just had to tell me: “Her hands were at peace the last two days. We noticed it and thought we had to tell you because you would be so glad to know she stopped holding them so tightly. She died with her hands open and at peace.”

Why her? Why did I fall in-love with her? She was a bright, enthusiastic, funny, creative, sarcastic, honest, lonely, hurting, broken woman. I do not know what to say beyond that I loved her deeply because I did. She never “earned” my love…in fact she tried it more than once. I just know I loved her right exactly where she was–clenched hands and all. Her husband asked me to officiate at her funeral. He knows the day of her funeral is also my last day with hospice, so he called it “poetic justice” that my last responsibility for hospice is her funeral. I fully agree, but even if I had already left I still would have done it for her…anything for My Love.

I wrote the following piece for my company’s bi-annual Memorial Gathering to honor those who have died with our hospice. The theme for this season’s services is “The Light of Love.” The first section focuses on “The Light of Remembrance,” which inspires the piece.

In the summer of 1977 my father died. I remember the day as being rainy and very cold, but in reality it was a hot and humid Florida summer day. I guess my little girl mind was so overcome with grief that the only way to describe a day when you lose someone you desperately love is to think of it as being cold and dreary with dark clouds crying. That is the funny thing about remembering the past—we are always looking back at it through a particular lens. I saw that day through the lens of pain and loss for so long that the day itself became transformed to match the feelings.

I also look back and remember holding Daddy’s hand, as he and Mother would lift me up over the curb, swinging me back and forth. I remember seeing his arms outstretched to me, as I would scoot down the high slide at the park by his office. I remember the look on his face when he opened my door to find Kelly Grey and I sitting on the red carpet with the pink ceramic pig smashed into a million pieces.

Kelly lived just six houses from mine, and we were born exactly three weeks apart. We would walk the grass of our neighbour’s front lawns to get to one another’s homes safely. Our parents had taught us to do this, so we were full of four-year old confidence. Somehow we decided this particular day that she would come to my house, but we neglected to ask my napping Mother—out of kindness, of course. As we sat in my room, she asked me how much money was in the pig. We decided to count the money, but alas the pig did not have an opening on the bottom, and the small slot on top did not send the money back to us when we shook it. I offered to go and fetch my tiny hammer from the garage. Daddy bought it for me, so I could “help” him with his household “Honey-Do-Lists.” I marched out to the garage where he was working at his tool bench, took down the hammer, and replied to his inquiry about needing any help with a simple “no thanks.”

Daddy had not had a four-year old in the house in over sixteen years, so it took an extra moment for him to comprehend that there was no need for me to have the hammer that would be qualified as “good”—which also proved to be just enough time for Kelly and I to smash the pig to smithereens. So there we sat on the floor of my bedroom with one dead ceramic pig, one hammer, countless change, and one Daddy staring down at us saying, “What in the world!? Kelly, where did you come from? Does your Mother know she is here?” He had that look I knew as meaning I was in T.R.O.U.B.L.E. He also had the mischievous smirk around his eyes of appreciating my ingenuity. He would know…I got my ingenious and mischievous nature from him!

You may wonder how it is that I remember all these little details of my ever too brief six years with Daddy. The answer comes from my Mother, who never shied away from talking about him and from keeping the light of remembrance stoked within me. She would ask me, “Do you remember when we met Daddy for lunch?” or “Do you remember going on the boat and catching your first fish at the marina?” She kept the memories alive—she kept Daddy alive—even when it must have cut her heart to a million pieces to have to do so. I know she wanted to go to bed and never get up because her heart was so full of agony and loss. My Grandmother had to take her in hand and tell her to get up because I needed her. Being a widow herself, she also promised my mother that she would stop crying all the time—“eventually.”

I am sure Mother wanted to forget sometimes—to forget all the love, laughter, happiness, touch and connection she had with him—because the forgetting might make the pain less. Instead, she held onto my Grandmother’s promise that “eventually” the pain would lessen, “eventually” she would not be crying all the time, and “eventually” she would invest in her own life again. In holding onto that promise, she kept Daddy’s love alive for me by reinforcing all of my memories of him.

Now when we talk of Daddy, we light up with the remembering. He is ever close, ever dear, ever loved. When I drive her nuts by announcing just exactly how we will be going about accomplishing a particular task—step-by-painful-step where she is merely an extra pair of hands—she shakes her head and says, “Just like your father…you are just like your father.” When I tease her or say something terribly funny she says, “Just like your father.” In fact, it has become quite the joke between us. Mother will compliment me on something and I will with deadpan delivery tell her, “Well you know, I get that from Daddy.“ She just shakes her head and laughs! When we are with other people and they comment on how bright I am, we look at each other, giggle and chime together, “She gets that from her father!” We both know how much her love and care for me has shaped me, but in those little moments we bring forward into our lives right now the love, humor and intelligence of a man who has been dead over thirty years. We keep him alive within us, which makes him a real person to even those who never had the honor of meeting him.

Remembering the one you love who has died is a precious flame within you, but you may at times be afraid that it will burn you. I want to encourage you today that the light of remembrance can only illuminate your life and warm your soul. I know because eventually that is what the light of remembering my own lost loves has become.

My friend Pixie broke up with the guy she was seeing. She is in her early thirties and has two teenage boys, whereas he has no children and is in his late twenties. She knows who she is; he is still defining himself. She is in-touch with her body, mind, emotions and spirit. He knows his mind, but the rest of him has a way of getting away from him or being completely stuffed down or ignored. She opens up under stress and blooms into being her best self. When the trial or tribulation passes–as they always do–she feels the pride and the exhaustion. She knows she has it in her to weather whatever storms come her way. She is a survivor. She knows when she must retreat into a haven of love, friendship and rest. She knows that if she does not nurture her soul, no one else will. He…well, he sees stress as something to be avoided at all costs. He runs into a den of silence and retreats from the difficult emotions–in others and in himself.

After Paul, our friend and co-worker’s husband, was murdered Pixie turned to the guy she was dating. She was upset. Her heart broke for Teri, and she worked hard to support those of us in the epicenter of this nuclear holocaust of violence, loss, unanswerable questions, and grief. She sat with me the night he was killed at dinner, and drove me home after I swilled down two cocktails. I rarely drink, but the day deserved a drink to Paul’s memory and one to dull mine. She called me faithfully and sat beside me at the funeral. She held my loss as she held her own. She got angry at the way our company put my Social Worker and I through the wringer and then slapped us in the face with a “stay strong for the patients” without considering that we had nothing left to give. Spent, she needed to talk. She reached out to the guy, and he responded, “I don’t understand why Jacqueline and you are so upset?”

The dividing line was drawn, and he is now gone from her inner life.

I understand completely. When something terrible happens those of us in the epicenter of pain-especially those of us who are caregivers–we need the ones we are closest to in life to provide a safe shelter from the storm and fallout. We need the voices of Love and Friendship to say to us, “I am here for you, so you can be there for them.” We will repay the favor ten-fold. We will love you with undying affection and gratitude. Knowing that your arms will entwine our battered bodies and spirits gives us the courage to face the deepest darkness humanity wrecks upon one another. Your help so we can alight upon a resting place makes all the difference in the world. A quick “let me come and take you to dinner” matters more than all the money in the world.

Unfortunately, sometimes we get only silence. I think what happened with Pixie and her beau is worse though. The accusation is that if we were not upset–because somehow being upset about someone you know being murdered and how that devastates one you love deeply is irrational–then there would not be a reason to be upset. It seems so neat and tidy, but painful feelings are never clean. They are always messy and leave us discombobulated in their wake. As well they should! I do not want to live my life prepared for the worse-case scenario. I would never get out of bed! So, I will stumble, tremble, and fall down when the shit hits the fan. The reproach and silence that can come from even those we trust the most adds insult to injury. No wonder Pixie drew the line.

The person I was seeing at the time was very busy with his life, so I tried to not burden him with it all. I let him call me. Unfortunately, when he would call to check on me he would also talk A LOT about his “irrational and crazy” ex-wife. A dividing line was drawn the night before the funeral, and when he asked me if I would ever be seeing him again I had to tell him the truth–I would not.

And then there are those who just get what we need. When Paul died I wrote a pain-filled email to The Scoundrel, who was living in Paris at the time. He wrote back saying: “This is very very horrible. I love you and kiss you on the head…….I’m sorry………It’s just so horrible….Do you have a friend who can hold you? xxxxx”

So I told The Scoundrel the truth…there was no one to hold me. The feeling that overcame me when he wrote those words to me was “emptiness.” Somehow emptiness seems better than longing. Emptiness implies being open and ready to receive, just the right fit has not come yet to sit in that space with me. Longing is when the one you count on to sit beside you when you are beside yourself cannot or will not come. This is what happened with Pixie–she longed for him to be with her, but he fell to the other side of the dividing line.

Since my father’s death in 1977 I rarely dream of him. One dream during college where I realized the old man telling me not to “throw my heart away” on the man with the Southern Drawl was Daddy just as I awakened ashamed to not have recognized him in time to talk to him. Another dream in High School where my friend and I hit a man on a bike during a terrible and blinding storm. I saw the man was Daddy, and became horrified since we killed him. In my dream, I ran home to tell Mother only for her to laugh as she put on lipstick saying, “He’s been dead for years.”

I am an avid dreamer. In fact, if I could make one film it would be of my dreams. In my dreams I see colours I never see in my life. In my dreams the feelings seem more vivid too. There is an urgency, even with the dreams full of pleasure and humor. Sometimes I wake up laughing…sometimes crying. Often the dreams seem more real than real. Do you ever feel that way? I fall deeply into them and often have to tell some poor soul what happened before the day is set right. This is a pattern from childhood. The funny thing about dreams is that their true significance to us remains only with the one who had the dream. Dreams are completely singular. No one else remembers them–at least not unless we are paying them for their expertise and interpretation! Yet, they become part of our personal history nonetheless.

When I was a little girl I had a dream about a boy from my class I had a terrible crush on that year. As my mother attempted to patiently listen to all the gory details of the dream, she could not resist the temptation to tease me. “Sounds like a nightmare to me Jacqueline.” I replied, “Oh no Mommy; it was a wonderful-mare.”

The week I graduated from Seminary I had my only “wonderful-mare” of Daddy. In the dream, I had just moved into a beautiful and modern building where I could see the ocean. As I descended the grand staircase to the lobby I asked a girl about where I could get ice cream, and she directed me to the boardwalk and an ice cream stand in the sand. As I walked the boardwalk, I went into an antique shop looking for forks for a party. I found my friend Jennifer, and we in turn came upon my “sister” and her “husband.” My “brother-in-law” and I left them to look at an art book in the shop and went off to hunt for the ice cream. He wore a blue button down rolled at the sleeves with madras shorts and brown leather flip flops. I held his hand. He asked me about how things were going. I broke down in tears–now knowing he was in fact my father–and we sat down on a nearby bench. I asked him if I would ever find love, stating that I wanted someone wonderful like him. He laughed and told me I did not want him but someone better! I said, “Oh Daddy, who is better than you?” He pulled me close and told me, “You’ll see.” I asked him if he was proud of me and all that I was about and doing in the world. He kissed the top of my head and told me he was. I can remember seeing the mascara stains on his shirt and apologizing. He again laughed saying, “I am wash and wear.” (Perfectly Daddy in every way.)

We got up and walked hand-in-hand out to the special ice cream stand in the sand, which turned out to be a Dairy Queen (I was robbed!). As we stood in line contemplating our selections, he turned to me. “Jacqueline. You have to promise me something.”

“Yes Daddy.”

“Jacqueline listen to me–this is very important–you have to promise me that no matter what happens you will remember the joy.”

“Yes Daddy.”

“No. Jacqueline. Listen to me! You must remember the joy. No matter what.”

“I will Daddy. I promise.”

“Remember the joy Jacqueline. Remember the joy.”

When I awoke the next morning my heart was humming with the melody of “I’ve Got That Joy, Joy, Joy Down In My Heart.” I could not figure out why. Then I remembered someone told me to remember the joy. I sat straight up in bed and remembered Daddy! Daddy was the one who told me to remember the joy! The whole dream flooded back to me, and I still hold it as tightly as I did then. My one visit from my long gone beloved. How could I not?

I believe in joy over happiness because of its transcendent quality. I believe in the joy of my life because of the love and connection I feel to those I love and to the world all around me. Sometimes it takes my breath away to consider just how much beauty and love there really is all around me and in me at any given moment. My daily worship comes from drinking in the sky when I walk or ride my bike with Emma. These are not religious moments, but I touch Spirit and Love and all that is more than the dissected parts. I touch wholeness. I feel the creativity–the endless creativity–all around me. I recently read a really brilliant line about God being restless and unable to specialize as evidenced by the sheer plethora of divergent organisms.* My contemplative time in the splendor of nature makes me giggle with this thought. The abundance of creativity is because of God’s obvious lack of focus!

Sometimes the sheer brilliance is so much, and I am so overtaken with the joy, I stop in my tracks. I stand still and try and photograph with my mind a singular moment that is not just what my eyes see, but all of the ways my senses are on fire from the beauty, the stillness, the colours, the quality of the air, the hints of perfume lighting upon me. Recently I had just such a moment. The moon was rising and greeting me to the East, just as the sun set in all its bright pinks and oranges. I felt caught between them flooded with joy…pure unadulterated joy.

I could not help but wonder to myself, “When was there another so perfect moment of joy?” And without warning all the joy of listening, watching, laughing, talking to, being with, and touching The Bean overcame me. The rage and hatred at him and myself all spent, I remembered the joy. I burst into a flood of tears and longing for a path that my head never lets my heart look down any longer. I thought of Ann Hampton Callaway’s song where she wonders if there is “some kind of heaven” where old love can go to be used by a long since gone lover when they need it most desperately. I prayed there is–for him and for me.

I remembered the joy between the rising moon and the setting sun; it was a challenge in every way.

*I cannot remember where. Let me know if this sounds familiar to you!

PHOTO CREDIT: The Bean

My Team Secretary, Teri Beroldi-Rein, asked me to write up her feelings about her murdered husband. These words were read by the Broward County Sheriff’s Office Chaplain at his funeral on Teri’s behalf. During the service, I could not help but think how this lovely and lively man dedicated to public service deserved just such a send-off. Only he also deserved to have it come after he died an old man in his bed, not as a “reward” for being murdered. Utterly unbelievable!

The most moving part for me was the drive to the graveside and seeing all the people lined up on the side of the road with their hands over their hearts and heads bowed. Paul deserved their respect, and I am glad he received this honor. He may have died senselessly, but he also died doing what he loved–public service.

Photo Credit: ALBERT DIAZ/MIAMI HERALD STAFF

In honor of Deputy Paul Rein October 5, 1931 - November 7, 2007

Photo Credit: BSO ONLINE PHOTO

Here are her thoughts and my words:

I must admit it is hard to find words to describe what is in my heart about Paul. I know it, but words just don’t seem to be enough. How can I describe all those little moments of living with someone? A knee brushed at the dinner table with a quick smile, a brief phone call to say “I love you,” his hand holding mine…a million little things that wrote his name again and again on my heart. Our love is like that…so tiny it wiggled right into each and every cell of my being and so large that it overwhelmed me with a million kindnesses.

