Sadness Seeps

I'm not so sure I used to feel this way. Maybe I did. Maybe I just didn't know I did.

I've been doing this hospice ministry, and the bereavement listening that goes with it, for, oh, over 8 1/2 years now. Most of the time I feel privileged, utterly honored to be in the position I am, to hear people share the most raw aspects of their lives, and to be able to offer them a tender voice, and hopefully a tender heart.

The question always is, for a professional, just how "tender" should the heart be? Indeed, how tender can it be... consistently...

I've noticed a change in myself lately, but maybe the change is less "in" me than in my awareness of myself... I've noticed that I feel hurt inside when I talk with people who hurt...

Today, let's see, I did a funeral; I returned about half a dozen phone calls from people looking for information about our bereavement services, and yes, some consolation along with the information. And late in the afternoon I reached a woman with whom I'd been playing a bit of phone tag: she is the mother of an 18 y/o daughter, killed when the car she was riding in was struck broadside by a man driving the wrong way down the freeway.

Who knows why these things happen?

Anyway, as she talked I could feel my heart grow sadder, soaking up her sadness, letting her pain and confusion seep into me. I allowed this willingly... I didn't resist it, nor defend with a "professional" voice or manner. I just let her sadness seep... into me... and my heart grew heavy...

It isn't everyone who has this effect on me, and truly, I don't think I could answer the phone if I was this porous with everyone... But even before we talked I was vulnerable: I knew why she was calling; I knew what her situation was; and I have a 19 y/o son... I found myself imagining what it'd be like to lose him, especially to some sudden random act of madness or violence. It happens. It happened to her! My ears were already open before we talked; I had pre-decided to let her pour herself in...

The thing about the "privilege" of my position is that, in everything I do, whether hospice or bereavement, there is an "entertainment" of possibilities: this could happen to me. Men dying alone: this could happen to me. Parents whose children die: this could happen to me. Husbands or lovers whose wives or SO's die: this could happen to me. I could go on...

Love leaves us SO incredibly vulnerable to loss... Not just the broken, romantic heart, but the disappearance forever and in the blink of an eye of one who'd cradled a piece of your heart... Now THAT'S heartbreak! ...that's heartbreak...

And when the heart breaks that way, sadness flows out like the levees breaking in New Orleans after Katrina. Now wonder there is ample amounts to seep into any body willing to wade into the flood...

So now I have to find a way to dry out my soggy heart... It wouldn't do for it to get moldy...

Pasts, Presents and Futures

About Pasts:
I've been doing a lot of funerals lately, or at least, so it seems to me. Two last weekend. Another tomorrow. I've been given several occasions to think about them, and what we are aiming to accomplish in them.

What is it about funerals that bring out the “gotta clean up this mess” in us? What happened to the Brutus in us who would simply bury Caesar without feeling compelled to praise? Or more, why are we so ashamed about another’s life, the choices they made, and what we may regard as their failings, that we tell ourselves what we can mention, and what we can’t?

This thought occurs to me often. My approach is to speak with the family beforehand about what they want to have said about their loved one. Nearly always we come to “awkward” moments when something has happened in the person’s life about which the family has lots of feelings. Maybe it was a divorce or an infidelity or a transgression of some sort, or perhaps an alcohol- or drug-related history, or even a job loss and a period of unemployment. Whatever it might be, such events or proclivities nearly always have a life-shaping effect on both the one whose life we are now recalling, and on the family members now recalling it! Yet more often than not, the consensus among those entrusted with telling the story of their loved one's life is: we can't mention that; we shouldn't talk about that. Talk about the "good" things, I'm told, but there seems little sense that what makes our lives rich and human and real are not just the flights from peak to peak to peak, but the ups and downs, the "thrill of victory and the agony of defeat," the ways we triumphed over failings, or did not. How can there be any real "good," in other words, without some "bad," some tragedy, some pain.

History belongs less to the victors than to those who live to tell its stories, and so, we who will die would do well to take note of who will be around to tell the stories of our lives! In their hands, our life may well have turned out to mean something very different than it did to us.

One dimension of how this comes to be arises in the search for meaning in the life of the deceased. At funerals we tend not to be satisfied simply with chronology, with recounting events. In fact, those who would remember us quite often know only a very little about what has actually happened in our lives! It is surprising what is remembered and what is forgotten when others look back over our lives at the end. But that makes the significance of what IS remembered all the more, well, significant. For there is at some point in every funeral a pronouncement or two about what the meaning of this particular life was. It is important for us to have something to say at that point!

