Exit, stage left

 My father decided to die.

Not in the sense of suicide, not at all. But I firmly believe that he gave the matter serious, thoughtful reflection and simply decided that it was probably the best time to make an exit.

Twenty-five years earlier, he had had a seven-way CABG, a septuple bypass. I'm reasonably sure that it set a record at the time at the teaching hospital where the procedure took place. He would say, and periodically did say, that the quarter-century he enjoyed after that was a bonus. Golden time. He got to see his daughters married, his grandchildren born and grow into adulthood, or at least its cusp. He made it to almost 60 years with the love of his life, his bride.

But as recently as three years before his death, he acknowledged that he was in pain almost all the time. He was frail. He had had both hips replaced; the first one had gone beautifully, but something got pinched in the second one, and it was basically always going to hurt. He'd been living with lupus for years and with dry-eye macular degeneration as well. His atrial fibrillation was becoming more of a nuisance. His wife had been in memory care for several years and was becoming increasingly less present.

The month before, he had undergone a cardiac procedure akin to unplugging the heart and plugging it back in again. It worked really well for about forty-eight hours, and then not. 

On a Saturday morning, following a sleepless night brought on by prolonged episodes of shortness of breath, he followed his cardiologist's instructions and phoned a church friend to take him to the emergency department. After a five-hour drive, I made it to his side around 3:30 in the afternoon where, after more than seven hours in a cubicle, he was being moved upstairs to the cardiac ICU.

About an hour after that, while we were watching the Kentucky Derby pre-race coverage  and contemplating ordering his dinner, he said, very clinically, "My right hand feels like it belongs to someone else." I shot out of the room and flagged down a nurse. Within a minute, so many people were surrounding his bed that I had a hard time edging out of the way. He was whisked to the Neurology ICU where, after much testing and measuring, they determined that yes, he had had a stroke: not the much more common hemorrhagic stroke but an ischemic stroke in the parietal lobe.It processes sensory information, but if you have to have a portion of the brain taken out, you could do worse. Dad lost the use of, and feeling in, his right arm and leg. He retained his cognition, though, and his sense of humor, allowing me to take a photo of him in his EEG cap. He could answer most questions and knew that he had had a stroke. He did have some aphasia, though, which frustrated the hell out of him, because he had made his living as a communicator. 

After three days in Neuro ICU, he was transferred to a cardiac unit, where he languished for another three days with a roommate who was startlingly cavalier about his coming surgery to remove a toe because he was diabetic and did not do what he was supposed to. It turned out he'd already lost four toes. It became a darkly comic foil to my father's last days.

That Friday -- a Friday the thirteenth, of course -- there was a care conference with representatives from neurology, cardiology, palliative care. Having lost too much time from work, I was back in Virginia and present by conference call. My two sisters were on site. I had been a nursing-home chaplain for seven years and knew -- we all knew -- that Dad would be a lousy candidate for post-stroke rehab, possibly among the world's worst. He would be hard on himself, yet tire easily. He would be impatient with himself and the therapists, and the impatience would come out as sarcasm, his words becoming weapons. He would argue -- under the guise of eliciting information -- with every guideline and instruction. It would be a nightmare.

I'm not sure whether Dad weighed the work required for post-stroke rehab. I do know that he had to have contemplated the reality that, hemiplegic, he was done with living independently at home. No more driving to choir practice, no more participating in the dance band, no more going to church, no more getting up at 3 in the morning, if he was awake, to make pastel drawings. Everything that had represented quality of life for him would be gone. He was tired, he was in pain, and, after four years of his wife in a facility, he was lonely. There must have been hours of wakefulness in which he considered his situation and his future.

He listened to the physicians during the care conference. He listened to the palliatve-care specialist, Albert Hong, who came to his room afterward and in the loveliest and most delicate manner possible conveyed that he really was not a great candidate for rehab. And he said, "I think I'm ready to be through." I can't say whether my sisters were crying, but tears were streaming down my face as I gave him my blessing. We all did. By that evening, he was in a bed in the local hospice house.

The following Thursday morning, at first light, he died in his sleep. The evening before, I had left him about 7:30. I told him I was going back to his house to feet his cat, and he smiled broadly. "I love you," I said. "I'll see you in the morning," and dropped a kiss on his cheek. The next morning, the funeral-home guy was loading him onto the stretcher.

