Tag Archives: Everyday Life

Another Chapter

22 Thursday Apr 2010

Posted by in Life at Home

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Oh Daddy.  It’s been a terribly long day.

I hope you’re resting easier now.  I hope the fever is gone — that all the bedding changes, necessary but tiring, are over.  How many sponge baths did you endure today?

It’s been a day for wondering.  Biggest of all, I wondered where you are  — is this just another chapter in your ongoing struggle to stay alive?  Or have we turned the page to the final chapter and don’t yet know it?  I wish I could skip ahead, just like I do with a really good book when I’m too tired to stay up any longer to read, to see how you and this particular story are going to end.

The nursing home called Sis at 1:00 AM.  Listening to the litany of indecipherable clues, Christi finally had to ask, “Are you telling me to come?”    Surprisingly, there was no pause.  “If he were my father, I would.”   It really does help to cut through the vagueness with sharp, penetrating questions.  I need to remember to do this more often.

Christi threw on a jacket, brushed her teeth and picked up her eyeglasses and her purse before she hurried into the dark to sit by your side.  She could have woke up Jane to go with her.  But she decided to drive herself instead.

The drive was thirty minutes.  Quick.  No traffic.  She had a full tank of gas.  And by this time, Christi is a well-oiled machine.  Christi can respond to your distress calls with no need for help.  Wouldn’t you say, Daddy, that Christi has grown up a lot over the last eleven months?

Of course, just because we can doesn’t mean we should.  We aren’t made to go it alone, are we?  I know Daddy, how relieved you must have been to see Christi’s face when she walked in the door at 1:45.   Can you blame her if Christi wasn’t similarly relieved?

It didn’t take Christi but a few minutes to call me.  An hour and a half later I walked in with Jon.  It was 3:15.   Christi waited until a more decent  6:00 AM to call Jane.  And an hour later, Jane walked in with Aunt Jo.  Where else would mother’s sisters be, but by the remnants of mother’s family?

It was a long terrible day.  But Daddy, even though you were mostly oblivious to it all, there were moments of terrible beauty throughout it.

The hospice team we engaged are wonderful.  I can tell they are old pros at this business of compassionate dying.  I sense that they will steer us through whatever is to come.  The will let us know, the best that they can, where we are in your book of life.

Then there were all the kindnesses we received throughout the day.  Breakfast brought in by Jane.  Coffee and snacks made by Dottie, the manager of the nursing home kitchen.  All your nurses.  Everyone trying to make a painful process less trying.  It was only later that I thought that this is how it should always be, that we should always go out of our loving way for others.

Then there was your ever faithful sidekick Larry.  Larry didn’t at all appreciate being closed out by a wall of curtains.  I just smiled as he asked the nurse to  push back the curtains.  Larry wanted to keep his practiced eye on you.  I felt sorry for the nurse — in these days of HIPAA, what’s a compassionate nurse to do?  I offered her a helping hand — I  told her to please push back the curtains — that Larry was your family too.

What else is there to say at this point of the story?  But that I love you Daddy.  I hope you get a good night’s rest.  I hope the same for all who love you and us.  Because tomorrow promises to be another long day.  But don’t worry.  We’ll get through this.  We can hold hands through the scary parts.

A Candlelit Path

19 Monday Apr 2010

Posted by in Prayer, Soul Care

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

“Give me a candle of the Spirit, O God,
as I go down into the deep of my own being.
Show me the hidden things.
Take me down to the spring of my life,
and tell me my nature and my name.
Give me freedom to grow so that I may become my true self –
the fulfillment of the seed which you planted in me at my making.
Out of the deep, I cry unto thee, O God.”   Amen
— George Appleton

Sitting on a hard plastic chair that night, in the basement of St. Luke’s Methodist Church, I did not know that I had ‘signed up’ to uncover my true self.    I had no particular interest in that bit of fact-finding.   My purpose was much simpler:  I came to pray.  That’s all.  I came to pray and to meet people who also desired nothing more than to pray.

As with most of everyday life, we get more or less than we bargain for.  In my experience as a student at HeartPaths Spirituality Centre, I received more.   It began that first night, reciting that first printed prayer of George Appleton’s with a few others — a small community of students and two leaders — from the first of many handouts I would come to receive as a student at HeartPaths.

Every HeartPaths session begins by lighting a candle.  The lit candle symbolizes the light of God.   Candlelight shimmers soft and invites confidences.  Never is it harsh and circling like a  penetrating searchlight.   Instead, everyone and everything looks better in candlelight.

Candlelight slows life down.  When traveling by candlelight, we tread carefully.  Not every bump in the road is illuminated.  It requires us to sometimes retrace our steps for a missed turn.  Like life itself, candlelight will not clearly define answers  or destinations.  Yet, candlelight bids us forward into the darkness.  As we step in, questions previously covered by darkness grow into recognizable shapes of answers and if not destinations, that at least rest stops along the way.

I have not arrived at my destination of becoming my true self.   The prayer I recited that first night in class is not yet fully answered.  Paradoxically, the more I know about myself, the more I find there is to know.  Does anyone ever arrive at Xanadu?

Yet, with the help of prayer by candlelight, I do know myself better than I did four years ago.  I’ve uncovered both warts and beauty spots.  And in the topsy-turvy truth of life, traits I once viewed as warts I’ve since come to know as beauty spots — and yes, some of those areas I once called beauty spots I’ve found to be nothing more than worldly warts.   But here, I get ahead of myself, as I am apt to do.

Backing up to the start, I see that self-knowledge (and self-acceptance) is where true growth begins.  And as it happens, along the way, I’ve learned that prayer is no more than being yourself before God.

Fancy that.  Looks like I got exactly what I signed up for.  And more.  In worldly terms, this candlelit path was a true bargain.

Irish Sensibility

17 Saturday Apr 2010

Posted by in In the Garden, Life at Home, Soul Care, The Great Outdoors

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

, , ,

I listen to wet tires whoosh down Walker Avenue.  I hear soft rain piddle its tune upon wet stone.  They are bits of grace,  from a soft Irish rain falling outside my window.

A rain like this always soothes my spirit.  It makes me drowsy.  It makes me long for the comfort of my soft bed.  And even though it’s on the cool side — mid-fifties, I think  —  I’m going to crack my bedside window and cuddle up in warm blankets.

It has been a dry Spring.  The parched dirt must be quenching its thirst with this lovely Irish blessing.  The garden glistens like glass.  Twenty-four hours of straight rain has made my garden happy and plump with wet green.

What is it about a gentle rain that fills me with hope?  It makes me think baptism.  I feel wash cleaned.  Fresh.  The rain makes all things new.  The rain is holy, like that dove that swept down from heaven, all those years ago.

Perhaps a small drop will cure my spider bite scar, that even a week later, is still warm and tender with fever.  Or better yet, maybe it could wipe away Daddy’s pneumonia.  The nurse is worried about “Pappy.”  That’s her name for my father — who in younger days, was a more respectful ‘Mr. Pappas.’

Pappy, indeed.  The nurse says it’s hard for the elderly to bounce back.  Is she trying to prepare me?  Or herself?  I should have told her, if anyone can bounce back, my father can.  Doesn’t that sound just like a child, bragging about what her daddy can do?

Do raindrops taste as good as when I was a child?  Back then, I didn’t care whether I stayed dry or got wet.  Before I ‘got’  better sense, I would turn my small face up to the sky.  Open my mouth.  Wide.   Wider.   And catch raindrops with my tongue.   Sweet success.

I was  a young thirsty flower with no need for doctors or tongue depressors to tell me to say “Ahh.”  I knew good medicine when it hit me in the face.