Yet, too often, there is in fact not much to say. Sometimes it is because the person died so young. I remember talking with this man about his experience of going to a friend's son's funeral. I think the young man was 18 or 19 when he died, as I recall, one of the casualties of our conflict in Iraq. Yes, the usual military things were said, about how he'd died "defending" his country and what not. But, as my aquaintance, remarked to me, "he was too young to have accomplished anything, so all they really could say was that he was a nice guy, who was well-liked in school." Not all of us ARE well-liked in high school and some of us die without the benefit of military service to give our having lived some semblance of meaning.
In fact, as the poet said, many of us really do lead lives of "quiet desperation." And from my hospice work I can tell you that many more of us die without the benefit of much family or many friends to mourn us. And even when we do have family and/or friends who are willing to speak of us, too often they speak banalities, like "he was a good man," and sadly shake their heads.

My point is less that many of our lives are meaningless than that even those who love us best have difficulty appreciating how meaningful they were or might have been.

And I'm also trying to encourage us to lean into our days with a sense that they might actually add up to something significant. I'm encouraging us to live into Life with an intention of making our lives meaningful. I think we better the chances that someone will see our lives' significance that way.

I remember a comic from the newspaper, "Ballard Street" or something like that, showing folks leaving a funeral, and one turns to the other and says something to effect that he'd better start leading a more significant life NOW! That's what I mean...

About Presents:
I had occasion this week to meet a gentleman in his 90's whose response to being on hospice was apparently rare enough that we were puzzled by it at first. He presented initially as "depressed," which is always a convenient medical condition, and not an infrequently assigned state for a hospice patient. Afterall, didn't Elisabeth Kubler-Ross tell us that dying entailed being depressed? And don't we have pills for that? Yes, if you are dying and deemed depressed, we can give you anti-depressants to elevate your mood so you won't feel so bad about it!

But actually, this man was less depressed than something else. I think he is actually in something of a state of shock-- that this is really happening to him, and that yes, the Death he'd always heard about and had even seen quite enough of in his 90+ years was actually coming to him. He put it well when he told me, "I'd never thought about it."

I believe him. I believe he never thought that Death would happen to him, at least not in any real way. He was alert and aware and as reasonably sane as the rest of us, so he knew in some part of himself that he was going to die. But he'd avoided ever thinking about it in real terms. Oh, he'd made his "arrangements," for gravesite and will and trust and the like. But as an existential possibility, he'd never thought of, well, not existing.

Sooner or later, we all have to, you know. We have to "not exist." And we probaly have to think about "not existing." Lots of folks HAVE thought about non-existence over the span of human experience, and so we have after-life beliefs and musings, and it has been said that the whole purpose of the world's religions and of religious belief in general is to have us think about not existing and to be able to answer comfortingly the questions that arise in our minds about that. Certainly a good deal not only of religion but also of philosophy is dedicated to the subject. So lots of folks over Time have thought about it. Just not this genteman...

He's thinking about it now, of course, and it is keeping him up nights-- not just the existential anxiety of not existing but also the sheer confusion of sorting through what to believe, that is, coming to some sense of HOW to think about it. And he's got nothing else to do with his days BUT think about it...

In a way, this relates to the previous subject, because he might (we'll see) find it easier to think about not existing if he can reach some sense about what the significance of his having existed has been. He might feel better about not "going on" if he can arrive at a sense in himself that what has gone on in the course of his days was worth something to someone. I believe, anyway, that we face the end of our days with a more peaceful heart if we can say that the sum of our days added up to something.

But we have to think about it-- both our life and its meaning and its ending-- if we are to come to that peace. Such may or may not turn out to be a peace "that passes all understanding," but I'll guarantee you it will be a peace that no anti-depressant will be able to give you!

About Futures:
I've been speaking to how looking back can help us face up to our finitude, but really our past is what we make it, in terms of what we remember and what we forget; and our present is what we declare it to be, in terms of what it all adds up to, what it is "all about, Alfie." But it is in facing our futures that we truly come to terms with existentially facing Death, because our future is unknown and to a great degree unknowable-- just as our experience of death is both of the unknown and to a great degree unknowable.

We do not live in a society that deals well with the unknown. We hedge against it by becoming our own "futurologists," striving to predict, as if we knew, what might be, as if it were to come to pass, thus comforting ourselves with what we think we know, even though, we are fain to admit to ourselves, no one really can know. The anxiety of not knowing is so painful that we use our imaginations in the worst way, to fabricate comforting scenarios for ourselves. Thankfully, living with these illusions does have its calming effect-- at least until we discover that what we imagined was to be is not anywhere close to what actually is, once we get there.

I'm suggesting that we have an alternative, and that alternative entails not being anxious about what we do not and cannot know, but rather developing in ourselves an acceptance of the our limitations-- and letting it all be as it is. For my money, the world's religions are really at their best not when they teach us about the life (or lives) after this life, but when they teach us how to be non-anxious and live within this one. I mean, the living of these days is no mean trick for any of us! I believe that we do better at that when we have the spiritual resources within us to face the hour, instead of borrowing comfort from whatever we have come to believe happens to us after we die.