It's taken me a year to be able to write about this. But as a lifelong writer and editor, my dad was an inimitable respecter of deadlines. He had been a college journalism educator for twenty years, and I believe it was more than happenstance that led him to wait until the semester had ended and commencement concluded before leaving the building. And he had been active in theater all his life: the man knew how and when to make an exit. Cleanly, quickly, and with grace.

I work as a hospice chaplain. I've seen patients fighting through pain to keep hanging on to life. More frequently, I've seen family members unconsciously prolonging their loved one's life by talking about how tough the person is and how much they need the person around and how they are not ready for the person's impending death. I don't know how I will feel when my time comes. But I pray that I will be able to leave as my dad did: himself to the end, and then getting offstage quickly and neatly.

Carry That Weight

 So, first of all. Having a blog usually means that the blogger will make regular posts. 

I haven't posted to my blog since May 4. 

On May 7, my dad entered the hospital, from which, after a week, who moved to the local hospice house, where, on May 19, he died. That's the shortest possible version of this story, because that's not what this post is about.

But it's why I haven't given this blog space a thought in months. 

I work as a hospice chaplain, a bereavement care coordinator. I deal with death and bereavement daily. It's profoundly different when it's your own parent. And now my mom, after seven or eight years of increasingly advanced dementia, is now on hospice care herself. 

The holidays were difficult. More than an absence, my grief felt more like a heaviness, a weight that had not been there before.

At any rate.

I'm back, and wondering about grudges. I'm not much for resentment and holding grudges myself, as I feel as though I have enough emotional baggage without taking on extras. But occasionally I'm on the receiving end, and it's surprising how frustrated and helpless it makes me seem.

We have all encountered that co-worker. Somehow, in the very earliest days of your employment, you said or did something that rubbed your co-worker the wrong way, and she hasn't liked you since. 

In my particular case, the co-worker perceived me as rude and standoffish when I was new and absorbed in learning a complicated computer charting system and new duties and responsibilities. Then, it seems, she viewed me as hypocritical when I tried to mimic the way others interacted with her.

Last summer, just before our supervisor retired, she held a come-to-Jesus meeting with us to clear the air. Behind closed doors, she said, "Where should we begin?" My co-worker jumped in and for ten minutes spoke about my rudeness, my inability to respond appropriately when she made a joking comment, and my failure to cooperate when she organized office social events. She said that for six months I had been nothing but rude to her, and she had been nothing but gracious to me.

I apologized, profusely. I said I had never meant to be rude or brusque. I mentioned my hope that we could get along better.

"Don't pretend. I don't need a friend. I am a professional," she said. My supervisor mentioned to me a need to be culturally sensitive. 

Life went on. During a recent office staff meeting, the current supervisor sat by while my co-worker scolded me twice, saying that I wasn't a team player and that I didn't pitch in the way I should. 

This morning, as I passed her desk, I cheerfully said, "Good morning." She grunted in response.

This is a small office. Most of the staff are field workers. It hurts everybody for us not to get along. But I feel frustrated and helpless. All I can do is do my job, help out where I can, and be friendly. But she is determined to expend energy in disliking and resenting me, and I don't know what to do about it. 

Except, I guess, carry on.

And that's what so many others are doing. Faced with situations that leave them feeling frustrated and helpless, they do the best they can, they put their best selves forward, and carry on. And chances are excellent that just about everyone you encounter has a situation somewhat like this. A situation that they can't help, but that adds weight to their daily lives.

All of which is to say: don't hold grudges. Do what you can to avoid being the ongoing weight in someone else's life.

Muscle Memory

In the primordial days, when the fires of creation were still flickering, one summer I had three jobs. It was, I think, the summer after my second year in college, which means I was 19 or 20. I was enrolled in a news editing course at the UNC School of Journalism. (I count that as Job 1.) My dad had lined up for me a part-time feature-reporting internship, two mornings a week, at a small weekly newspaper. And I needed a job that actually paid money, as my summer earnings would be my pocket money for the coming academic year. 