To say that Paul was a good man seems an insignificant way to describe the purity of his goodness that touched all he did and all he knew. I never could believe I found such a beautiful person to spend my life with after years raising my family alone. My family loved him the moment they met him, and they love him for the way he brought happiness and love to my life. But Paul was never just focused on his family: He reached out with that same goodness to friend, neighbor and stranger alike.

One day Paul and I walked through the grocery store and a young man approached us. He asked Paul if he remembered transporting him to court. Paul told him he did and asked, “Did you do what I told you to do?” The young man told him that he had in fact listened to Paul’s wise advice and cleaned up his act. He had a job and was doing well. You should have seen the look of pride on Paul’s face! His encouragement made a difference in that young man’s life. You should have seen the look of pride in my own face. What an honor to spend my life with the kind of man who would not just look at someone who made a mistake as a nobody, but as someone needing a little fatherly advice to get them back on the right path.

I did not just love my husband; I also admired him. His tenderness, wisdom and willingness to give his very best inspired me. Paul knew what it meant to work hard. He grew up poor, so life was always a struggle in his family. Yet he grew up to do the right thing and live his life with integrity and purpose…he and all of his buddies from the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Those guys remained friends these last 70 years. Unbelievable! “The German.” “Germs.” “The Weasel.” “Cooney.” “Mayor.” “Pucky.” “Jake the Snake.” These are just some of the nicknames the guys went by. Imagine my surprise when one of their wives called the house one day asking for “Pucky.” I had no idea who that was! Paul admitted that in fact he was “Pucky.” His father gave him the nickname when he was a small boy, and it stuck with the neighborhood boys. I felt like I finally crossed into his precious inner circle of friends when I found out about “Pucky!”

Paul never took the happiness we had together for granted or took for granted my devotion to him. He knew what a special love we have. Just the other day we were watching “Dancing With the Stars,” and he danced around the den asking me to dance. I see him there full of life, joy, playfulness and love. I see him in all the stories people tell me of his goodness towards them. I see him faithfully going with me different places, not wanting to miss a moment of being together. I see the light of pride in his eyes the night I converted to Judaism. And I see him every night when I would come home and he would say to me, “Here is my darling. Here is my sweetheart. How was your day?”

Paul is my darling. Paul is my sweetheart. I will miss him deeply all the days of my life.

Today is a horrible day. Today my dear sweet Patient Care Secretary lost her husband. Paul died tragically when the prisoner he was transporting overpowered him, struggled with him, shot him, and threw him out of the transport van. (Here is the link to the CNN story.) There are no words that make sense of this horror. I literally am shaken and grieved to my core. For my dear friend, for her family and his, for the future they planned that never will come to fruition, for my grieving team, for myself.

I have been with so many people as they were told of the death of their loved one, and I never had adrenaline overtake my body. However, as she was told my right leg quivered uncontrollably. I am so heartbroken that this did not go differently, but here we are and Paul is dead. I met him and thought he was a lovely and kind man. He came to my Open House just after my birthday in early March. I also knew him through her and all of the tender love stories she would tell. Theirs was a second love, yet it was a gift of unmeasurable joy for both of them.

The news is reporting that the young man who killed Paul had written over his heart “Break This Bitch.” Was that a warning? Did he think his heart could not be broken? Had it been broken so badly that he started down the road of drugs, robbery, and armed robbery that led him to commit a murder? No matter what pain he had been through in his life, it does not dismiss the pain he has caused because of the choices he has made. But yet again I am reminded that if we do not face our pain–not just face it but actually heal it– we set off a series of events that can not only lead to our own destruction, but to that of others as well.

I cannot help but wonder if his heart is broken now?

Last week I wrote two nominations for our Employee Appreciation Awards. One for my nurse Wendy, and one for my Secretary. Here is the one for her so that you might know her a tiny bit and think of her with prayers for comfort as she negotiates the terrible cyclone of sudden traumatic grief and loss:

Three Sets of Footprints

All of us have read the poem “Footprints” about the person who notices only one set of footprints in the sand during all of the most trying times in their life. Inquiring of God why this is, they learn that those were the very times when God carried them. How true for us all! Life cannot be done as an individual effort. Each day we rely on unseen hands to carry us through and make our lives possible. From farmers to the checkout person at the grocery store, cannery workers to those at the recycling center, and loggers to soft toilet paper manufacturers, from the President of our company to our Patient Care Secretaries, our lives are interdependent.

Here at our hospice we think in terms of our Teams, and for our team—Team 151—there is one person we literally cannot survive without…our Secretary TBR. Even our Team Manager agrees that we do fine when she is gone, but those days when T* is out of the office are painful. Our team holds our collective breath until she returns, for she truly carries us through and helps us to thrive out in the field. She is so faithful in the little things, and if she misses a tiny beat she will go off to make sure we have whatever we need, even when we could do if for ourselves. She delights in the giving! T* knows that love is in the details, and although it might seem strange to speak of love at work, it is the only word to describe the dedication and attention to detail she offers. T* always speaks with kindness and concern, offering up love freely to us and to the patients and families she serves with us.

She also will go above and beyond to help her co-workers. She does not want to see anyone fail, for she knows what it means to work hard to keep your head above water. She patiently teaches the new PCS’s coming through, while lending a hand to other teams whenever needed…and not just our sister team! If ever there was a team player—encompassing the whole of our office—it would be T*.

She also takes the time to care about the stories of the individual families we serve. You should of seen her delight and gracious embrace of one family as they celebrated their 70th Anniversary last Christmas. T* was able to be at their home for our little celebration, and she was so tender with this lovely and fragile couple. Seeing the joy in her own face at finally being able to meet them was priceless. She holds the needs of our patients and families close and ensures they have what they need, sight unseen almost 100% of the time. It is no wonder she often is mentioned in our “Thank You Notes” from our families.

Team 151 is a terribly busy home team. In October alone we had around twenty-five deaths, yet our census stays stable. Twenty-five new patients filling our roster just as the other twenty-five came off of it. Talk about paperwork! Yet T* not only keeps us straight (no wonder she usually arrives before seven each morning!), but she will take on the slack when another PCS is out or falling behind. How does she have the time? How does she have the stamina? And to think she does this with kindness, professionalism and intelligence! No wonder our Team Manager knows her place in regards to T*! No wonder we admire, cherish, and love her as we do!

T* embodies the love of God by carrying us physically as a team, but also by the love she extends to us as team members and to our patients and families. When we look back at our lives and our time here we will see three sets of footprints in the sand, and when we see those times with only two sets we will know it was T* who helped to carry us. Please help us in acknowledging her unquestioning fidelity to our corporate values by honoring her as she so justly deserves.

I wrote the following about one of the nurses on my team,
as my team nominated her for Nurse Caregiver of the Year at our company.

The road not take is often a lonely road. Fellow travelers are few and far in-between. One goes on passion and commitment even when the body, spirit and mind seem completely spent. Often, only the tender angels of mercy, compassion, gentleness, and love serve as companions for the at times solitary work of our hospice nurses. Where would we be without their unquestioned faithfulness to our patients and families?

Our team—Team 151– wants to raise up the faithfulness of one particular nurse, Wendy T. This year’s theme for our Employee Recognition Awards is the perfect fit for what Wendy exemplifies, in that she always takes the higher road of doing right by her patients and their families. Wendy’s story at our hospice is one of consistency. She is not trying to go and do one extraordinary act for one extra-ordinary situation. She seeks no fame, and in fact is sure to be a bit embarrassed by our accolades. Day-in-and-day-out, Wendy gives the same tender and intelligent care to ALL of the patients and families she serves. The only complaints from her patients come when she has the audacity to be on vacation, and they miss her terribly! She makes that much of a difference in their lives.

The impact Wendy has begins with the trust she establishes. Being a hospice nurse with us for over 15 years gives her a depth of experience families and patients lean into. They know she has been in this space before and is not learning on the fly how to care for their beloved. That being said, Wendy’s openness to learn new ways to medically intercede for our patients, her flexibility to try new things, and her willingness to embrace the whole of the Inter-disciplinary Team’s expertise exemplify why she can be trusted implicitly. She uses the depth and breath of her practice as a nurse to give roots to her work, just as she reaches above and beyond her comfort zone to capture any intervention that might soothe a troubled patient. And she is also faithful to always call the family of her patients following their death to reassure a troubled heart, offer her support to them, and listen to them as they process both the death and the care we extended.

In the Christian Scriptures there is a passage written to the church in Thessalonica by the Apostle Paul where he speaks of being “gentle…like a nurse” when he visited them. Here is that passage re-written to speak of the way Wendy works on our behalf:

As God as our witness, she never comes with words of flattery or with a pretext of any kind, nor does she seek praise from anyone. Although she could make demands given her seniority and expertise, she does not. Instead, she is gentle amongst all, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children. So deeply does she care that she is determined to share with all those she touches not only the healing balm of palliative care, but also her own self, because each and every patient and family has become so very dear to her.

By mixing in the good milk of her own life with the vulnerable hunger of those we tend to, Wendy gives of her very self to all. She creates bridges between herself and her patients by opening up and showing her own tender places of loss so they know a fellow sojourner is with them on the last important days of their life journey. If all roads lead to hospice, then the dedication, passion, skill, expertise and compassion of our employees must be honored, for our company does not exist without our faithful workers. We raise up our colleague and friend, Wendy T., because she is faithful to walk this journey in our name for the patients and families, even when it requires her to be on the solitary road not taken. Please join us in honoring her fidelity to all we say we hold dear and seek to embody, for she is already accomplishing these values daily.

This week is National Pastoral Care Week, and our theme for this year is “Healing Faith.”  Working with hospice patients daily requires me to think about healing in a different way than “just getting restored to the way one was prior to the illness.”  Death is healing for my patients, and the only way they find it from a physical sense.  I find it amazing how easily we seem to equate healing with “going back.” Why don’t we possess an imagination that a healing would imply more than being “OK,” but instead would mean we are being re-created into a new fullness, being different, and flourishing in that difference?

Being a lover of rationality and logic, and also a girl with a vivid imagination, I must admit that I look for the scientific meaning behind so-called “miracles,”  while open to the amazing web of life that does not always go according to logic.  I am a skeptic…a faith-filled skeptic, but one none the less.  Mostly I am skeptical of any theology that speaks for how God does or does not act in a physical sense in our world.  I have seen the ravages of a theology that emphasizes a God who meddles with the laws of physics born out on suffering families who just cannot understand why that same God won’t meddle for them.   They often say to me while facing head-on the eventual death of their loved one, “We still have hope.”

I trouble these waters because I insist on planting seeds that might grow into a tree.  This tree then can be cut down and a bridge made through their theological quagmire.  Maybe.  I just heard on Monday from a Muslim family these very words, “We still have hope.”  One of the matriarchs of the family is dying from breast cancer, a cancer that has spread all over her body and is literally eating her alive.  Cancer that cannot be treated.  Cancer for which there is no mortal cure.  In the face of this cancer they still have hope, but hope in what?  Her daughter said, “Hope in her being healed.  Hope that she will recover.  Hope.  [She] will not give up on [her mother].”

How sad I am when I hear those I care for speak of anti-hope as being “giving up” on their loved one.  I imagine the patient in a terrible race where all of their supporters leave the sidelines and stop cheering, certain of their defeat.  But is that really what it means to “give up” hope?  No!  It cannot be!  For what they are really saying is that they are so in-love with this person that they cannot even imagine one moment without them present, so they do not even imagine it.  (And would I please stop even mentioning it too!?)  The center of this storm is the reality that at some moment they will indeed need to let go of their fantasy where their loved one is physically healed and restored to the fullness of life they experienced prior to their illness.  But this letting go is not giving up on hope or healing.

When I worked in Trauma, I would often accompany the physicians as they informed families that “there is no more hope.”  Oh the anger of these families being told to stop hoping!   They might has well have been told to stop breathing!  What the doctors wanted to convey was that they had no more medical expertise to offer the injuries and effect the healing.  They would support the body as best they could, and let the body evolve with its injuries as it would.  I would sit with the families and re-frame what hope meant for them at their crossroads of medical reality and faith.  I would tell them of how praying for healing was still a worthy prayer, and that of course they wanted their loved one to be healed and restored to them.  I also told them that healing might not look that way, but instead healing might just be surviving the worst, having their own heart continue to beat, or finding ways to invest in life and love even without this particular person being physically present.  I like to trouble the waters.

When my own father died, I can remember thinking that Jesus stopped loving me because he did not make him well.  It would take me years to come to a place of genuine reconciliation about my own beliefs about who God is and how God acts in order to accept God’s love and Daddy’s death as being co-inhabitants in my reality.   In other words, it took me a long time–and in some ways I continue on this journey–to heal my disappointment in God not being or acting how I thought God would act…or how I think a loving God should act.

Healing disappointment–a common theme for all of us–requires embracing the pain of things not going as we want, or as we need.  Many of us live with not having the most basic of needs, including life itself, met.  It is not fair for the young father to die, the little child, or the constant friend,  but unfair happens frequently.  When I work with my patients and families now, I work with them to heal–and have hope, or an imagination that healing is possible–all of the places the “unfair” has threatened their investment in life, in their spiritual and emotional health, and in their loved ones.  I often hear myself saying, “Although you cannot be healed of your disease, you can–if you intend to–work towards healing your brokenheartedness over all the dis-ease your illness has brought.”

I begin almost every week with my current Bereavement Group in the same manner. “Come and let us intend to heal together.”  Our lives must be totally re-ordered when they become shattered from the loss of someone we love.  We can never expect them to be the same.  If our life was a beautiful and colourful ceramic vase prior to the loss, the loss shattered that vase into a million pieces.  Healing is that work we do where we create a new mosaic with the pieces of the past, mixed into the mortar of our own rock solid existence, and with new aspects and colours we never would have imagined as our old “whole.”  When I think of “Hope in Healing,” it is this place of imagination where the new mosaic is created, where I see God as our greatest encourager in our healing.

God is excellent at creating something amazing out of dust, so I figure I will “seek striving” and “be still” and listen to the voice of the Holy One within my heart whisper direction, comfort, peace, and love into my ear as I watch my own hands create healing in my life.

For those of you who read my blog consistently, you will find elements of this sermon familiar. I used the story I wrote earlier in the summer to commemorate my father’s death as the jumping off place for a recent sermon. The text from the Hebrew Scriptures is Genesis 17:1-8, 17-22, the story of Abram and Sari being renamed and told of the coming birth of a child late into their barren years.

In the summer of 1977–the summer my Father died–a mango tree was planted in our back-yard. Dear friends of my family gave the tree to us shortly before they moved back home to India. The father finished his PhD at the University of Miami, so it was not too long after Daddy died that the tree was planted. Their six-year old daughter and I played and attended kindergarten together. I can remember jumping on the mattresses at her house; they sat on the floor, so her mother felt our safety was not endangered! Her home always smelled of warm spices. I can remember being jealous of the pretty red dot her mother painted so carefully on her forehead. I can remember the cool embrace of her mother and father, always so glad to see me come to play. Her parents’ car had rotten floorboards, so you had to hold up your feet. I loved watching the road go by, especially in the rain.

