Author Archives: Janell

Belonging

03 Monday Aug 2009

Posted by in Prayer, Soul Care

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In honor of my 100th post, I joined Blog Oklahoma late yesterday evening. 

Before joining, I traveled through all seventy-one pages of blog descriptions of other members.  A dozen enticed me to pay a visit; three ended up on my blogroll. So I thought, “Why not”.  “I’ll come out and play.”  But other than this, I’m not sure what will come of my membership.

Memberships are funny animals.  In joining a club or society or whatever, we satisfy this inate desire to belong to something bigger than ourselves.  I belong to the AICPA and the OSCPA, though my life as a certified public accountant rests on an unlit back burner.  Yet I hate to drop this long-term affiliation, even though I’ve no dreams to ever practice again.  I confess:  I enjoy being on my husband’s payroll.

More recently, I joined the Oklahoma Country Master Gardeners.  Now this membership requires me to do something other than to breathe and pay money once a year.  Twice a month I go sit behind the county extension help desk, what I have affectionately renamed the ‘hope desk’, as my callers are always looking for a ray of hope.  When the phones grow silent, I visit with two other on-duty gardeners.  And when my phone rings, I listen to the caller’s latest malady, as I play a bit of plant detective to uncover the mystery of why this or that is not performing as expected.

We do have our pesky expectations, don’t we?  Expectations have sent me to question my local church membership.  The last three Sunday mornings I have played musical pews, to see if  I can find a better fit than where I currently ‘belong’.  So far, no dice.  Each church has its own personality, it’s own way of conducting the business of church, and I’m starting to wonder if I’m looking for that mythical mystical unicorn.  

I’m looking for a church that conducts less business and more church, at least during the worship hour. My biggest gripe about church is not the passing of the plate, or even the dreaded passing of the peace–a nightmare for introverts like me, and even some extroverts like my friend Laure who always dabs on a bit of hand sanitizer afterwards, just in case she got a little more than bargained for–but rather it’s the spirit-grating advertisements that come in the midst of the worship service.  We’ve prayed, sang a few hymns and then, low and behold, here come a few ‘announcements’ or two.  Ecclesliastes 3 teaches us there is a time for everything under the sun; in my book, commercials, even if related to the business of the church, should not reside anywhere near  a worship service.   To them, I say:  Be gone.  Find your own time and space.

Ironically, for this writer-wannabe, the perfect church service would be practically wordless — certainly no sermon or commericals.  Just music, a few chants, the barest of homilies.  I had hoped to find this animal alive at the montly Taize service at St. Paul’s Cathedral yesterday evening.  But what I remembered at 3 pm was gone by 5pm.  So it will be September before I can satisfy my curiousity.  And I hope,  this unmet desire to join with something bigger than myself.    

But make no mistake.  If Taize meets my dreams of church, I’ve no plans to join St. Paul’s.  And I hope the real members of St. Paul’s don’t mind.  But if they pass the plate, I’ll pay.  And if they pass the peace, I’ll play and even keep my hand sanitizer at home.  But mostly, I just want to pray, surrounded by a few others who mostly want to pray.

Come Holy Spirit.  Come out, come out, wherever you are.  To you and you and you, Trinity of One, do I truly wish to belong. 

Voices Barely Heard

02 Sunday Aug 2009

Posted by in Life at Home

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Daddy has no voice but what other’s give him.  And in the fertile ground of nursing home life, Daddy’s need of voice has grown big.  What will this need deliver?  

For better and for worse, my sister and I give Daddy a voice.  So after a string of better weeks, the worst showed up early last week, leaving my sister and I with no ability to make heads or tails of Daddy’s jumbled whispery sounds.  To be sure, it’s a little easier in person.  Then Daddy and I can resort to using our home-grown sign language, where I ask questions and then give Daddy a multiple choice quiz.  If Daddy holds up one finger, I know he wants the first alternative; two fingers the second and I try not to cloud the issue with three or four choices.   Better to keep the choices etched in black and white, otherwise Daddy finds it hard to make a choice at all.