 

I was fortunate that my work-study job covered room and board and that my parents paid for my tuition and books. But spending cash was on me. Given the constraints of the class and the internship, I needed a job with flexible hours. It doesn't work this way any more, but I remember walking into a Hardee's and asking for a job application. The person at the counter gave me a paper placemat with the application on the back. I filled it out, spoke to the manager, and started work the next day. 

 

I loathed it. It was mentally numbing, physically demanding, and often gross, and the manager was a letch and a creep. But it paid actual money. In fact, I got two raises over the course of the summer, was soon helping train new hires, and the management tried to get me to forgo returning to college in exchange for a supervisor's job. 

 

None of which has to do with muscle memory. That's the stuff that helps pianists and typists do their thing, A scene early in the movie The Competition, starring Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving, shows Amy Irving's character on a plane, en route to a piano competition. On the tray table, her fingers play, and she hears the music in her head. Several times, it's her fingers that tell her a split second before her ear does that she's hit a wrong note. She digs out the music, checks it, finds the mistake, and goes back to practicing. Muscle memory is the reason that you really do never forget how to ride a bicycle.

 

So. Hardee's. That was maybe 35 years ago. 

 

This morning on my way to work, I decided on a small midweek treat and stopped at a local coffee drive-through for a cup of coffee and a pair of egg white bites (egg whites with spinach, poached by the sous-vide method). When I got out of the car, instinctively I folded the top of the bag over so that the logo side showed. 

 

No one else was around. I climbed the stairs to the office and reached my desk without anyone else seeing the bag. What difference did it make how I folded the bag, or if I folded it at all?

 

Muscle memory.

 

Thirty-five years ago -- I would often drive to work singing along with the radio to "Let's Hear it For the Boy" from Footloose or to Madonna's "Isla Bonita" or "Borderline" -- my supervisor at Hardee's instructed employees always to fold the bag so that the logo showed. That meant that as the customer carried the bag, everyone would see the company name. 

 

It's not only our brains that make habits and practices. The body does, too.  Which helps explain one reason I find so much appeal in what I call liturgical aerobics -- the "sit, stand, sit, kneel, stand, repeat" common to Catholic, Lutheran and Episcopalian worship services. 

 

I've had bad knees since I was 35 or so, thanks to a torn ligament, but when I worship in a church that invites people to kneel for prayer, something about the posture helps prepare me for the act that follows. I suspect that's part of the appeal of rosaries, meditation poses, and the posture of centering prayer. 

 

What holiness is stored in our hands, what knowledge in our knees? Prayer can, and should, and often does, occur at all times and in all places. When we incorporate muscle memory, though, on occasion you and I can transcend our current surroundings and discover the liminal. 

The Stupidest Place on Earth

 One of the accidental advantages of my birth was that I came into the world in South Florida in 1967, about the time that my dad, then a business reporter at the Miami Herald, was covering the unknown entity quietly buying up parcels of land in the center of the state. 

Disney World opened on October 1, 1971, in Bay Lake, Florida, adjacent to the cities of Orlando and Kissimee (kuh-SIM-mee), and set about making the non-coastal part of the state about much more than citrus farms, phosphate, and horse breeding. While it was still a relatively modest complex, no more than the original Magic Kingdom, my parents took my two sisters and me there twice -- once on a reporting job for which the Herald footed the bill, meaning that we got to stay in the upscale Polynesian Village Resort hotel, complete with a "waterfall" slide in the pool and kid-friendly drinks served in coconut halves.

As a result, it's always held a special place in the nostalgia region of my heart, even as it's grown and sprawled to the point that just the idea of visiting overwhelms me these days. But now it seems that the governor of Florida has made a move that is almost certain to backfire. For what appears to be sheer partisan cussedness, Ron DeSantis is looking the gift mouse in the mouth, and I can only hope that someone, or multiple someones, in Tallahassee come to their senses.

Florida’s state legislature passed a bill Thursday (April 21) revoking The Walt Disney Company’s control over its own self-governed district. Until now, that sort of Vatican City rule let Disney tend to sewer improvements, road repaving, and the like without having to go through municipal government -- in other words, without taking too long to get the repairs and upgrades completed. The bill turns over all that, as well as water and fire services, to Orange and Osceola counties. Along with a billion dollars in debt.

Why?