The tree commemorated my friendship with their daughter, my Mother’s addiction to mangoes ( I still have nightmares.), and Daddy’s life. I can remember the father digging the hole and planting the tree. A small tree, with stakes and ropes to keep it upright. The hole was too big, but my Mother felt it would help the tree to mulch around it, so it was never fully filled in to the top of the hole. And mulch we did! Year after year, the best of the table scraps, grass clippings, and refuse went under that tree. Even the dead bunnies from a prolific surprise by my rabbit Baron (who then became “Baroness”) went under this tree. The offerings to the gods never were as thoughtful or as sacred as what we offered our dear mango tree.

When we sold the house ten years later, we still had never tasted one mango off our blessed tree. She never bloomed. Not once.

We sold the house on 100th Street to a Greek Orthodox priest. He invited to his open house to see all the renovations he made to our old home. We walked through the house noting each change, including the central air conditioning we never had. My room was now an office. The interior garden taken out, paved and a big hot tub put in its place. The Buddhas and totems were gone. The little concrete pond where Kelly Grey and I poured a whole bottle of bubble bath before turning on the pump and filling the patio with bubbles, gone. A huge satellite dish could be seen looming in the back yard. So much change, yet so much the same. We noticed and took in all the ways “our home” had become “his house.” As we finished our tour, we walked through the master bedroom and bath, then the laundry room, which put us at the very back of the expansive indoor patio and overlooking the back-yard. Mother and I saw it at the same time. The mango tree laden with fruit.

Mother turned to me and said, “It is time to go.”

Our faithfulness to our little mango tree not too unlike Abram’s to God. Dutiful to a fault, yet the promises of fertility beyond the grasp of reality. Don’t you just love it that Abram hears this covenantal blessing from the Holy One and laughs? Can you see him? I can. I can in large part because I have been him. All of us come to that place where we feel “settled” and accept—in a sense—our lot in life. Things may not be the way we originally hoped, but things are what they are and we try to hold onto that little corner of the world we call our own.

We do not look to the sky to see promises like stars painting the eternal ceiling above us with abundance. We do not want to be renamed anything other than what we are right now in this very moment. We only want to stay the course, keep things the same. Maybe we might complain about how they used to be when they were better, because the past somehow seems better in the rear view mirror than the uncertain future ahead. We did not feel that way about it when it was our present reality—of course—but now the luxury of time has given us the gift of forgetting the bad parts and putting on a pedestal the good.

Abram understands this too. He cries out to God to just let Ismael—his illegitimate child with his wife’s slave—be “enough” of God’s blessing for him. Let us look at our text again:

Abraham fell face down; he laughed and said to himself, “Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?” And Abraham said to God, “If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!”

Abram wanted to keep the status quo, and changing it—even in ways that brought forth more fruit, more complication, more change, more work, more legacy, more life—inspired great fear, trepidation and well, laughter.

One of my responsibilities in my job with hospice is to lead a bereavement group. Week-after-week I often hear the same stories repeated about the way a loved one died, the ways in which modern medicine failed, the ways in which other family and friends just do not help with all the hurt, the ways in which life will never be the same without the one who died, the ways death changed life and the anger at those changes. I hear these stories from the same people week-after-week, and my heart hurts for them because I see how stuck they are, and I long to offer some kind of healing balm that might validate their pain, but also inspire them to embrace this change and the fruit it might bring to their lives. That old mango tree in the yard of my childhood home keeps coming to mind.

See once upon a time, I dated Plant Geek. Plant Geek is getting a PhD in Horticulture from the University of Florida and works down in South Dade studying Mamey for his dissertation (of all things!). His adviser went to Costa Rica for six months in 2005. Plant Geek house sat and dog sat in his absence, and this was the time of our dating.

We walked around the yard, moving between all the various fruit trees and plants. What else would you expect from a horticulture professor specializing in tropical fruit?! When we came to one particular mango tree, Plant Geek started to pick some of them off for me and Mother. He always considered himself to be her “Dealer,” given she really is a Mango Junkie. And what a good Dealer! More varieties. More mangoes. Needless to say, Ms. Audrey loved how it worked out that I dated Plant Geek during mango season!

As we stood under the tree, so laden with fruit, I thought of our tree on 100th Street. I told Plant Geek the whole story of our mango tree–even the dead bunnies–and how it never blossomed or gave us fruit. I told him about finding her drooping with fruit just a year later. I wanted to know one thing: Why?

He told me the answer was simple. We had been too good to the tree. Trees need stress in-order to bloom and give off fruit. Reproduction, which is what the fruit is all about to the tree, comes about when the tree gets scared it might die and so it sends forth the fruit to ensure its survival in the next generation. In commercial growing, he told me, they actually use drought and flood to force stress their trees into better production. Our tree never experienced a single stressful moment until we sold the house to a man not quite as dedicated to her nurturing. She did the only thing possible. She freaked out! She brought forth fruit for her survival.

How often all of us get stuck thinking life should be about rocking along and keeping everything nice and even and happy. Oh to have an easy stress free life! What wouldn’t we give for that! And, how much we need safety, security, good food, water, and tender loving care to grow to be strong, healthy and happy. But the truth is that part of what inspires our imagination and makes it sparkle with possibility much like the stars in the darkest night sky, is stress. And like Abraham, we too shake our fits at God and want things to just stay the same and for our lot to be secure.

Unfortunately, life is not like that. I recently remarked to my bereavement group that given how I am younger than all of them, and I know “life is not fair,” I was sure they knew this too. “So,” I asked, “What did you do in the past to help deal with the ways in which life was unfair?” The room fell into an awkward silence, and when someone finally spoke it was to tell the same story from the week before about trying to keep some piece of their loved one “alive” in their home.

Now do not get me wrong, all of us need places where we can bemoan, mourn, and cry out in anger and anguish the terrible changes this unfair life brings to each of our doors. We all go through terrible emotional droughts, and for many in my group that is where they are and where they should be. I understand. When my father died thirty years ago his death ushered in a terrible drought in my life. From his death June 28th, 1977 until the one year anniversary, I saw more than some see in a lifetime. Daddy, Grammy, and my best friend from church all died. My sisters came to Mother and told her they never wanted to see us or have anything to do with us again. With them went their husbands, Aunt Clem and Grammy, before she died later in the Fall. Our dinner table went from nine to two in less than one month. Losing my family like that has proven to be the most powerful loss of my life.

But my life has not just been about those losses, just as Abraham and Sarah’s was not just about barrenness.

For now I seek to embrace the good covenant I have with God, one you have too. The covenant that no matter what happens God with be with us. The covenant that grace is enough and mercy plentiful. The covenant about loving God, my neighbour and myself. The covenant that focuses on forgiveness and inclusion at the dinner table of all God’s children, even when they are barren or stressed out!

I want to embrace with gratitude all the love wrapping itself around my life. I possess more love than I know what to do with from both friends and family. When I was ordained last fall, the most beautiful moment for me came during “The Laying On of Hands.” Being surrounded by all of these loved ones blessing me and my calling to walk beside all of God’s children surpassed any other moment of my life. That moment did not come easy. Years of study, poverty, questioning, giving up, trying again, waiting, wondering and working had to transpire before I found myself on my knees at the altar surrounded. I felt more love in that one moment than I had ever experienced in my life. I could feel the mango tree of my own life overflowing in fragrant fruit.

So, tell me friend, what about your own tree? Do you feel the stress of your life bringing forth new fruit and the abundances of creativity, friendship, compassion and love? Or do you just laugh when God wants to bring you out of your barrenness–even if it is painful and stressful–and pray for the status quo?

Back when I dated Plant Geek, I would often go to sleep in his bed with his hand on the center of my back. Sweet comfort found with a simple hand. Sweet safety in touch. A gentle connection. Even after he and I parted ways, I would lay restless in my bed and just think of the hand to my back and then tumble into a peaceful rest. Just the thought; it was all I needed.

In another relationship, I learned even more deeply the power of touch. I never heard of Reiki before this small introduction. I must admit to being both open and skeptical. Despite my own spirituality, I often put my analytical mind into overdrive and question, question, question. My first experiences with Reiki forced me to reassess some places in me needing to just be and not think. As the other hands held me and meditated over me, I felt the release of pent up energy and fear. Tears would often well up and spill out on the bed. I learned how much I internalized my life and how the scars of my life were flaring right in the depths of my body and disrupting my energy.

I knew of the word “chakra” but could not tell you anything about them. Now I can name all seven of them and their functions. I can assess them and work to try to find a balance in my energy fields and in those of others. (Here is a great link to a page about them and their functions.) My Root Chakra–that which grounds me to this planet and informs my sense of safety–often gets out of whack. The first line of the meditation for the Root Chakra on the above page says: “It is safe to me to be here.” As I said, when Plant Geek first put that one hand on my back I felt safe. The other experiences with this type of healing touch rooted me deeper to my life, my place on this planet, and the abundence of life and possiblity.

Unfortunatley, as soon as any new trauma occurs with me the first thing to go is my sense of rootedness. I can remember being very sick with a virus when I was 23 and in bed for a month. My fever did not fully break for two months, and in the beginning they soared over 103 degrees F. Delusions came and went. At some point, Mother crawled in my bed and fell asleep. I awoke to find her there and became terrified at this stranger in my bed. I did not remember who she was. I screamed out, “Who are you?” I was certain she was there to kill me. She told me that she was my mother. I cried, “I do not have a mother!” I can remember the feeling of dread overcoming me. I knew, just knew, I did not have a Mother. She calmly reassured me that in fact I did have a mother, and she was my mother. I finally realized who she was and began weeping. “I do have a mother.” I fell into her arms and cried out all my terror.

I fell back to earth and found my gounding again in her healing embrace.

My patients often describe to me feeling the pull of death upon them. Dying does not hurt or cause them fear, but when they tumble back into their beds and awake to find themselves back on earth they report feeling disorientated and unsure. I understand. I can still float away easily. Maybe this is why I feel the most protected and at peace when I am in water? The warm cocoon makes the floating feel normal and not do discombobulating. Alas, I am not a fish. I live here on Terra Firma and being rooted heals the feelings of being able to fall right off the planet’s edge. Being rooted to my life helps me feel real and of value.

Those first tender and amazing experiences with Reiki opened my spirit to the healing powers of touch. I do not mean this in the way one might experience a charismatic or ecstatic moment of miraculous healing that looks exactly the way the one seeking the healing expects…i.e. “I was blind, but now I see.” No, this type of healing is more about inner vision than anything else. This healing is about seeing yourself as you really are–the true you created by love, existing in love, persisting in love. This healing is about inner peace, creative hope, and forgiveness. Yes. Forgiveness. As Carolyn Myss said, “Every great act of healing is preceded by an even greater act of forgiveness.” This healing is about allowing the flow–the Chi–to be about unconditional love towards self and others.

I attended a workshop this weekend on Healing Touch. After witnessing a patient die whisper quiet and with minimal problems, when her disease normally creates a gruesome death, I became entralled with learning about Healing Touch. Her daughter has taken many workshops and did a great deal of energy work with her to facilitate this peaceful death. Healing Touch does facilitate peace, and my workshop served as a wonderful reminder of the need in my life for my spiritual practices to root and ground me as I provide compassionate care and touch to my patients. It reminded me of the need in my life for my spiritual practices to root and ground me to my own life and the process of my own healing.

As I lay on the table during a Chakra Clearing–one of the most profound experiences of tranquility I have ever experienced–I lay there thinking about my need for touch. Touch connects us one to another. When the one we love leaves, we miss not only their presence in our lives but also laying down on the sweet bed of love and companionship and resting in their tender embrace. The widows in my bereavement group tell me how utterly painful it is to crawl into their too empty beds and weep over the one person who would hold them in their void…the one person missing from their lives.

I need to be held and assured. I need that tender embrace. I need the hand on my back in the middle of the dark nights of my life. I need all the “compromised” places of disorganized energy to be healed with the gentlest of touch and by the kindest of hearts. I need the hands that heal placed on me.

I am waiting.

The first time I met a new patient of mine, I found myself surprised to see her sitting outside on the patio given that she is on Continuous Care. We only put you on Continuous Care when you are having medication issues or for immanency, and I heard she was on due to her death being expected shortly. A young woman in her fifties shrivelled from cancer and aged by at least thirty years. The visit with her was short given how easily exhausted she becomes. She fell asleep numerous times while we spoke–even in the middle of sentences–so I sat quietly praying for her and for her daughters.

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love my nieces. I will do anything for them. In many ways they contain God’s greatest gift to me. No matter how much they might drive me nuts, I always can come around for them. I just love them–and forgive them and me for our humanness–that much. So when I meet other young women of a similar age, I find my heart picks up the same rhythm it has around Morgan and Piano Girl. For this reason, I offered to come back and speak at a more convenient time to my patient’s twenty-something daughter. I thought about my nieces and what they might need from a chaplain if Sista was dying. And I gave thanks that for at least one more minute I am young and cute (if I do say so myself), which goes a long way in reaching out to someone also young and cute and facing one of the most horrible losses of her life.

I arrived as agreed and met “Stacy” in the parking lot of their complex. Right on time, she came whirrling into the lot in her bright orange sports car. The car fit her personality, at least what I saw of it ever so briefly on my first visit. We went inside and she flitted around like a butterfly on acid ordering Chinese food, talking to her mother, and to our nurse. For a brief moment I thought she was going to cancel our conversation, but finally she looked up at me and asked, “So, where do we do this thing?” We ended up sitting next to each other on the couch and with a rush she began.

“I am really having a hard time. I can’t lose my mom–you know, I kind of still have hope she will pull through this–but I also know in my head that she is going to die. I do not trust anyone. I need help, but I can’t let anyone help me. I push people away. I am really independent like that. I think my sister is going to take a leave of absence and come down. My boyfriend is always trying to help me…but I have to find ways to pay him back. I feel bad if he stays to help me, like he has better things to be doing than helping me with my mom or because I am scared. And my friend from work–well, I pushed her away a couple of weeks ago. I always do that. I have a hard time making friends, especially with girls. I do not trust them. Not that I trust guys, mind you, because they all cheat. I mean my dad–before he died–cheated on my mom. My step-dad too. Every man cheats. I know my boyfriend cannot be trusted. My step-dad beat my mom, but he helped so much financially. She stayed with him because of us. I do not know who to trust or have help, so yes I am young but it is all up to me. That is why I like to help people and want to help people for a living. I am good at that. So, what exactly is it that you can do to help me?”

As I sat there listening to her I felt prepared. I heard this story once before, just with a slightly different cast of characters. At the time, the story was just a personal history. I filed it under “everybody goes through shit” and this is the shit The Bean went through. I look back now and see the signs he would eventually implode, but at the time the story was just that. A story. History. Past tense. Over. Done with. The imploding, however, got my attention as I lay devestated from the nuclear fall-out.