I’m no better at making decisions than my father.  In Myer’s Brigg talk, I’m an INFP, which (in part) means I dislike being hemmed in by predestination, even if at my own free-will hand.  What sounds good now may not a few hours later.  Reading between the lines, I’ve sort of picked up that this indecisive tendency of mine drives the decisive- J-types in my life just a wee bit crazy.   

If I lived  by my lonesome, I’d simply bask all day long on the sands of indecision and perennial lateness.  Maybe I was born to be an island girl, where the sands of time slip through the fingers of curled water and drift slowly back to the ocean floor, to be pulled back at some future great wave.  I love going to the beach, where I can listen to the gulls and smell the salt on my tongue, then forget my cares and get lost in time as I gaze off the shore to find that fuzzy point where sea meets sky.  There’s no urge to rush; I know real life will wait.  

But wait!  Isn’t this the kind of stinkin’ thinkin’ that caught the nursing staff off-guard on Tuesday, when I arrived to find Daddy with cracked lips and fuzzy mouth, dehydrated before blind eyes?  It is because of Tuesday that I now know actions do not always speak louder than words, especially for elder care, when those  in charge fail to take charge.  When signs of disturbance go unseen, undercurrents lurk just below the surface of everyday routines to pull down the Daddy’s of this world.  It takes a watchful life guard to help someone like Daddy speak volumes; to hear a cry for help from a soundless parched mouth.   

I’m no life guard.  But even for an indecisive girl like me, it was easy to see Daddy was beyond thirsty.  So I set about to make the nursing staff aware of  Dad’s symptoms, expecting someone to jump in and offer my father a life-line.  Instead, the nursing staff shrugged and went on its merry way, sometimes offering me a little song and dance for my trouble.  I heard something eerily akin to that whistling island talk ditty:  Don’t worry.  Be happy.  Then for an encore, I listened to some stanzas of false optimism, in words that called to mind that special Broadway musical… 

“The sun will come up tomorrow, bet your
 bottom dollar, tomorrow, there’ll be sun.”

I couldn’t believe my ears.  And the thoughts singing and dancing between my ears were just as incredible.  

Yes.  There will be sun tomorrow.  But what about daddy?  Will Daddy still be around to see the sun come up tomorrow?  Hey.  Just so you know.  I’m worried.  And I’m not happy.  Can anyone hear me?  Or have I washed up on La-La Island?  Are there any decisive-J’s working at this center?  If so, please report to Mr. Pappas’ room.  Now!  Mr. Pappas is in desperate need of a nurse who can connect dots and connect Jack to an IV. 

Time didn’t stop, though it seemed to.  Nothing productive happened for six crazy hours.  The nursing staff went around its routine business, but meanwhile in my father’s room, all was far from routine.  My brother and I got  little liquid into Dad by mouth, while worse, the nursing staff could get no liquid out, even by catheter.  So four hours into our visit, with my brother’s J-support, I drew a line in the sand.  I asked for Dad to receive fluids by IV. 

Can you believe the doctor said no?  He said, let’s wait and see how Mr. Pappas is doing tomorrow.  The doctor refused to issue an order to permit nursing staff to give Dad an IV and then refused to issue an order to send Daddy to the ER.   It took two hours for the ER call to be made.  And it came with my stubborn refusal to leave the nursing home premises until Dad recieved an IV.

All this came after my meltdown.  After the 911 dispatch attendant told me I had no power to call on Daddy’s behalf, in spite of having a medical power of attorney, as Daddy was under a doctor’s and nursing home center’s care.  Ha!  If they only knew.   And it came after I glared and spoke a few curt words at the poor girl–in the wrong place at the wrong time–who was sitting behind the nurse’s station desk.  And I glared until she made the decision to give me her voice.        

The gift of voice has nothing to do with songs and dances and everything to do with the quality and quantity of everyday life.  We live impoverished until someone takes time to forget the sands of time and listen to our stories.  And if we have no one to helps us listen to our lives, we might as well live life on the sands of some deserted island.