DeSantis swears that it's not retaliation. I call mouse poop. A month ago, the Florida legislature passed a bill that limited what public primary schools (kindergarten through third grade) could teach about gender and sexual orientation, stating that it had to be age- or developmentally appropriate. That sounds entirely reasonable, until you realize that it's so vaguely worded that it's now become widely known as the "Don't Say Gay" law. Disney's top mouse, Bob Chapek, responded to calls to help get it repealed. 

The bill is worded so squishily that parents already are wielding it to quash content or statements they dislike. In theory, Miss Jennifer with a picture on her desk of her wedding to Miss Courtney is disseminating content that is not age-appropriate. DeSantis promises that the bill dissolving the special district isn't retaliatory and won't hurt Florida taxpayers, but at the bill-signing ceremony he complained about "a corporation based in Burbank, California" using its economic oomph to "attack the parents of my state." 

Perhaps DeSantis has forgotten that every mile of Florida's coast (and there are many miles) draws the tourist dollars that power the state -- but that inland without Disney, and the many resulting theme parks and attractions surrounding it, would be (as noted) not much more than citrus farms, phosphate, and horse breeding. All of which are vital industries, but not the sort to encourage people to drive or fly many miles, book many hotel stays, and buy many souvenirs. 

More to the point, the "Don't Say Gay" law is a prime example of the difference between "I can't dance, it's against my religion" and, "You can't dance, it's against my religion."

I'm Not Dead Yet!

It's been a while since I posted to this blog. I knew that, but I didn't realize it had been ten months. 

Oops.

It appears that I made my last post a day or so before we moved from our temporary apartment to our house, built in 1930 in a historic neighborhood in the Tidewater region of Eastern Virginia. At the same time, I was experiencing some tension as a chaplain at the hospice where I worked, tension that ultimately led to me switching to a job I love at another hospice nearby. 

Between buying the house, relocating locally, and changing jobs, I did not know how long the blog had been dark. 

House lights down, stage lights up full. 

The recent animated movie Encanto, with songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, an award-winning composer, is full of catchy songs, as one would expect. Evidently the big earworm, particularly among the uner-10 set, is “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” focusing on what turns out to be just one of several family dysfunctions.

 

In the American culture at large, it’s not Bruno we refuse to talk about, but death. After seven years in nursing-home chaplaincy and roughly a year and a half in hospice chaplaincy, I’ve found that just about everyone I’ve encountered in those settings fits into one of a few categories.

 

Category A: The person nearest to actually dying – the resident or patient – is more than ready to talk about it. This person has ideas, if not an actual service, has definite opinions about the celebrant, the location, the music, and the mood. This person has family members – spouse, children, nearest living relatives – who are anything but ready to talk about it. No way, no how, no time.

 

Category B: The family members would like to discuss making plans with the resident or patient, if only to know if the person has a preference regarding cremation, cremation avoidance, organ donation, and disposition of the body in general. Ideally, the family members would like to encourage the resident or patient to participate in shaping the funeral or memorial service. (A funeral features a body in a casket. A memorial service features either a cremated body or no body at all.)

 

Category C: Neither the patient nor the family members want to talk about it. Period.

 

Category D: Both the patient and at least some of the family members are ready to talk about it.

 

Guess which category allows for the most healing and paves the way for the most restorative time of mourning and moving forward toward living with loss? That would be Category D.

 

In some cases, people in Category A and Category B might be subconsciously influenced by a superstition they can’t even name, much less acknowledge: that talking about death will hasten the end of life. The word “superstition” comes from the Latin stare (-stition), to stand, plus super, meaning “over.” The idea is that of standing over something, frozen in awe, but it also strikes me that some of the super means thinking that hovers above our conscious, linear, rational thinking. Something we pay homage to even as we are a little sheepish about doing so.

 

People sometimes have the same thinking about hospice care, not wanting to begin services, although that might be less superstition than misinformation, or uninformation. Hospice care is for when the patient has a terminal disease, with a prognosis of six months at most to live, and wants his or her life to end at home (or in a nursing home), with as much dignity, comfort, and autonomy as can be achieved.