I looked at her ever so softly and asked, “Who was the alchoholic…your mom or your step-father?” The answer: Both of them.

I read a book about Adult Children of Alcoholics after The Bean imploded and left. I paid attention. I saw much of my own family dynamics, and the ways I continue to practice day after day healthier ways of living and relating in the world. I saw just how fucking hard it is, as best I can for someone who did not grow up that way, and how much work it takes to really deal again and again with it as it comes up. I learned some things I shared with this terrified girl, most importantly that being in relationships–especially intimate or fragile ones–wakens the beast of fear and that she did not have to reinvent the wheel to find her way to safety. The path has been walked by many, and they are availible to help her find her way.

When she repeated to me again that she just cannot trust anyone, I gave her the only promise I know: “You can learn to trust yourself, so that when people fail you–and they will because we are all human and make mistakes, even Chaplains– you will trust yourself to get through it and figure it out.”

I sat there so grateful I grew up in some terribly important ways…so grateful all the imploding shit was not just left to rot out me and my heart, but could be used for good somehow. All of a sudden, in one conversation all the pain of this terrible heartbreak was bearable. All of a sudden, I was glad I met The Bean, and I was ready to say that I do not regret meeting him. All of a sudden, everything was okay. All of a sudden, everything came full circle.

Now this is the place where some of my dear readers might be saying to themselves, “Yes. Everything happens for a reason.” I do not believe in that lie. If everything happens for a reason, then The Puppet Master we call fate, or destiny, or God, is intentionally causing terrible things to happen to us in order to teach us a lesson. I posses no freedom of action, just freedom of emotional reaction until I get to whatever reaction this Puppet Master has deemed pleasing to itself. No thank you.

I do, however, believe things happen for the reason we give them. I believe in our limitless creativity, which I think continually surprises God in its joy, love, forgiveness and at times, cruelty. I am the one who can with all the love in the universe take back a thing meant only for my harm and find a way to make it into something life giving for myself or others. I am the one who can invite God into that space to whisper in my ear “potential” when my heart is crying out “impossibility.” I am the one who can forgive, let go, reshape, build anew, and design good things for my life with whatever comes my way. As I said to Stacy, I can trust myself even when others prove untrustworthy.

So, I changed what I wrote about him in The Dating Game.

Here is the old version:

The Bean. Bank Robber, Cynic, Musician, Writer and Atheist. I must admit that he possess lovely qualities: whip-smart, funny, kind, playful, an amazing teacher, generous, fun to be around, reads books, talks about real things, compassionate. Or at least that was The Bean I experienced until his ex-girlfriend called, he went to have dessert until after 2 in the morning, and… Loving him changed me forever and in beautiful ways. I never want losing him to take away those things or change me into someone more cynical, more fearful, and less trusting, but so far, it has. I only want to be my true self–like I was when I met him and with him– regardless of the pain he caused when he left. Although he is the only person I feel I ever really “fell in love with,” none of it remains as sweet as it might of if we had broken-up over not being good together and with integrity. He said, “I only dated you because I was lonely.” I believe this to be true. Unfair. Wrong. But true, even if only in part. Given this, I wish I never met him, which is terribly hard and painful to say, but given the lies my joy was based on, it is also really honest. No one likes to be the fool, even if everybody plays one sometime, so every memory, every thought, every feeling became tainted in one cruel week. As I said, I wish I never met him.

Here is the new:

The Bean. Bank Robber, Cynic, Musician, Writer and Atheist. I must admit that he possess lovely qualities: whip-smart, funny, kind, playful, an amazing teacher, generous, fun to be around, reads books, talks about real things, compassionate. This is The Bean I experienced until he “imploded” (his word). Loving him changed me forever and in beautiful ways. I never want losing him to take away those things or change me into someone more cynical, more fearful, and less trusting, so I have worked very hard and intentionally to not let them. I only want to be my true self–like I was when I met him and with him–because I really like her. She is a good girl. I think I understand now that he did the very best that he could do, and even while it may not have been the very best for himself or for me, it was all he was capable of. The day it ended I told him I remember who he really is. He replied, “I am glad one of us still does because I don’t.” I carry that beautiful, imaginative, kind young man who really gets it in my heart and only want the best for him. I want that for me too. I give us both countless amounts of freedom to find it for ourselves, by ourselves.

Amen. So be it.

Miss Douglas once asked me, “If you were not a minister, what would you be?” I replied, “A porn director.” As true as this might be from a strictly imaginative standpoint, mostly likely I would have been a doctor…other roads not traveled and all. I also know I would be an Atheist if I was not a Jesus Follower (opposed to being a Christian). Atheism makes sense to me on so many levels, and my spiritual life still includes doubt, questions, ponderings and out-and-out rejection of theism.

And I still possess an image of a loving God whispering in my ear.

Both. And.

“Hank,” a patient of mine, is an Atheist, and we get along famously. He journeyed through periods of Protestantism, then to Jehovah’s Witness while his wife was dying of cancer, and now self-identifies as an Atheist. I know we get along in large part because I never try to move him from his convictions, even as I see his spiritual pain. I also hold him in my heart with great compassion over just how isolated Hank is from the rest of humanity. Hank is not a “Happy Atheist.” Hank is heart and spirit broken.

When I did my Clinical Pastoral Education Residency at Rush University Medical Center, George Fitchett–the Grand Pubah of Spiritual Assessment–supervised me. In a landmark study he conducted with Duke University Medical Center on health care outcomes and spiritual practice, they found those patients who were content with their spiritual path–from “Happy Atheists” to Southern Baptists to Buddhists–had decreased hospital stays and increased outcomes. Health is not affected by affiliation –or lack there of–it only mattered that you were “happy” with your spiritual choices. My Spiritual Assessment of Hank ranks him as “dissatisfied” with his spiritual choices. Highly dissatisfied.

I also do not believe Hank “needs God”–as his nurse does–in order to find the lacking satisfaction. However, I do believe Hank needs to come to terms with his prior vision of whom he believed God to be and his anger that God did not turn out as expected. The fundamental flaw I find in all religions stems from an insistence on having a special revelation about not only the nature of God, but also how God does and does not act in the world. Again and again, we humans–the creators of said religions–set up one another up for failure by claiming unknowable information as not only known, but Divine Truth. What argument can be made against such claims, especially as they are transmuted by various means over centuries into “the inerrant word of God?”

I find so many people these days are what I like to call “The New Agnostics.” People who gaze into the vast universe, see the complexity and beauty, and wonder about an Original Designer, Instigator or Force. This may be why, in part, the masses do not decry Intelligent Design; they suspect it themselves in its most simplistic understanding. (Not to be confused with the political and religious agenda of the Christian Right, in particular, on this front.) These folks are also totally disgusted with the failure of their religions to accept plurality, change, science, women, gays, etc. They leave their religious traditions behind in part but not in full as they seek spiritual connection without the religiosity of their past. “Spiritual, Not Religious” then becomes its own religion of one. I understand this because even as an Ordained Minister I always fill out on-line dating forms as “Spiritual, Not Religious.” I never want to be confused with the dominant perception of what it means to be a Christian.

Of course, there are some like Hank, who abandon their Higher Power all together. I hold no inner issue with this choice, but I question their satisfaction with it when it comes as a result of being disillusioned with other human beings and their perceptions, insistence and hate-mongering in the name of their “God.” I keep reading stories of those dissatisfied with God because of the ridiculous nature and behavior of religions and religious people. Are these the same thing?

I am a fan of logic, and it seems rather illogical to me for anyone to insist on knowing anything concrete about who God is and how God acts in the world or who God is not or how God does not act in the world. The information is simply unknowable. (Read this wonderful “This I Believe” by Bill Nunan.) Will this always be the case? I do not know. I do believe we live in an age where we cannot say with certainty–like in the same way we might assert “2 + 2 = 4″–anything about God at all. Whatever I say, even as a minister, is strictly based on my own inner vision of who God might be and whom God is to me. Get that? Whom God is to me. Period. In fact, I am so passionate about this stance, I will only reflect back to my patients and their loved ones words they use to describe who God is to them. This is why Hank and I get along so well. I never reject his language about who God is not to him.

I want to advocate for Hank to be at peace with his Atheism. Atheism is a reasoned, intelligent and ethical spiritual path for many. I want Hank to be a “Happy Atheist,” but I also know his “unhappy” Atheism is only one small tendril of the pain wrapping itself around his life and choking it out of him, literally. As his Chaplain, I feel my job requires me to try and help Hank make peace with all of the ways life did not turn out how he wanted or needed. All the “doing” of the different religious paths he choose did not earn God’s favour and keep him from harm. His wife is still dead. His children still absent. His addictions still present. Loneliness and isolation being his constant companions. Whatever vision he possessed of God and God’s children failed him, and I desire to walk beside him with compassion (His favourite word for me.). It is the least I can do as his Chaplain, as a minister, as a human being.

I feel part of my job as a Chaplain is to advocate for those I care for to be able to ask the deepest of metaphysical and ontological questions with a member of the clergy. Too often, clergy sit back on the revelations of the past and do not entertain the curiosity and creativity of the present. I do not advocate with my patients a change in their tradition, but instead affirm the ways their spiritual resources give life to their dying and provide curiosity when I witness ways it is not life giving. Mostly, I find I need to “sit Shiva” with those deeply hurt by the certitude of their religious bodies that left them dissatisfied, rejected and cast out from the one place they thought all would be accepted–God’s House.

In the summer of 1977–the summer Daddy died–a mango tree was planted in our back-yard. Dear friends of my family gave the tree to us shortly before they moved back home to India. The father finished his PhD at the University of Miami, so it was not too long after Daddy died that the tree was planted. Their six-year old daughter and I played and attended kindergarten together. I can remember jumping on the mattresses at her house. They sat on the floor, so her mother felt our safety was not endangered! Her home always smelled of warm spices. I can remember being jealous of the pretty red dot her mother painted so carefully on her forehead. I can remember the cool embrace of her mother and father, always so glad to see me come to play. Her parents’ car had rotten floorboards, so you had to hold up your feet. I loved watching the road go by, especially in the rain.

The tree commemorated my friendship with their daughter, Mother’s addiction to mangoes, and Daddy’s life. I can remember the father digging the hole and planting the tree. A small tree, with stakes and ropes to keep it upright. The hole was too big, but my Mother felt it would help the tree to mulch around it, so it was never fully filled in to the top of the hole. Year after year, the best of the table scraps, grass clippings, and refuse went under that tree. Even the dead bunnies from a prolific surprise by my rabbit Baron (who then became “Baroness”) went under this tree. The offerings to the gods never were as thoughtful or as sacred as what we offered our dear mango tree.

When we sold the house ten years later, we still had never tasted one mango off our blessed tree. She never bloomed. Not once.

We sold the house on 100th Street to a Greek Orthodox priest. He invited to his open house to see all the renovations he made to our old home. We walked through the house noting each change, including the central air conditioning we never had. My room was now an office. The interior garden taken out, paved and a big hot tub put in its place. The Buddhas and totems were gone. A huge satellite dish could be seen looming in the back yard. So much change, yet so much the same. We walked through the master bedroom and bath, then the laundry room, which put us at the very back of the patio and overlooking the back-yard. Mother and I saw it at the same time. The mango tree laden with fruit.

Mother turned to me and said, “It is time to go.”

Once upon a time, I dated Plant Geek. Plant Geek is getting a PhD in Horticulture from the University of Florida and works down in South Dade studying Mamey for his dissertation. His adviser went to Costa Rica for six months in 2005. Plant Geek house sat and dog sat in his absence, and this was the time of our dating.

We walked around the yard, moving between all the various fruit trees and plants. What else would you expect from a horticulture professor specializing in tropical fruit?! When we came to one particular mango tree, Plant Geek started to pick some of them off for me and Mother. He always considered himself to be her “Dealer,” given she really is a Mango Junkie. And what a good Dealer! More varieties. More mangoes. Needless to say, Ms. Audrey loved how it worked out that I dated Plant Geek during mango season!

As we stood under the tree, so laden with fruit, I thought of our tree on 100th Street. I told Plant Geek the whole story of our mango tree–even the dead bunnies–and how it never blossomed or gave us fruit. I told him about finding her drooping with fruit just a year later. I wanted to know one thing: Why?

He told me the answer was simple. We had been too good to the tree. Trees need stress in-order to bloom and give off fruit. Reproduction, which is what the fruit is all about to the tree, comes about when the tree gets scared it might die and so it sends forth the fruit to ensure its survival in the next generation. In commercial growing, he told me, they actually use drought and flood to force stress their trees into better production. Our tree never experienced a single stressful moment until we sold the house to a man not quite as dedicated to her nurturing. She did the only thing possible. She freaked out! She brought forth fruit for her survival.

Daddy died thirty years ago today, and his death ushered in a terrible drought in my life. From his death June 28th, 1977 until the one year anniversary, I saw more than some see in a lifetime. Daddy, Grammy, and my best friend from church all died. My sisters came to Mother and told her they never wanted to see us or have anything to do with us again. With them went their husbands, Aunt Clem and Grammy, before she died later in the Fall. Our dinner table went from nine to two in less than one month. I was molested for the first time the following spring when John asked me if he could marry my Mother. You might find this strange, but I do not think being molested was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Losing my family like that has proven to be the most powerful loss of my life.

I see six year-old girls and think about how innocent and little I was. Who of us can process so much loss at one time, let alone a six year-old? I still work at it. I get scared of losing those I love, and as a result, I get scared of loving too much. The place I see this the most is in my intimate relationships, and unfortunately, the only place to work on these fears is in an intimate relationship. I just cannot touch it otherwise. I do not know if I will ever find anyone who can love me through the adjustments…I thought I had, but I was wrong. I pray I do.

In the meantime, I embrace with gratitude all the love wrapping itself around my life. My Mother continues to be such a source of love, affirmation, help and friendship. She is one of my Soul Mates in life. My Sista is too. Who would I be without her? My own biological half-sisters left thirty years ago, but Sista has been in my life for the whole of it. Our blood may not be the same, but our hearts are one. She is my champion, best friend, mentor, and pain in my ass! Love truly is thicker than blood.

I have such amazing and lovely friends. My other soul mate is Tammy Wayne. I can always count on her to remember me, what I love, who I love, and celebrate my life. Paparazzo’s patience may have been pushed to the limits with all the grieving these last six months brought, but he never wavered in his love for me. Harlot never fails to call me. Paulina Ballerina always accepts me. Miss Douglas, Fundraiser, My Best Friend, the list goes on and on. I really do possess more love than I know what to do with from both friends and family. When I was ordained last fall, the most beautiful moment for me came during “The Laying On of Hands.” Being surrounded by all of these loved ones blessing me and my calling to walk beside all of God’s children surpassed any other moment of my life. I felt more love in that one moment than I had ever experienced in my life.

See. My mango tree is laden with fruit.