To that end, in my own life, for my self, I have developed a benediction-- or a maxim or a mantra, if you will. What I tell myself is, "it is all good." It is all good, when things are pleasant. It is all good, when things are painful. But it is all good.

I say it about my past: All the things that happened to me, all the decisions that I made, all the comedies and the tragedies, the loves won and lost, the periods of clarity and those of confusion, the opportunities for service and those stretches of being unemployed, all of it: all good.

I say it about my present: The loneliness or the solitariness or the company, the times I feel useless or helpless or competent or engaged, the ways I waste time or make the most of it, the met and the unmet wishes, dreams and desires as well as the fears and reassurances of going from moment to moment in this day, the conversations and the silences, all of it: all good.

And I say it about my future: My looking down the road and wondering where I'll be or who I'll be with or what I'll be doing, the anticipations of my aging and how "the old grey mare ain't what she used to be" or even the old grey stallion for that matter, the ways I feel myself tempted to control the uncontrollable or even influence what might be controllable or not, etc., all of it: all good.

And then I aim to let that benediction settle in me and settle me and calm me...

For truly, it really IS, "all good." Blessings...

The Despair in Men's Eyes

Men can make extraordinary caregivers. I know. I've witnessed them, and been inspired by many. But the effects of providing care for those they love, maybe especially their wives, mothers or lovers, wears on them in ways that are different from women. For instance, men, for the most part, don't bear helplessness well. Helplessness seems to erode their confidence; it eats at their sense of themselves. I think we men like to feel competent at whatever we do, but caring for the dying leads most all of the the edges of our competence. Men generally do not dwell there well.

As they do, a kind of despair can come over them. There are many mantles that are borne relunctantly by caregivers of the dying, and despair is one. Today I am thinking about the despair I saw in the eyes of two sons yesterday, as they went about doing everything right for their mother. Despair filled their eyes, clouding them like cataracts, and despair sagged the flesh of their faces, seeping with slow drips into their hearts.

I have seen similar looks in the faces of men providing care for their wives. Despair shrounds the light of love; many struggle gamely, and vainly, to dispel it.

I am at a time in my life when I envy especially the husbands whose devotion leads them to despair. Not married, as I am now in the aftermath of divorces, I wonder whether there will be for me an opportunity so to love a woman that, should I be the one providing care for her as she dies, I might experience that brave despair I see in the faces of these men.

What's Left

I just returned from taking my son back to college after his Christmas break. I walked in the door, climbed the stairs, and stepped into a cloud of sad silence. I breathed it in, and sobbed.

I thought: how much more is it like this for those who return home from unwanted good-byes, from sendings-off like funerals that are devoid of hope of return? How much heavier is the silence weighted with sadness? How much more difficult is it to breathe?

I don't pretend to know grief, but I am not a stranger to it, either. None of us are, I guess. I imagine that we all come to know grief in ways large or small, but I believe that each of us knows grief only in our most personal ways, in the ways we know family, or friends, or lovers. Yet perhaps precisely because of the very personal quality of our knowledge of grief, we have only just made our acquaintance with it. There is always that much more to find out, to be surprised by.

And so it is, I am surprised to find that something remains: my son contributed his presence to my/our home briefly this vacation; yet when he goes, he has left enough to make me aware that he'd been here, and that he has left.

And now I adjust to life by myself again... I get to fill the quiet solely in my own ways.

I miss him...

Unanswerable Questions

As I walked across the room toward him, I wasn't sure he was still living. His eyes were heavy-lidded, his mouth drooped open, his chest neither rising nor falling. He made no sound. He looked a bit out of place in his own home: a hospital bed in his otherwise simply elegant bedroom, a female nude done with pastels an odd counterpoint to the near lifeless body nearby. I approached him, spoke to him introducing myself, and for a few agonizing moments there was no response. Then suddenly, surprisingly, his respirations sputtered to start, like a car engine on a very cold morning. He was still living, reluctantly.

I had more questions than he would have answers. I had arrived during his last hours, maybe his last minutes. What had all the rest of his life been like? It wasn't even like seeing the tip of the iceberg! More like one ice crystal of it.

Yet there was, as always, a sacred silence in the portent of that moment, a thickness in the air that held his labored breathing in colloidial suspension. This was not a time for coming to know more, but one for living with unknowing on the threshold of the unknown. I thanked him for his hospitality, for sharing this private, precious, tenuous time with me.

The dying often have unintentioned capacities. Their virtues are constantly being discovered.