 

Back to the discussion about death, and whether or not we talk about it, one of the (possibly unintended) results of not talking about it is the decline of funerals altogether. Whether it’s a funeral, a memorial service, or a celebration of life, choosing to do nothing at all is becoming increasingly popular.

 

Part of it, no doubt, is the increase in what the Pew Research Center calls “nones,” people who do not claim an affiliation with a house of faith. If ritual is not something that you normally engage in, it can feel artificial and even ghoulish to put on a service with your dead parent as the centerpiece. At the same time, the practice is a keystone of healthy grieving, of being able to live with the loss in a way that is healthy and whole. 

 

Part of it is most likely the statistical reality that many of the people dying now are part of the Silent Generation, and their reflexive inclination is: “I don’t want to be a bother.” Maybe they think that saying, “I don’t want a funeral” will lift a burden from their loved ones. They mean well. They’ve been trying to avoid being a bother most of their lives. But in doing so, they’re also depriving their loved ones of the opportunity to engage in one final act of love.

 

At the hospice service where I work, in the week before Easter (coincidence? Who knows), eleven people died. That’s a lot for one week. Four, just under half, chose to have no funeral or memorial service. And yet burial rituals are seemingly as old as humankind. People who study the very earliest human communities have found evidence of burials. St. Jean de Brebeuf, a Catholic missionary from France found people in the Huron-Wendat communities of North America uniting for a communal burial of the dead every ten years. This was in the early 1600s. 

 

Newly dead people were wrapped in beaver skins and placed on high wooden scaffolds. In preparation for the burial, women in the families were tasked with scraping clean the bones. Father Brebeuf saw one family do this with a corpse “oozing with decomposition.” Deeply moved, he called it “heartening” to see such “works of mercy.” (From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World in Search of the Good Death, by Caitlin Doughty.)

 

Not that I’m suggesting that we return to do-it-yourself defleshment. But the emotional reality is that doing nothing at all leaves a hole that never quite fills. If you are part of a family in categories A, B, or C, instead of choosing not to “talk about Bruno,” ponder this: At some point, you will be dead, and the people you love most will have to make decisions about what kind of ritual, if any, they will find to mark the passing of one person – one unique, wildly precious person – from their lives. You can participate in the discussion and let your loved ones know what you do, and do not, want. Otherwise, your loved ones are left to make guesses, or to honor your desire not to be a bother.

 "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" has to be one of the dumbest truisms going. To Kill a Mockingbird, the late Harper Lee's novel, begins: "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." I was thirteen the first time I broke a bone, but the story of the break isn't nearly as strange as the story of the aftermath. 

 Waiting to be picked up from some after-school activity, my friend Jessica and I were horsing around in the front courtyard of the junior high school. From the main sidewalk, three shallow steps led down to the small patch of concrete, then three shallow steps back up to the main doors. I tripped over a loose metal cap at the edge of the top step and fell, landing hard on my left arm. It hurt, of course, but I'd had falls before, from bicycles and roller skates and the odd tree limb, and I was certain the hurt would subside. Besides, I didn't want to get in trouble.

Astonishingly stupid in the way only thirteen-year-olds can be, I managed to conceal my injury for several days until my parents demanded the complete truth. I remember being (quite rightly) scolded for failing to confess all from the beginning at least as much as I remember having my broken wrist in a cast for a month. 

Given how heedlessly we played as children (my mother would later say that she was glad she never knew just how high we all climbed in the huge poinciana tree in the front yard), it astonishes me how few broken bones my sisters and I collected. But the wrist healed beautifully and has not troubled me since. Ditto the ankle I managed to break five years later.

But decades later, if I wish, I can still summon up some of the words that hurt me. Most of the time, I don't wish to, and time really does heal a lot of those childhood wounds. Life gets a lot easier as the skin gets thicker. Besides - a side benefit of having worked in the letters-to-the-editor department - once a total stranger calls you a lying bitch over the phone, you get really good at not taking things too personally.

Which does not mean that some words are not objectively offensive.

In the divided discourse of today, people are quick to taunt with words that are meant to hurt: "snowflake," "OK Boomer," and similar phrases. When someone says, "That's offensive," it's considered a purely subjective judgment, and many people will deflect by suggesting that the problem lies with the complainer. "If you're that offended...." (Shut up and go away, is the usually unspoken end to that sentence.)