The year: 1977. I remember First Baptist Church of Seminole was having a church picnic when we arrived to find my Grandmother that Sunday evening. The plan was simple: Leave me with my grandmother for the week, while my parents enjoyed a week to themselves following a terrible year of Daddy being so sick with Myocarditis. He would finally return back to work the following Tuesday, July 5th. He never did.

I wonder now if he realized at all he would never see Miami or our home again. When was the last time he saw my sisters? What did he say? I remember being outside in the bright heat asking for just one more hug before they left Monday morning for Ocala. Daddy said, “Jackie. I will give you a hug when I get back.” Funny how promises not kept stay with us forever…

They drove our truck to Ocala, where they went antiquing and checked into a small inn. A couple owned the place and lived there as well. In the evening, my Aunt Charlyne met them for dinner and a dip in the pool. I see them in my memory now just as I saw them Tuesday morning around nine when Mother sat in Grandmother’s Florida Room and told me every detail. The sky twinkled with stars. The pool glowing against the dark night. Mother in her turquoise bikini, which always made her look more like an Amazon than a sex goddess. Daddy’s tan skin with the greying chest hair. I could see them floating around and laughing. Especially laughing. Aunt Charlyne has the most distinctive low hackle of them all.

After she left, Mother and Daddy went back to their room. Did they make love? I realize children usually try not to think of things, but I know from my own losses how unsettling it feels to look back and realize the last moment you lay with someone skin-to-skin. No one tells you it is going to be the last time. Would I have cherished it more if I had known? Would I have tried to cheat fate and find a sweeter moment to be the last? Who knows what happened for my parents, but that year of illness must have given birth to lonely consequences as the illness took them away from each other physically.

I know he went to the bathroom at some point and returned saying he did not feel well. Mother, being both a nurse and a wife having been through the mill, suggested they go to the hospital. “Jack, after all we have been through, I would feel more comfortable getting you checked out than not.” They dressed, went downstairs to the owners watching television, and they gave them directions to the hospital with best wishes for a speedy return. Daddy was in full cardiac arrest before they got out of the parking lot.

He wanted to drive, but Mother wisely thought this was a ridiculous idea. She also thought she should make a run for the ER, instead of waiting for an ambulance. Racing towards an unknown hospital in an unknown town, she forgot the directions as she leaned over and gave him rescue breaths. Using the truck’s CB, she cried out for help in getting to the hospital. The whole time she massaged his heart with her right hand as best she could.

I can see her with Daddy. Full of panic, yet calm and doing what had to be done. She is at a red light where there is a slight hill in-front of her. She turns the CB station again, unknowingly hitting the police band. A trooper responds. When she tells him where she is, the night sky becomes illuminated with flashing lights. He is just beyond the hill waiting for her, and tells her to run the light as soon as she can. She follows him all the way into the Emergency Room driveway.

This all happened late in the night. The evening shift of nurses, getting off at eleven, were just coming out of the hospital as they pulled up. Three nurses in total. One ran back for a gurney, while the other two took over giving Daddy CPR. One of those nurses stayed with Mother the whole night, even driving her to Aunt Charlyne’s at three o’clock in the morning. I know I think of her when I sit with a family during the wee hours of the morning paying back the universe her kindness in part.

At some point, a doctor came and told Mother what she already knew. Daddy had a massive heart attack. I know she called our pastor, Rev. Reed, in Miami and talked and prayed with he and his wife as she waited. Then, some time after two the doctor came again to say Daddy had another heart attack, they did all they could do, and how sorry he was, but “your husband is dead.”

At Aunt Charlyne’s, they talked and cried and decided to wait until Grandmother got up at six to call her. Why ruin her sleep? She would need her rest in the coming days. Over the years I have pondered my Grandmother going through her morning routine with a lively six year-old running around and knowing my world was about to change forever. How did she hide her tears? How did she feed me breakfast? How did she go for the mail? It came early those days. When it arrived, a package from Mother and Daddy held a little red toy. I ran through the house playing and singing, “My Daddy is going to hug me again when he gets back!” How did she not cry out in anguish?

This was all that happened before Mother arrived without Daddy, sat me down on the love-seat by the steps down to the Florida Room, and told me the story I based my inner movie on exactly what it looked like when Daddy died. This is what happened the day before my world tipped over and changed forever.

The following post is dedicated to all the CNA/HHA’s who work selflessly to tend to patients’ most intimate needs, especially the six women on my Hospice Team. I wrote this for their special week of honor.

Feel free to check out my old post “The One Armed Bitch Named Jesus.” I wrote it in honor of them as well.

They are often the first to notice our patients’ decline. Inspecting the gentle folds, mounds, wrinkles, crevices, and colour while caressing back to cleanliness and comfort bodies no longer able to care for themselves. Once, our patients were babies and their Mother held them at her breast and nursed them to life. Now, these gentle women hold them to their breasts of love as they help lay them down gently before the Big Sleep.

They know who has enough love, and who goes gravely without. They know the wives about to lose their minds, and the sons who coo in their fathers’ ear sweet words of assurance. They know who eats. They know who does not. They know when the bladder function begins to fail. They know the secret chocoholics. They know those desperately lonely. They know the ones just plain desperate. They know the most intimate of secrets, and still come and care regardless.

What kind of person wakes up in the morning, smiles at the new day, makes their breakfast and then happily goes to wipe poop off fannies for a living? How can someone do this with such tenderness when even family cannot? Love. Unconditional love for neighbour is the only answer. When they heard The Voice of Love calling and asking, “Whom shall I send to tend to my children who are sick, elderly and dying? Whom will tend the least of these?” they responded, “Here I am; send me.”

Let us bless them, our Certified Nursing Assistants and Home Health Aides, for they bless all of us. They bless us by being on the frontlines of tender care and showing gentleness and grace to all they serve, regardless of who they are, how they act, or the severity of their condition. We bless them today, and always, in the name of the Love they so generously give out of the abundance of their own hearts and lives.

Amen.

I am helping a patient of mine put together her “goodbye letters.” Really, they are love letters to her closest family and friends done with knowing her death will come soon and wanting to leave them something tangible with her imprint of love all over them. This last week she dictated a letter to her future daughter-in-law. The future girl of her son’s dreams has yet to be found, and from what I gather he does not date too much these days–more your recluse type–so this letter is for the future hoped-for by his mother. Now I did hear that her son promised to get married by thirty-five, a good ten years off, at least that is her prayer for him. (Poor dear.)

As we worked on the future daughter-in-law letter, my patient would consult me to see if she covered all her bases. She wanted the opinion of a “future daughter-in-law,” whom she sees me to be given her palm reading from the week before! (Too funny; right?) I tell you what…this patient is such a joy to see! I really look forward to each visit because regardless of how sick she is, she possesses an amazing spirit and looks at life with joy and gratitude. I am learning a great deal from her about love, forgiveness, optimism, and most importantly, letting go of fear and trusting God.

In the letter to her future daughter-in-law, she wrote the following: “Be kind and gentle to each other. Love and marriage are like a rose. As they blossom, they get sweeter and open more with each passing day. When you argue with each other (over the next fifty years or so), remember inside that grouchy man is the same young guy you fell in love with. Please take excellent care of each other.”

Do you know much about roses? They are not difficult to cultivate, but they do require knowing a thing or two for them to flourish. I am not a rose expert by any means, but I did help someone plant a new garden and learned about roses in the process. Sista’s parents, Gram and Granddad, cultivate roses out at Lawless Landing. I wrote to Granddad to ask for some advice on the rose front, given there being just one straggly rose bush with one bloom every now and again in the garden before we began. What were we to do?

Granddad offered his sage rose wisdom. “Don’t be afraid to prune. Spend the time and money to make the right mix in the soil; roses can be picky about that. Water. Water. Water. If you tend to them, they should bloom abundantly for years to come.” In the end, the old rose was out, and two new ones purchased to be planted in deep pots with just the right soil and mulch top. A careful brew of moss, manure, soil and fertilizer to help these little plants blossom and grow.

I think many of us treat our relationships the same way we treat roses. We either buy them on the side of the street (you know who you are!) or at the store, but then throw them away when the blooms wilt and the water turns rancid. Maybe we feel sentimental sometimes, and turn over a bouquet and try to dry them out, but dried flowers are never as sweet at fresh. At other times, we do go ahead and actually “buy the bush” (terrible pun not intended, but noted) but become dismayed when the plant dies from our neglect. Into the mulch pile and onto another new plant thinking, “I just need to get one that is in my favourite colour, then it will work.” (Or something like that.)

The same person I helped with planting the garden remarked to me at the time, “I just want roses, but I do not want to have to mess with them.” Don’t we all! Relationships are hard. They require pruning back the dead parts of ourselves and allowing for that growth time in the one we are with after we help prune them. We must be honest, but we can never be cruel for cruelty always takes away more of the healthy plant than it can survive without. We have to nurture and tend to the soil. It takes the right balance of the shit of the past processed enough to bring added joy and life to the mix of regular ordinary life and rich healthy soil in order to have a full future. We must water our love. Love dying of thirst has no hope at all of blooming. And we cannot be afraid of being stuck, pricked, poked or cut by the thorns. Thorns are part of life, and I have found in my limited rose experience that often the sweetest most beautiful roses have the sharpest thorns. Put another way, if passion for life and love rules one’s heart, deep waters of sadness or informed understanding will often be their gentle companions as well.

I know part of the pain of my own past centers on feeling the burn of being tossed into the mulch heap. None of us like to feel tossed away because of our thorns, especially when we feel we have worked so hard to cultivate amazing blossoms with the fertilizer of our lives. Having been on the mulch heap these last six months, I spent my time pruning back so I would be ready for replanting a garden with someone else. My gut and heart believe the new blooms can be even sweeter than the last, but I still get scared sometimes. I do not want to be thrown on the mulch heap again! I guess this is why when my patient spoke of love and marriage being like a rose, I could not help but think to myself how appropriate a metaphor this is, only for me it is more like a rose garden. One that requires patience, nurturing, attention and forgiveness in order to enjoy the sweet opening blooms year after year.

I, for one, am willing to put in the work.

Photo credit: The Bean

I often hear people say, “It is all in God’s hands.” What do you think they mean? I think it often means we no longer know what to do about a terrible problem, so we hope–have an imagination of some sort–God might still intervene and make things right. When God does not make things right the way we think we need, then we often progress to the axiom, “God must know something you don’t know.” I heard this one in the hospital when people died all the time. Often it took the form of: “God must need them in heaven now.” The idea that people die because God needs them in heaven always seems to make me a bit ill. Why would God need them? To sing in the choir? To lay the gold on the streets? To help bring in the harvest? For that matter, why not to teach God how to use the Internet or the joy of the Kama Sutra? The word “ludicrous” comes to mind.

I remember the night my thoughts changed and matured about God’s intervention in the world. At the time, I worked doing twenty-four hour on-call shifts at UNC Hospitals and still attended Duke. The Pastoral Care on-call room was located up on the eighth floor of the Neuroscience Hospital with Carolina Air Care. Air Care tolerated–barely–99% of the chaplains given a particular elder chaplain in a silk robe had mistakenly (???) flashed some of the staff one night. I, however, developed a close relationship with the Peds Team and the bond translated into my not getting the same static as most of the chaplains. The bond became so close, they would just pound on my door to announce the fun time about to begin, instead of waiting for someone to page my ass downstairs to the ER. This night the pounding began before the kid even hit the heli-pad.

The story of how he came to us has been told plenty of times in plenty of places. Drunk kid with sports car given by parents totals the car and his (or her) life in a series of bad decisions. Thinking about him, I still see him being brought out of the helicopter–a hot lift no less (no time to cool the bird due to how bad he was)–and throwing up everywhere. EVERYWHERE. I can smell it. I can hear the team moaning and groaning about cleaning all that shit up. The chills come again too…right up my arms and legs. Damn.

His parents come to the hospital. His Daddy had that farm swagger in his cowboy boots and Wrangler jeans. He paced in between going out to our smoking lounge (only in North Carolina). Back and forth. Back and forth. I already knew the news. Having been in the ICU just prior, I knew his son would die soon. No medical interventions would stop the total devastation of his injuries. Brain and body in a race to the death. I sat in a chair watching him pace and listening to him as he spoke to me about God.

“I pray chaplain. I’m praying right now. I keep asking God to help. God is all I have. God is my only hope. God must give me a miracle, otherwise…well, otherwise I do not know what I will do.” He went on, now forgetting my presence, “Oh God! Oh God! No! Help me! Help my son. I cannot bury my son. I won’t. I just won’t. Dear God please! Listen to me. Stop this from happening.”

And then he stopped pacing and stood looking stoic. Ever so slowly he turned and faced me. “If God could stop this from happening now, why not just stop it from happening all together? Where was God when my boy really needed him? You know, out there on that road in the car?” [Now before you go down the path marked, "Your boy drank himself into this problem, sir. No sympathy here buddy;" let us remember his story is not so different from any of ours. We all screw up, and those we love do too.]

So, where was God prior to the boy being on that road and when he was getting loaded? Why did God not intervene?

I completely reject the idea that everything is in God’s hands. If this were to be true, God is a Puppet Master, and we are God’s toys, not God’s children. And children make choices. Right ones. Wrong ones. Indifferent ones. So where is God in my choices, if God is not in correcting or protecting me from my outcomes?

In my vision of God, I see God leaning into the boy’s ear saying, “Son, you know better than this. You have been taught right. Drinking like this and then driving cannot lead to good. Stop now. Don’t get behind the wheel. Let someone else drive. Listen to me. Your safety is important to me. Your life matters.”

We live in a world full of bad luck. Bad luck that just happens, bad luck we work hard to cheat, bad luck we create. I also believe in Immanuel–God with us. Love finds us even in those places where we are sure and wrong, just like when love finds us where we are unsure and right. I believe in the Whispering God cooing in our ear and heart. Can you hear God?

You are my child. I love you. I made you to be human, which can be quite fragile and limited, but also beautiful and capable. I made you to be in my creative image, and I am constantly surprised by what you come up with. Come up with something really beautiful and good today. Come up with a special gift of kindness. Come up with forgiveness where you feel betrayed. Come up with brilliant violet where everyone else expects grey. Come up with laughter instead of hurt feelings. Come up with mercy instead of judgment. Come up with understanding instead of more pressure for yourself or anyone else. Come up with life, not fear. Love. Love. Love, today my child. I know you can do it. I made you that way.

Amen.

I hate feeling powerless. Becoming an adult ought to mean I can take care of myself in the world, but more and more I feel as though no matter what I do, I will always be behind the eight-ball. South Florida is notorious for paying low wages to the Worker Bees and high wages to the Kings of Commerce (some queens, but few). South Florida is also one of the metropolitan areas most affected by the Real Estate Boom and slow-down. As a result, rent prices have also gotten hefty to help cover ridiculous mortgages. Shit! I paid only $47 less to live in one room in some girl’s townhouse (her brass knuckled grill sporting live-in boyfriend came free of charge) than what I paid for a WHOLE TWO BEDROOM APARTMENT in North Carolina!