But I wonder:  What happens to those elderly voices, that are feeble and past their energetic prime–like those of Daddy, and Miss Alpha and Marie–that take time to birth, and that even after a hard labor, come out barely there and hard to recognize as words?  To be heard at all will require the listener to be willing to operate on island time.  In the scary world of nursing home life, for these barely heard voices, it’s a matter of life and death.  

The Spirit is Willing

30 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in Life at Home, Soul Care

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Mom was always a little blue on dreary days like this.   But rather than fight it, Mom simply followed the sun by going undercover as she put aside her normal productive activities to stay in bed with one of her treasured Harlequin romances.  Mom’s books were a lifelong passport to happier places, even if only to the land of sleep and dreams.     

What is it about the dark that inspires us to rest, like a bear hibernating for the winter?  Last Saturday I walked into my father’s dark nursing home room in the middle of the day to find him curled up in a recliner sound asleep.  These days our roles are polar opposites; where Daddy once woke me back to life, it is now me beckoning him to do the same.  I reached out my hand to open the blinds to invite in the bright sunny day, then for added insurance, I reached out my hand to turn on Daddy’s bedside lamp to flood the space with soft reading light.  Finally, I reached out my hand to softly touch Dad’s shoulder. But the hand that worked so well to bring light and life from the blinds and the lamp fared less well with Daddy.   

As peaceful as a young babe, Dad’s face was wiped free from the cares of living, where unable to exercise his own free will, Daddy is shuffled and wheeled and carried about like a fragile piece of antique furniture at the wills and occupation of others.  As I remember Daddy trying to wake up, I liken it to the truth of those ancient words–the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak–spoken by someone greater than I who was very much in the know.  While Daddy was glad to see me, he could not will his vacant eyes to stay open.  And rather than helping Dad fight it, I surrendered my father to the healing powers of a warm blanket and the cover of darkness.

As I watched Daddy sleep, I wondered where his dreams were taking him.  I hoped for some happier place, to that mystical font where deepest dreams come true.  Lately my dreams have consisted of unhappy places; I find myself stuck in a turnstile at an airport with heavy luggage that–though too large to carry on board–I refuse to relinquish.  And while I keep missing flight after flight and feel anxious to reach my unknown destination, I am stuck between that proverbial rock and a hard place.  I refuse to give up my precious bags and I refuse to give up my journey.  So I struggle for something to jar me loose, like a needle struck in the groove of a scratched LP record I wait for that helping hand to shove me through the turnstile so that I can play the next ring of the tune, until I know how this dreary dream will end.      

What seeds of experience or longing breed such dreams within us?  And of those of my beloved father, who hopefully sleeps without memory of the clumsy and unsteady feet which hold him back from his own hoped-for destiny of his home on the hill?  Here of late, I’ve been left to wonder whether my recurrent dream has anything to do with Daddy.  While I am no interpreter of dreams, I suspect that those precious bags I refuse to part with are full of my hopes and dreams for Daddy’s recovery.  And that I am in some fruitless tug-of-war for Daddy’s spirit, engaging with the invisible powers who wait for me to graciously turn over my bags to their safe care and handlng.    

Even now, I sense those spirits of the invisible world may be calling Dad’s spirit home, far away from the home that I have in mind.  Like St. Paul, Daddy has indeed fought the good fight; Dad’s past month’s progress is proof of what sheer willpower can do.  And while Daddy may not yet be ready to join Mom in the happily-ever-after, Saturday’s visit was a reminder that the human spirit is both strong and fragile; capable of great hope and susceptible to instant despair.    And though I did not suspect it  at the time, the spirit I called sadness that day was instead a precursor to yet another medical setback, as today, Daddy is resting alongside IV tubes at another hospital in Seminole.   

Whenever Daddy lands on the space called ‘Hospital’, I always fear that the biggest good-bye of them all is waiting just around the corner, a few steps beyond the turnstile.  When I’m finally shoved through, will I then gracefully release my precious burden for its journey, and like the not-so-big girl that I am, just cry and wave my hand good-bye.  No, probably not.  I’ve never been good at saying good-bye in my life.   And the mere thought of Daddy being among the ‘dearly departed’ is not something I’m yet ready to grasp.  My flesh is weak and my spirit unwilling.