The reality is that part of human society includes sometimes tacit agreements about objective offensiveness. In most cases, when I say, "That's offensive," I don't mean that I am offended. (If I were, that's what I would have said.) Without having discussed it, everyone would agree - for example - that using a yellow cloth Star of David to indicate a non-vaccinated person is objectively offensive. It need not offend any one individual to be so universally unacceptable as to be objectively offensive.

And yet a hat-store owner in Tennessee has made such badges, wears one, and offers them for sale. 

Sticks and stones can break bones, of course. But in many cases bones knit together far more readily than the psychic wounds done by words. 

There's no easy way to change the hot mess that social discourse often becomes, of course. But as for me and my house, as they say, I can acknowledge the lasting power of words, both to wound and to heal, and to choose those words with care and with an eye toward kindness.

The Truman Committee

 By 1941, Harry S Truman had been a United States senator long enough, and brilliantly enough, to erase some of the taint that he carried with him to Washington. He had some associations with the Kansas City, Missouri, political machine of "Boss" TJ Pendergast. It was to his credit that in his previous political roles, which included overseeing and awarding road contracts, he never enriched himself. (In fact, he would be just about broke when he left the White House in 1953).

That's part of the reason that when he orchestrated a committee, within 18 months it was effective and powerful. As the United States, in early 1941, was not yet in the war, it was involved in the Lend-Lease program, sharing military equipment with allies. Truman wanted to investigate waste and shoddy contracting, deeply concerned at the bedfellowship of the military and big corporations. By mid-1943, just the threat of Truman Committee investigators arriving at a steel plant or military base was often enough to make shady practices evaporate. 

Truman, who had been the captain of an artillery battalion in World War I, was generally distrustful of big business and driven by both general agreement with New Deal practices and genuine patriotism. He firmly believed that it was abhorrent to allow substandard steel to be used in ships and planes - potentially killing troops - for the benefit of profiteering. And he firmly believed that the German military and its leader must be stopped. 

In listening to an unabridged audiobook (56 hours!) on Truman, I've been struck by how basic Truman's patriotism was. He loved his country - and he applauded and encouraged civilian contributions to the war effort. My dad, who was not quite 11 years old in 1945, says that he remembers vividly the unity of spirit, the knowledge that we were all in this together. People saved their fat and traded it to the butcher, used ration cards, avoided making long-distance calls on holidays so that soldiers could call loved ones where possible.

Earlier this week, by contrast, I learned that for some people, gasoline is the new toilet paper. If you remember, in the early months of COVID-19, people were panic-buying toilet paper because they did not know when they would be able to get more. Most people behaved themselves, but some are reporting that they still know folks with excess 24-packs in the garage. When ransomware hacked the Southeastern Pipeline, temporarily disrupting the supply of gasoline to filling stations, most people behaved themselves. Lines formed, but they moved along. When I was low on gas and needed to fill up on Wednesday, there was gas at the pump when it was my turn and I was able to get what I needed. 

But social media has also shown numerous photographs of people filling eight or ten ten-gallon gas cans and stacking them in the back of their SUVs. And multiple reports of people finally reaching the pump and discovering it empty. 

That's panic-buying verging on hoarding. Something that was actually against the law in World War II - and something that comparatively few people engaged in.

Social media has also shown photographs of people endangering themselves and others by ignorance of the principles of chemistry. There's a reason that gas stations have signs about putting gas only in approved containers. And yet, we've seen photos of car trunks filled with bulging, tied-shut plastic bags filled with gasoline. Or people pumping gas into open plastic tubs. And as with the toilet paper, most of us are behaving ourselves, but I'm waiting for a news article about a car exploding because of a trunk full of gasoline.

Obviously, society has changed drastically since World War II. And one of the things I'd like to see make a return is a sense of shared obligation. At the very beginning of the pandemic, it went well for the most part. But after only a few months of sheltering in place, a lot of people, having had enough, insisted on engaging in shopping, dining out, and gathering for motorcycle rallies. During the war, rationing of certain items, including gasoline, went on for three full years. People complained, but they understood.

When the pipeline got hacked, we didn't even wait three days, much less three years. As cyberattacks become increasingly a threat, maybe it's time to bring back the ration books.