I bring home about $2650 per month, not counting mileage or on-call money. Let’s look at the break-down, a.k.a. “Why I Am Having A Breakdown:”

$1380 (Rent & Utilities, but only the most basic of cable around here…not even the Weather Channel.)
$470 (Gas & Insurance..and this number is on the rise.)
$200 (Prescriptions, etc…if I filled all of them. Who knew allergies and sensitive skin were so expensive?)
$400 (Student Loans & Credit Card. I still am in deferment for the Big Kahuna–the $120k I owe to Sallie Mae–which would be another $550 per month, consolidated so I finish paying just after Retirement. Also, my credit card debt is under $3200, but that is a doubling since I started this job. The majority of this money goes to school not credit cards, but I still feel totally irresponsible because this number is so high, and because I am not paying the suckers off.)
$100 (Emma: this covers fleas, food, treats, toys, vet visits, hair-cuts and heart worms. Puppy hysterectomies are paid in-full by Nana.)
Grand Total Out-Go = $2550

Wait! What about food, doctor appointments, clothes, hair-dos, tampons, floss, cleaning supplies, dry cleaning, going out with my friends, etc? What about savings, paying off debt, reimbursing Nana for all the emergency help, having money to fix my car, my knee, or my bike? What about birthday gifts, or cards for that matter? I have $100 guaranteed, plus the mileage and on-call money. Last month that came to a whooping $145.83!!! That meant that for four whole weeks I rolled in the pennies for a grand total of $245.83! Can’t beat $81 bucks a week, can you? This is why when I was at Target on Sunday I just about burst into tears that my $85 budget had already been blown by $65 on house-hold stuff before I put the first food item into my cart. I looked over the cart and decided that, yes, toothpaste is indeed a necessity and it would stay. Ditto for the laundry detergent. The other cleaner went back on the shelf. I now had a good $25 (including tax) to blow on food.

And to think my mother wonders why I eat cheese toast all the time?

See, I save my money to eat out with my friends every now and again. I do not want them to know how close I cut it sometimes. I want to feel like I am their equal. I do not want anyone to think of me as being irresponsible, but I know I feel that way. Not because I actually possess this horrible propensity to buy scads of unnecessary items, like toilet paper, but because I cannot make it right now without help from my family. A thirty-six year-old grown-ass woman with a Master’s Degree from Duke (of all places), and I do not make enough money to live on and take care of myself!

I have full-on panic attacks when I need to go to the doctor. Where will the money come from? What if he prescribes something else I cannot fill? You should have seen me crying like a baby over needing new tires in February. Had to call Mama on that. My $40 oil change cost just under a grand by the time all the “do only if my car would not be safe otherwise” things were done. Now I need three weeks salary, plus medical costs (about $6000 total) to get my knee operated on because of a tear in my cartilage from a bad crash off my bike last fall. Oh the fuck well! That will not be happening any time soon. How about just after retirement, when my student loans will be paid off? If Medicare is still around will they cover it or will it be seen as a pre-existing condition? Please email me if you know!

I need to get a second job. Most of the chaplains at my company work other places too. The on-call schedule makes it a real bitch to do, but people manage. You know? Work 60 hours one place and then try and pick up a good 20 or so hours somewhere else. Maybe I am just lazy or unmotivated or a total free-loading daughter, but I DO NOT WANT TO WORK ANOTHER JOB!!!!! (Can you hear me screaming now? Yes? Good!) Here is why: The job I already work really works me body, mind and spirit enough as it is. Sister here has nothing left to give. I need my down time in order to fill my cup, otherwise I cannot do the job I feel called to do. I do not have anything–time or energy–to give to a job I have to do in order to afford to continue to do the job I already have. (Say that three times fast!)

One of my supervisors asked me recently if I still feel called. I must confess the question stung.

I feel like I am giving my very best to my patients and their families. I just feel like my best includes my stressed out, broke off my ass, angrier and angrier by the day, worst too. Angry? Yes. The little vicious cycle of not wanting to get a job to help pay for my life so I can afford to stay at my real job has a cousin: I am A.N.G.R.Y. my family is helping to pay my way to keep me in my job as a chaplain–making all sorts of sacrifices, given we ain’t rich folks–so I can work for a FOR PROFIT COMPANY!!! That’s right. For fucking profit.

I have $20 cash…and less than $20 in the bank at the moment…checking and savings combined. (Thank God for credit, right?) I worked ten hours today going to a death, having smoke blown in my face more than once, did two spiritual assessments, fought for a cancer patient to actually HAVE some pain medicine because the pool nurse took him off given it was making him constipated (all narcotics do) but failed to actually order anything–not even fucking Tylenol–to help the poor dear, run paperwork back to the office, and cram a PB&J down my throat in the fifteen minutes I had to eat lunch all so the Fat Cats at Corporate get richer and can have lunch at Joe’s Stone Crabs (or so I hear).

With one week to go before I get paid, house guests who will be here four of the seven days, and the car on empty, you may wonder to yourself why in the world I would ever work for so little money in a job where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? Do not feel too bad for me…feel bad for the Aides on my Team. If I can hardly make it, how do they at all? And they have to clean poop for a living!! The truth is that Chaplains do not make living wages on the whole. I would do better–even in my own company–if I lived in Georgia, for instance, where the cost of living is so much less and the company pays about $5k more.

Chaplains are not valued in any way by the majority of people, and money demonstrates this point just as much as anything else. We are seen as superfluous. Who cares that we live in an age full of what I like to call “The New Agnostics.” The New Agnostics hate their churches, synagogues and temples of origin because of the duplicity, abuse, irrational doctrine, disregard for science, and hypocritical nature of the congregants, but have not yet given up on their “Higher Power.” An ecumenical chaplain, like myself, then becomes the Face of God to them as they die and offers a peace they never found within their home congregation. Add to this, we asset protect in the tens of millions of dollars neighbourhood our organizations by being the front-line to listen to complaints, offer validation of feelings, and placate thousands of angry families each year.

But I guess it is still too much to ask that I make enough money to actually eat and buy my allergy medication? I am glad I know how to push that out of my mind when I am holding the hand of a patient telling me how angry she is at God for letting her get so sick, or at a family member insisting we want to kill her mother because we administered pain medicine, which calmed her down enough to begin to let go and die. And in the end, I find my calling in these small moments with my patients and their loved ones. My company cannot pay me to love them, which I do, so I keep on giving all my love away for free, and remind myself that they only pay me to fill out paperwork. Maybe that is why there is so much of it!?

If you do not read Post Secret every week, you are missing out. I always laugh and cry. I find someone I can relate to deeply. Sometimes it just scares me shitless…

I told Fundraiser when he called me for my birthday in February what mine would have been…

I did not tell him about wanting to kill myself. I kept promising myself I would go for my final swim in the Keys when I could no longer tolerate the pain. I did not want Fundraiser to know just how bad it had been. In fact, I got Emma to try and stay alive. I almost didn’t get her. In the end, I figured I was due some unconditional love just about then. If I had not gotten her, I am not sure I would have made it this time.

I tried to commit suicide in sixth grade. Thirty-six aspirin one afternoon at school. God only knows why I did not die. I also had a pretty good plan when I was 17 and in Jamaica on Choir Tour with church. The Jamaica trip served as a turning point in my life. I finally went to get help for all the buried shit from my childhood. I told the truth for the first time. I said, “John touched me.” I told my mom the day I got back from Jamaica. And I worked and worked and worked. I used to believe I worked it through enough to never want to do it again. I am smarter than that now. I know how once you try it trying it again is not all that difficult. But I would not try; I would succeed.

Working as a “Mental Health Professional” of a kind means I know what happens if anyone finds out about your plan. You get locked up. I do not want to be locked up, so I keep the times I feel utter despair to myself. I think of despair as “negative hope.” Given how I see hope as having an imagination things will change, or how they might change, despair looks like things not changing at all. Of course, I do think of suicide as hopeful because it means things can change once and for all. My lifetime of suffering (not the only stories–I know) will come to an end. No more rejection. No more heartache. No more isolation. No more loneliness. No more fear. No more struggling. No more panic.

I see now how I wrapped myself in the warm comfort of ending it all after The Bean left and extinguished my star from his sky. The irony? I do not know how I would have made it through those really awful nights, days, minutes, seconds without its tender embrace.

I do not live in this same space now. How do I know? I am talking about it. I speak the truth of my secrets…posting them even. Plus, I no longer protect or censure what I say about The Bean. I did in the past under the heading of “just in case he comes back.” Now I feel I can say whatever I damn well please!

Want to know another secret? I still find joy in being me and in my life. I am just ridiculously optimistic like that even if it is hard-won.

My team took care of a six year-old with terminal cancer until a week ago. The child died. We knew this would come, but until the death we could pretend death would bypass this family in that corner of our hearts where the unbelievable meets pleading to Someone somewhere to make it go away.

This child was (yes, the word now is “was”) so beautiful and precocious. One set of grandparents already gone, the child wrote a letter last year to them saying how much they were looking forward to meeting them in heaven long before anyone knew what was growing deep inside. I find such comfort in that letter–I pray the family does as well–and have a vision of the child being welcomed into Love’s embrace with the longed for grandparents waiting to take this child by the hand.

I cried when I heard last Wednesday of the child’s death. The death felt sudden somehow. I saw the look of shock, grief, dismay, concern, pain and resolute understanding on the faces of my team. This is not to say we did not believe the child did not have terminal cancer. We did. This is not to say we believed the child would be given a miracle. We did not. We are just human beings who despise seeing children die, and still just do not want it to be the case. We are also human beings who know that children do die, for we have been in this place before.

As many times as I have been there, I do not like going back. Inconsolable. Yes, that is the best word to describe the terrible pain. I feel it in my gut as a caregiver. What can I say? What can I do? I can only be. I can only love. I can only care. I can only remember.

When I was a Chaplain in North Carolina, I saw so many children die I lost count of their faces. Some still come back to me–even now as I write this–and I pray for their parents and loved ones who continue on without seeing them grow up. I count the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years they were with us and name it “blessing” even as their deaths continue to be “loss.”

Let me call out those I do remember:

• The baby in the bucket.
• The baby who waited two weeks for her Father to be found in Afghanistan and brought home before she died.
• The teens–two from one family, one from their best friends’ family–who died in that wreck.
• The boy who got drunk to celebrate getting out of rehab and getting a new car. Your father taught me an important lesson about hope in the face of destruction: We pray for a miracle because it is all we have, even as we are so angry with God (or at least our view of a God in control of every aspect of our lives) for not stopping the terrible thing from happening.
• The twins of the one I cared about. May your adopted child continue to bring you blessings and the trees flourish in their honor.
• The baby with the perfect old lady hands.
• The little boy who I prayed over in the operating room.
• The teen with Cystic Fibrosis.
• The girl whose mother was an inmate.
• The girl whose mother donated her organs after she was stuck down at the bus-stop.
• The boy whose parents just could not donate; they were too grief stricken.
• The girl whose body was in limbo as her brain held onto only the tiniest expressions of life.
• The baby the mother beat.
• The children set on fire by their mother’s boyfriend.
• The children tossed from the van on the family trip from Virginia.
• The children tossed from the van on the way home from church.
• The baby my flight crew brought in and just melted when he died.
• The baby killed by her father.
• The boy who knew he was dying for so long, but his parents never wanted to talk about it.
• The baby with no arms or legs. I will never forget escorting your wailing family out of the NICU.
• The baby I bathed before putting in the box to be buried at home given how poor your Mama was.
• The ones I have forgotten, may God remember for me.
• The child who died a little past midnight on my Team, Wednesday, March 21, 2007.

Sweet Honey In the Rock sings “We Are” on their Sacred Journeys CD. Here are the words in honor of all the children I tended and their loved ones, and for all who have lost a child and all the dreams that go with them into Love’s tender embrace:

For each child that’s born,
a morning star rises
and sings to the universe
who we are

We are our grandmothers’ prayers
We are our grandfathers’ dreamings
We are the breath of the ancestors
We are the spirit of God

We are
Mothers of courage
Father of time
Daughters of dust
the sons of great visions
Sisters of mercy
Brothers of love
Lovers of life
Builders of nations
Seekers of truth
Keepers of faith
Makers of peace
Wisdom of ages

We are one.

I watched the news this week of Elisabeth Edwards’ cancer metastasizing to her bones and was shocked by how no one said the word “terminal” at any point. “Treatable, not curable.” Does that mean Elisabeth Edwards will die from cancer? Yes, mostly likely she will. I would call that terminal, even if she will live longer than six months, which is the gold standard for coming on Hospice.

But we hate that word–terminal–and what it means. Terminal grounds us in there being no more extraordinary curative measures that will stop a disease process all together. Terminal means that eventually the inevitable will happen. Terminal means that we might prolong this inevitable course, but there will come a point where we will only offer comfort–spiritual, emotional and physical–and nothing else as you die. Terminal means death is on its way.

The New York Times had an interview with her where she said the following:.

When asked about the suggestion some have made that the continuing campaign is an act of supreme denial about her cancer, Mrs. Edwards looked momentarily struck. Then, with her husband looking on somewhat tensely, she hurled back: “Absolutely! I am not giving it anything. If it expects to be the boss of me it’s gonna have to earn that.”

She added, “I am denying it control over how I spend the rest of my life.”

“We made the choice to live,” Mrs. Edwards said. “We don’t want to do it surrounded by a veil of tears.”

Such interesting words, “I am denying it control over how I spend the rest of my life.” Is that possible? The answer simply is “no.”

Even now, on a daily basis she must contend with the cancer. Pain, fatigue, life-extending treatments, and that nagging guttural fear knowing it is eating her alive. The circle of loss will be with her daily. She will look at her children and count the seconds. She looks at her husband and wants so much for his future–the Presidency, no less–and knows that her body has the capacity to destroy both of their dreams. She looks at her lifetime love and knows she will bring him unspeakable pain because she will leave him. Leave him to mourn their parental loss of their eldest son Wade alone. Leave him to be both mother and father to their other three children. Leave him to face his political destiny without her, something he has never had to face before.

I do not think denial is possible in this place. Terminal can be called incurable, but its truth looms nonetheless. Death can escape the verbiage but not the heart of the matter. So why deny cancer its due? Because cancer, even terminal cancer, does not mean you have to give up living in the other places it is not encroaching. I completely understand.

One thing working with the so-called “dying” has taught me is that there is no such thing as “dying.” There is only life, life, life, life and then death. Despite all the ways in which we make that spiritual transition–for even my atheist patients journey in their mind’s farthest corners prior to death to search and heal and say goodbye–death is in a moment. Life is all those other moments leading up to it. I understand the heart of what Mrs. Edwards desires. She desires to focus on her life–and all that it contains, including this cancer–instead of just focusing her attention on death’s door.

I do not know why we die when we die, and I say this as someone who has been with others as they die hundreds of times. I do know we only have once chance at living though, so for whatever time we have embracing that life, life, life is the very best and most we can hope for. To do anything else would be denial of our fundamental purpose on this planet…to live and to live and love well.

On Sunday, I got up at six in the morning with Emma and began to cook. My aunts (Aunt Charlyne, the one with terminal lung cancer and Aunti Sandi, the one she now lives with) were set to arrive a mere 12 hours later, so I needed to get started! Time was a-wastin! I planned a fully home cooked meal in their honor, given that my one aunt should start chemo on Thursday. I bought most of my groceries at Whole Foods, including organic lean beef for my beef stew. Fresh rosemary, French butter (does it really taste better?), Russian Banana potatoes, the finest chocolate, organic raspberries, etc. I made the beef stew from scratch, used Julia Child’s master recipe French rolls, and finished with a lovely flour-less chocolate cake with raspberry sauce. By the time I crawled back in bed for a short nap at 11:30 am, the bread was doing its second rise, the stew was cooling for being refrigerated, and my finger was properly smashed in a battle between the bottle opener and the bottle where my finger lost!

Despite almost passing out, I pressed on with my cooking. I tasted the stew multiple times. I added more Worcestershire, a splash of vinegar, some Dijon mustard. I kneaded the bread, trying to keep both blood and cotton ball fragments out of the dough. I chopped the chocolate, measured out the sugar, began the sauce, found my candy thermometer, and turned the AC down to seventy degrees. I vacuumed. I dusted. I cleared the paperwork off the dining room table and put it in neat piles away from where they would notice. I picked out fun china; I posses around 10 different ones, so this is not an easy task! Napkins, glasses, silver, serving pieces, all placed just so in-order to welcome them with sight as well as smell.

I could not help but think of Babette’s Feast as I laboured. In the movie, Babette has run away from Paris, where she worked as a renowned chef, as a political refugee. She finds work cleaning and cooking for two elderly Dutch spinster sisters. She cooks rather bland pitiful fare due to their preference. The sisters avoided pleasure all their lives out of devotion to God. (Of course, if God wanted this type of dutifulness, why did God create an entire world for us to delight in? But I digress.) There is no colour, no joy, no flavour, no mirth, no spirit (or Spirit?) to their lives. For many years, Babette toils in this grey existence, but love flourishes within all three of their lives even in this world of grey tones. After winning a small lottery, Babette plans and creates a beautiful meal for the sisters and their fellow congregants. This Feast does not just serve to delight and astound their senses, but also to pour out Babette’s love on the sisters for their kindness to her. Babette’s Feast is indeed a form of Holy Communion, which never should focus on strict table laws, but always on an open table of love and community. Babette works for days to create her Eucharist, and she selflessly pours her whole heart, body and soul into each and every dish. The delight the sisters take over each morsel left me both jealous–although I am not too sure about the Turtle Soup served–and open hearted at the love flowing between everyone at this meal. The grey banished in the light of love’s myriad of colour.

Jacqueline’s Feast could not compare when it came to epicurean delight, but I did manage to knead love into every roll, sprinkle compassion into the stew, and stir mirth into the cake batter. We sat down, with a short prayer by me. I passionately prayed that God would be with us, and especially with the person most deserving of winning at Super Boggle. My Aunt Charlyne said. “Nice try, but prayers cannot help you now.” We all broke out laughing.

See, I have only beat her at Super Boggle and Trivia Pursuit one time apiece. In a recent email to her–where I urged her to consider not doing the chemo at all–I reminded her of these two seminal events. I wrote her saying:

In my mind I go back over my whole life experience with you. My first memory? Being out on the horse farm with you and calling you “Aunt Charlyne.” You told me that you were “nobody’s aunt” and to call you Charlyne. I guess I am a true Osborne Woman–headstrong and all–because my whole life I have completely ignored you and called you “aunt” anyways! (laughing) You are not just my mother’s sister, but you are my aunt, and I love you. You have a place of honor in my heart, and my experiences of you are real. I remember the family times when you would be pissed off (The Trinity-as I like to call Aunt Frances, Mother and Aunt Gail-can be a real pain in the ass and very self righteous sometimes.) and the wonderful fun, humor and intelligence you brought. Of course there is also my fear of your amazing game-playing abilities. I can still tell you the year and the holidays that you have ever been beaten at ANYTHING by me! Christmas 1989 Betsy and I beat you at Trivia Pursuit on a Sports and Leisure question (our biggest weakness) where the answer was Martha Graham, whom I had just studied in my college Humanities class. Then in 1997, again at Christmas, I beat you at Super Boggle. All my friends know about this and that I figured the only way to even the playing field between us was for you to get Alzheimer’s! Not that I would wish that on you just to be able to beat you, but it did cross my mind! (really laughing now)

Jacqueline’s Feast ended with me and Aunti Sandi being shown our hats by the Whiz, but also with being able to say and hear, “I love you.” What joy to hear her laugh, throwing her head back and cackling! How fun to see her reach for her third roll and smear it with lots of good butter! How precious to show both of

them my Granddaddy’s newly recovered chair sitting in my Living Room, and to show her where I put the antique dresser they drove to North Carolina to get for me back in 1991. Most importantly, what a wonderful sacred moment with those whom I love, especially the one who has spent so much of her life separated from us all.

I spent a good part of Monday crying–and here I am at it again–over how precious her time really is and how much I want each one of her moments to be poured to overflowing with more love, care, good food, laughter, family, games, and joy than she can handle. She has spent a lifetime without enough, so I figure it is high time she gets too much. (See my other post about this.)

So many of us are starving, like my Aunt Charlyne, for more love, more joy, more kindness, more understanding. I really believe in being the very thing you think is lacking in the world. Too many mean people? Be kind. Too much noise? Be quiet. Too much media? Turn off the TV. Too much fighting? Be peaceful. To much pain? Love more. Not enough time? Spend what you have loving and holding and cherishing before you miss the chance.

And of course: Chocolate batter on the spoon? Call “fins” and lick it up!

(”Fins” is a family expression akin to “shot-gun” or “dibs.”)

 I get to “do” funerals at least once a month as a hospice chaplain…what fun. I must admit I sometimes wonder what people think when planning these affairs, so I want to offer some helpful tips.

1. Have a positive attitude about what the heck you are there to do!  You are there to remember, grieve and celebrate someone’s life.  Just as their life had many different elements–sometimes they were great to be around, sometimes they were a pain in the ass–so should the funeral.  Embrace the final send-off as a time to really speak honestly about them and their life.  You cannot hurt them.  They are dead.
2. Do not be afraid to laugh and cry.  A continuation of the above advice.  Funerals where there is both laughing and crying heal broken hearts.  Funerals with only tears tear at everyone.  The funeral begins the season of grief for those close to the deceased.  For those especially close, laughter helps them to embrace the beauty of  the life lived at the same time they mourn its loss.  This point holds especially well for funerals for children.  A few, “I never thought  we would potty train little Ben.” goes a long way in opening up all the parts of the heart broken when a child dies.
3. Remember that after a certain age the following: They were old.  They were going to die.  Everybody dies.  PERIOD.  I understand missing someone, but let us be reasonable here people.  If you are 90, suffering the effects of a stroke, do not know your family any longer, and need a diaper, death is a sweet release.  Do not throw yourself on the coffin of your Great-grandmother!  She is dead and glad to be so. We all die.  You will too.  It was her time; she old!
4. Tell the truth. Again, you are not hurting the memory of the departed by saying how much it annoyed you that he always would fart, say “sorry,” laugh and then fart again.  Just because someone is dead does not mean we have to put them on a pedestal we would have howled with laughter to see them on during their lifetime.  Do not be cruel…that is the one caveat.  No one likes to be around someone mean spirited, but especially at a funeral.
5. Do not be afraid to skip the funeral parlor or church.  Have it at your house if possible.  The atmosphere is more laid back and helps people relax, grieve, support one another.
6. Cremate if you are comfortable with it.  So much the better for everyone and cheaper.
7. Skip the open casket.  The only time the casket is appropriate is to help children under 16 see that their parent or sibling is really dead.  (This comes from my own experience.  If I had not seen my father I would probably still wonder if the body had be switched.)
8. Do not be afraid to talk about the person you love.  We ministers can say some things, but our words pale in comparison to what you would say as a family member.  What to say?  Tell stories; this always works the best.  But do everyone a favor and skip stories about hair, make-up, golf and pets.  Of course, at my funeral I want all of my dogs mentioned.  They were/are: Wolfie, Mindy, Sydney, Gretchie and Emma.  I don’t play golf, but my hair and make-up  always look good…for the record.
9. Wear color!  Wear their favourite color.  Black is boring and not full of life.  No matter how sad you are, your life will go on until you die.  Do not start now by mastering the art of depression with black.  Black slims thighs and hope.  Mix it up!  A bright pink sweater with your black skirt will honor your sister who always loved pink.
10. Go outside if possible too.
11. An Open Bar is a good idea. People stress out at funerals. A little nip never hurt anyone–unless they are in AA or drinking to excess or harming themselves or others–okay, sometimes a little nip could hurt, but if it won’t then have one by all means.
12. Food is also good. Food helps calm the stomach when the hooch hits. Serve it before and after the actual service. Encourage people to eat by eating yourself. Everyone will feel better.
13.  Forgive yourself for everything not being perfect.  Nothing in life ever is.  Your loved one sure was not, so why should their funeral be?

Happy Funeral Planning!

My Aunt who has lung cancer and COPD moved to Miami last week. First of all, lung cancer and COPD basically mean that she is not only screwed when it comes to her breathing, but she is messed up every which way. A MRI of her brain this week will tell us just how far the cancer spread in its attack on her body, but we already know one of her lymph nodes has ballooned. Time. We just do not know how much time she has left, but we can all feel the breath being choked out of what little time we were counting on when we knew she had the COPD but not the cancer.

Secondly, this whole situation is fucked because she SWORE, circa 1975, that she would never never never ever ever ever live in Miami again. She moved to Ocala leaving the corporate world of Esso behind and worked with horses or on horse farms for the majority of the last thirty years. She also lived in a trailer in the stix and mostly as a private person with little contact beyond her job and family…well, sisters. Until this last weekend, I had not seen her since Christmas 1997. I remember our last meeting very well because of the momentous occasion of beating her for the one and only time at Super Boggle! But I digress. My point is that she has hid away from friends and countrymen for the last thirty years, and she now lives back in the one place she swore she would never set foot in, let alone live.

Last fall she called my aunt who lives here in Miami asking to move in with her due to realizing she could no longer take care of herself. She could hardly breathe just trying to go to the grocery store. Another aunt turned her down–I do not think she realized how serious the situation had become–and out of total desperation called the Miami aunt. At the time I pointed out to Ms. Audrey that I thought she probably could not take care of herself for awhile, given how notoriously stubborn the woman prides herself in being. What it must have taken to make that phone call? She had to admit weakness, need and ask to move in with someone who would have to take responsibility to care for her. She also had to admit to herself that her needs evolved to such a desperate state that living in Miami became the least of her worries.

So this is the woman whom I greeted on Saturday. Let me tell you, she looked like shit. Old. Wrinkled. Pushing a wheelchair with her dried laundry and oxygen tank. Her pulse-ox (O2 level) was 77, aka “Totally Fucked!” even on 100% oxygen. She looked miffed to find my surpise arrival, although I did call my other aunt before stopping by, with puppy in tow as well. I could see my grandmother in her and my eldest aunt. Her colour pale, her lips pursed…I took a deep breath. I told her that I was sad to hear the news about the cancer. Her reply? “You play, you pay.”

I cannot seem to get those words out of my head. “You play, you pay.” She was “playing” all these years of being a heavy smoker? I do not doubt that occasions of mirth existed where she lit up, but I would not be out of line to say that she mostly lit up out of anger, frustration, loneliness, being pissed, bored and full of addictive habit. I remember all of the Christmases where she would storm out angry at some infraction by one of us. There were family gatherings she never came to, and momentous occasions she never phoned or wrote or acknowledged. My first memory of her is out on one of those horse farms, and her telling me to not call her “Aunt” because she was nobody’s aunt. Where was the “play” in her distance, both physical and emotional all these years?

I hope I can take her by the hand and say to her how I feel about this bullshit statement. She is just so damn angry about the cancer and her impending death, but then again, she has always been angry. My work teaches me again and again how most of us die as we lived. Death and life mirror one another. In other words, once a pain in the ass, always a pain in the ass. I want her to know how I continue to think of her not as simply my mother’s sister, but that she is my aunt. I take with me in my heart her quick wit, love of games, staunch loyalty, and fierce independence. I want to tell her that I do not care that she smoked, no one “deserves” to die with their very breath being choked out of them. I want to tell her I understand that all those years of smoking got her through and helped her survive. I want to tell her I believe it totally sucks that the one thing that helped her survive this world, which can be so rotten some times, will kill her in the end. I want her to know how we all have survival methods that kill us in some way or another. As Katherine Hepburn said, “Life is hard, afterall it kills you.” I want to buy her the best damn cigarettes and let her light up as much as she wants until she cannot any longer. What will it hurt now?

Mostly, I dream of her forgiving herself and her family for just being human beings. I want my Mother and her other sisters to forgive her for smoking and offer her compassion. Maybe then we can really say, “I love you,” and she can breathe it deeply into her soul and be comforted.

The following is a sermon I preached at my home church in October of 2006. Let me begin by giving you the two scripture lessons from the Lectionary for that Sunday:

THE HEBREW SCRIPTURE WITNESS:

Job 23:1-9, 16-17

Then Job answered: “Today also my complaint is bitter; his hand is heavy despite my groaning. Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling! I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me. Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power? No; but he would give heed to me. There an upright person could reason with him, and I should be acquitted forever by my judge. “If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me; If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!

THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURE WITNESS

Hebrews 4:12-16

Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account. Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

Sermon:

Seeds of Life

Cold was the night, hard was the ground
They found her in a small grove of trees
Lonesome was the place where Georgia was found
She’s too young to be out
On the street.
Why wasn’t God watching?
Why wasn’t God listening?
Why wasn’t God there for Georgia Lee?

These words come from Tom Waits’ song “Georgia Lee” where he both tells the true story of a murdered girl and pleads for understanding about where Love is in the face of terrible tragedy and loss. Georgia Lee suffered and suffering is incomprehensible to us.

Let me tell you a more typical story: During my internship in North Carolina, one evening I found myself on my renal failure unit sitting and listening to a man of seventy tell me about how he felt that he was a failure. He sacrificed spending his time playing with his kids to work two jobs so they could all get a good education. And now here he was, spending his retirement caring for his wife, who had Alzheimer’s, having his own grueling dialysis treatments and spending his children’s inheritance on medicine. He recounted despair after despair. What would he leave his children? He told me his secret—he had considered suicide to make things better but realized that he could not leave his children with the burden of his wife’s care. He looked at me deeply, grasping my hand so tightly that our hands shook: “Chaplain, tell me, where is God? Will he help me? What did I ever do to him to deserve this pain? What ever can I do?” And with that he broke down and wept openly. A country man, a strong man, a man’s man, sat there asking me to explain to him the deepest mystery for those who know Love’s tender kiss and then also face feeling the deepest rejection by that very same Love. Why do we suffer as we do?

I find in my practice as a Chaplain that we have done a terrible job within our faith communities of narrating suffering in such a way that gives us tools to deal with the terrible things we all somehow face. So, again and again I walk beside people, especially those facing the death of loved one, and find that faith has only offered them impossible standards or empty platitudes, or convinced them that God is intentionally doing this to them to teach them a spiritual lesson.

My job as a Chaplain is to find you where you are and support what you already believe or question. So, when it comes to the nature of suffering, I cannot dismantle centuries of harmful teaching. I cannot begin to speak to why the world works the way it does or tell anyone with certainty exactly who God is and how God does or does not act, for my experience of God cannot capture that truth in a way that is true beyond question or reproach for anyone other than myself.

What I can do is reflect God’s presence in their suffering by showing up and holding their fears and pain. I feel intimately called by God to go and stand beside people as they raise their hands towards heaven and cry out, “See me! Listen to me! Be here! Answer me!” I understand these questions, for I too have asked them. So today provides me with a rare opportunity to talk to you about some of the things I see we can say about suffering so that we are set up for Life and not for failure.

Then Job answered: “Today also my complaint is bitter; his hand is heavy despite my groaning. Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling! I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me. Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power? No; but he would give heed to me. There an upright person could reason with him, and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.

All we like Job have shaken our heavy hearts in dismay and said, “But I am good. My wife is good. He never hurt anyone. We do not deserve this.” We love cause and effect. Be good and good things will happen. Do bad and bad things will happen. I do not mean to imply a loose understanding of karma here, but instead that simple base part of ourselves where we believe one plus one should always equal two.

So, why do we suffer? The most pure answer I can give holds not one shred of meaning: We suffer because we do. Suffering, having problems, facing loss, having grief and despair all characterize the human life. Period. We suffer because we do.

I am a big believer that meaning is not some big floating cloud of intentionality by God towards us and what we go through. I believe that the meaning we give to the tragedies we face comes strictly from our own willingness and creativity to do just that…an opportunity God wants to be a part of, but not that God creates suffering for us to teach us a certain lesson about the meaning of life.

We suffer because we do; we create meaning with that suffering because we can.

I realize that I am saying something that we do not often articulate, and quite frankly the historic theology of the Christian Church has embraced a radically different theology about suffering. Here are some common themes:
1. Suffering is good and we must suffer for the good of God.
2. Suffering is a holy enterprise.
3. You really know you love when you suffer.
4. The better the Christian the more quiet they are when they suffer.

I reject these understandings of suffering, and quite frankly in my practice as a Chaplain I have never seen these offer any hope to those who have been taught them. If anything, they set us up to fail because when we are faced with pain we get scared. And when we are terrified we have a God-given instinct: Fight or flight! If suffering was something God intended for us as part of holiness then why build our core with a default OUT? And if suffering is so good that we should embrace it with quiet acceptance, why did Jesus curse God from the cross and cry out saying, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?

I want to offer us another—more life giving—way to think about the suffering we face. We suffer because do, but the opportunity to create life, love and healing with our reality is limitless. When we embrace our lives—the fullness of our lives that contains beauty and real stinky messiness—we embrace that we are human. Being human means that we are frail, limited creatures. We break, and we heal.

So, let us be honest about why we are suffering. What is causing the real pain?

I have a patient right now who is actively dying. Her dear sweet husband is stuck on the fact that she is a good person and that he just cannot seem to understand why she is dying. What did she ever do to deserve this? The flaw that I see in his logic (but not in his heart or questions) is that what is causing her death is cancer, not her or anything she has done or not done. The causality is cancer. She has cancer. Period. And even if her lifestyle aided in her getting this particular disease, the reality is that if we live long enough we will get anything and everything. We are human beings. We die. Babies, teenagers, young mothers and old men all die everyday. You are born. You live. You die. She will die from cancer; she knows how she will go and that her time is very limited. I do not know how or when I will die, but I do know it will happen to me too. What is causing the real pain in this family is the terrible reality that she will die and they will miss her deeply. What value is there in wondering what she did or what they did to cause her death?

I am not arguing against us asking these deep “root of our lives” questions. But I am inviting us to consider the ways in which causality is tied to our faith understanding and how destructive that can be.

As we engage the fullness of our pain, we need not rationalize it away or think that our pain is insignificant in the light of another’s pain. God is not extending any merit badges for rationalizing away our pain or our need. This is not a time for “mind over matter.” Life hurts us all sometimes. How many times has someone asked you how you were doing and your soul cried out to say, “I am hurting. I am so lonely that sometimes I feel desperate for some human interaction and touch? Or I am going through x, y or z.” But instead of the truth, you say to them, “I am fine, you?” thinking to yourself that you do not want to be a burden or that the other person probably has it worse than you and who are you to “complain” anyways? As any of my friends will tell you, when they say they are “fine” I reply, So, you are feeling Freaked-out, Insecure, Needy and Emotional—what is really going on?”

I believe that acknowledging our own pain creates the opportunity for healing bridges between others and ourselves. When we are honest about the fact we are hurting we open ourselves to extend and receive compassion. I don’t know about you, but I would rather not tell someone who has the “perfect” life about my problems. They are just not going to get it when I am miserable. And the person who denies their own pain usually says things like, “It is all in God’s hands. or Everything is going to be okay.” I do not think that the husband of my patient would be very comforted with the thought that his wife’s life hangs waiting for the whim of God or the lie that she will be okay. Being in-touch with our own suffering helps us let go of platitudes and get down to the truth, “I see you are hurting and this sucks!”

When we embrace the suffering of our lives, we find Immanuel. God with us. I love this one part of our lesson from Hebrews: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses.” By allowing ourselves to be human beings who hurt, we allow God to come and sit with us on the ash heaps of our lives. The greatest balm I know for suffering of body, mind and spirit is to not be alone. No one else can feel your pain for you, but to know that you are held in love and care as you suffer—that has miraculous healing power.

I want to preach to you the Good News of resurrection…most importantly spiritual resurrection.
Michael McGee says this of spiritual resurrection: Spiritual resurrection happens when our “hope has grown into healing, when we have gone from seeing ourselves as broken and fragmented to being whole and complete even though we still hurt.” We have established that pain and suffering just are, and in the same way the opportunity for healing and wholeness are ever present. Spiritual resurrection happens when we take that opportunity, grab onto it and our lives become more, not less, with what has happened to us.

Spiritual resurrection is all around us! As Helen Keller said, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.” Having an imagination about this kind of wholeness is not a denial. Healing does not mean that the bad things never happened, but it does mean that the end of the story is NOT the suffering. How many times did Jesus say to those afflicted, “Rise up! And let me see you whole!?” The pain wins when we are presented the opportunity to heal but resist it thinking that we have to hold onto our suffering for it to stay real. In the end, however, the suffering stays real and we lose a little bit more of our lives each day as a result. There is no magical expiration date…but what I can tell you is that if you hear Jesus whispering in your ear “Rise up!” do not be afraid to be whole again.

Finally, when we do find our mourning turning into dancing, let us not only celebrate being free from this pain, but also ask God “What I am free to do for Love and life now?” This is where we reflect our divine right as children of God, made in the image of God, made of the stuff of stars, to be creative with God and design the next chapter. Reach out. Grab your neighbour’s hand. Let us be transformed together as spiritually resurrected persons, who have abandoned the hamster wheel of despair where we spin around and around wondering what we ever did to deserve this. Dance! For anyone can survive…finding ways to love and invest with the suffering of our lives takes uncommon courage, but we have within us all the tools needed. God is not hiding from us, for God is right here in the fabric of all that we are giving us the creativity and grace to imagine our lives WITH what has happened to us.

I know this is true out of my own life and the painful losses I have suffered through. I have asked deep questions and shook my own fists at God so hard that I swear I have given God a bloody nose on more than one occasion! When I hear “Georgia Lee” I often have put my own name into that song asking “Why wasn’t God there for Jacqueline?” I only can speak to you about the life that is possible with what happens because I of the spiritual resurrections I have had in my own life.

Once I had a vision of my life being a terrible wasteland—similar to one we might imagine following a nuclear holocaust—where God and I tended a small and thriving garden together. I saw Jesus and I laughing on the tiny patches of grass, teasing and tickling, rolling around as children might with glee. The warm sun on my face. The cool breeze whistling though my two weeping willows that embraced us with their drooping shade.

Close your eyes and count to ten
I will go and hide but then
Be sure to find me. I want you to find me
And we’ll play all over
We will play it all over again
There’s a toad in the witch grass
There’s a crow in the corn
Wild flowers on a cross by the road
And somewhere a baby is crying
For her mom
As the hills turn from green back
To gold
Why wasn’t God watching?
Why wasn’t God listening?
Why wasn’t God there for Jacqueline?

And as I looked out across the barrenness and scarred landscape left by the pain of my life outside of that garden, I knew that things might change and life take a turn and bomb this garden one day too. And then it hit me: I know how to grow another one, for the seeds of life are always within in me. The seeds of life are within us all. We were made from them as were the stars. Amen.

Last week I wrote: “I have my own boundaries, and I know that sometimes, for all sorts of reasons, certain patients and families touch you beyond the professional distancing I practice. A woman so kind, my heart breaks to leave her or hang up the phone. Give me just one more of her “sweetheart” comments I pray.”

She will die soon, very soon. She knows it. I know it. Her family knows it.

I saw her again on Monday at her request. When I arrived, she could hardly be roused. I felt the bells in my gut go off, but I worried they rang only because of how I feel about her. I went out of her room to talk to her daughter about how she felt her mom was doing…trying to feel her out about her own radar regarding how close to death her mom might be. Later, as I thought over the visit, I realized that even sitting there talking with her daughter, and when I called her Primary Nurse, my anxiety level climbed. Why? I think I felt fear that she could have been dying in her room while we were talking. I do not want her to die alone.

I often tell my patients and families that the goal of hospice centers on helping their loved one die surrounded by care and love and without pain: physical, emotional or spiritual. Some of my patients want to die with those they love outside of the room, and so they lay wait until the room empties and then they let go. Still others wait until one particular person crosses the threshold before letting go. My own grandmother died the moment I entered her hospital room. I count it joy to have been with her as she entered the next life. Whether those dying wait for leave taking or coming in, they die with love. The love in their hearts, and the love bestowed upon them, if they are lucky.

This particular patient wants to die with her family around her, but let me not skip how I found this out.

After calling to see about a nurse coming out to evaluate her, I journeyed back to her room. I found her exposed with most of the covers pushed down. She now engaged me, and seemed to be coming around more. I asked her if she was in any pain, and she told me that she felt terrible pain from trying to move. Her daughter came in and helped her move to her side, gave her a new pain patch and a few small bites of sherbet. Being even more awake, my patient asked me, “Is this what happens to everyone?” I knew what she meant by her question…Do my other patients as they die feel themselves dying? I told her “yes.”

She denies any fear about it, saying she could feel herself going and it was “peaceful.” She just wants to live long enough for her grandchildren to come in from out of town–a few days more–and then she can die. She put it this way to me: “I just want to hold on until my family gets here so I can die with love all around me.”

I hope she makes it.

She also told me why she asked for me to come to see her; she wanted to pray for her family and to confess her sins. She wants a clean slate before she crosses that great divide and enters the place of Love. We must have prayed at least five different times that afternoon. I cried each and every time. Her name is special to me, so each prayer felt like a prayer for her and a prayer for the one I know and love by the same name. (I cannot write this now without the tears streaming down my face.)

Maybe part of why I care so much about her has to do with this name connection? Maybe it is because she reminds me of my grandmother given both of them are characterized by kindness and a certain steely determination? Her daughter showed me pictures of her at a younger age, and she looks so much like Aunt Glitter. They could have been sisters. These reasons are just pieces of the complicated puzzle of my heart. I can sketch in certain places, but in the end I just know that I care about her differently, more, something…than how I care for most of my patients. She just got in to my heart. Period.

Her own daughter worked in the hospital for a long time and said to me, “Some people just get to you. It is not supposed to happen. You are a professional, but they do. We are just humans.” She then told me about a woman who got to her heart. I am glad she understands. I do too.
I have no delusions about my place or role in their lives, but I also am honest with myself about how I will miss her when she is gone. She is just that lovely.

When we were done praying together she said to me: “Honey, thank you. I feel so much better now. Sweetheart, I love you.”

My only response?

“I love you too.”

“Oh…oh…you are such a pretty girl. I worry about you. Going and seeing what you see…you must be so distraught.”

These words came to me from one of my patients on my first visit to see her.  She became overwhelmed with the thought of my going from house to house and listening to the stories of the dying and those who care for them.  She is 92 years-old, and she is cared for by a live-in aide. Her own child long since dead; the last of her generation. She has outlived everyone. Her official hospice diagnosis is end-stage cardiovascular disease, which may be accurate but fails to capture that she is just dying because we all do. My diagnosis? Little-old-lady-itis.

I know this because her memory is failing, her body slowing down, her life is drawing to a close. I find it rather beautiful. We live in a world focused on usefulness and profitability, but her life is about sleep, rest, memories, bathing, eating. A simple existence. She is never too busy to talk, although some days she may be too tired. So why still live? What purpose does lingering have?

I use the word lingering because of another patient of mine who died last week. After her 100th birthday, a milestone she embraced reaching, she expected to die almost immediately. In fact, she lived alone well into her 99th year, with aides coming in to help her beginning just a few weeks before reaching the century mark. What an independent woman! She held onto her autonomy with an iron grip, so reaching her birthday ended what purpose she felt for her life.  She became angry that she had not yet died and told me that living was “torture.” She gripped my hand and said, “I am just lingering here.  What good am I?  Why have I not yet died?”

I told her that I did not know.

I don’t know why we die when we do, but I do know that I worry about how we die.  So often I see those suffering from Little-Old-Man or Lady-Itis and what brings them suffering is not their disease but rather their loneliness.  Their children live far away, many visiting rarely.  The disconnect reaches all aspects of their lives.  So many of my patients want to offer me food, a cup of coffee, a comfy chair, anything to keep me just a few minutes longer.  They linger in the isolation of old age and cherish anyone who comes and touches them there in that place.

When my 100 year-old patient died, I went to declare her.  I put my right hand on her chest and my left on her head.  I leaned over and said to her, “I am so happy for you.”  Her suffering, which centered only on being ready to die and the pain of waiting, ended.  Peace radiated from her still form.

I tend to not worry about myself so much.  My patients may be dear to me, but I do not possess a lifetime of stories with them as central characters.  I always think to myself, “They are not my family.”  I have my own boundaries, and I know that sometimes, for all sorts of reasons, certain patients and families touch you beyond the professional distancing I practice.  A woman so kind, my heart breaks to leave her or hang up the phone.  Give me just one more of her “sweetheart” comments I pray.  The six year-old on my team, well, there is just no protection from facing her eventual death.

I do worry about my patients though.  I worry about them being so disconnected.  I worry about their families missing the precious final months, weeks, days, hours and minutes with their loved one.  They miss the healing, the stories, the forgiveness, the sadness, the loss, the acceptance, the love.  But I do not worry about me as I wrap my heart in their stories and touch their lonely hearts a little bit and see the suffering wane before my very eyes.