Communion

Writing is a chore; truly. It is like counting calories. You make a pledge to do it every day, and very quickly you fall off the wagon and find yourself in the dust and dirt of some road you didn't even know existed. Straying onto random roads seems to be my life right now.

Yesterday we drove to Birmingham to have lunch with Al's cousin, his wife and daughter.  The very same daughter who lost her husband to cancer last Saturday. A week ago today. Which would all be fine if I knew the daughter, but other than saying "Hi" when we met at one family reunion or another in the last seven years, I am not sure we have ever spoken.

It is a strange feeling sharing a meal with someone you barely know, but it is particularly strange when the other person is in obvious emotional distress. In the southern way she was polite and made us comfortable but I could tell it was not easy. And because I did not know her husband it should have felt even more awkward. Except it didn't.

The daughter was incredibly gracious, asking questions throughout the meal, questions that helped her get to know me, giving me permission to do the same.  In the midst of three other people we focused to this task and a couple of hours later when we got in our car to leave I felt a kinship that was, and is, not really explainable.

I meet people in all kinds of circumstances. Rarely these days do I feel a connection. It is an odd thing but it seems to me that as people get older they close in the walls surrounding their psyche and admit fewer and fewer new players. So meeting this woman and finding her wide open, maybe because of her recent loss, her new grief or her gentle nature, I was surprised. I was even more surprised at my willingness to step in. Because I too am more closed off than I used to be.

I read a book recently by a Canadian author entitled The Impostor Bride. Late in the book two tangential characters, older women who share a grandchild, meet for the first time. They fall into polite talk but at one point one says to the other "What were you like when you were a girl?" and a dialogue opens. Later, in thinking back over the exchange, one of the two muses about how surprised she was by the connection. She knows she is loved, but very few people really care who she is or what she thinks anymore, and certainly she didn't expect to meet someone new who would care.  But here it was; a surprise. That is how I felt yesterday. Not only by the other's genuine interest, but by my genuine response.

I wonder if in the presence of grief, or any raw emotion, it is easier to cut through the societal boundaries to real discourse. If at those times we recognize, or admit, the unseen in the form of a stranger who genuinely cares. Because my caring was genuine; that my caring was welcome was what I found surprising.

I believe I am someone who is comfortable with death, and perhaps that is unusual. My grandparents were all dead and buried before I was born; I wasn't around older people until I went to nursing school and was confronted with elderly patients. That was short lived because my subsequent work as a nurse, and as an art teacher, centered around women and children and families. It was where my wounding occurred and thus it would be where my healing would commence. I did not recognize that at the time but certainly at some unconscious level I was seeking a safe, somewhat remote, place to nurture myself.

Not many people die in the areas I chose to work but occasionally, as a NICU nurse, I would deal with the death of an infant and thus the emotions of the bereft parents. Those instances were few and brief however; the deaths were often expected and the parents were often absent. The process of saving some and loosing other sick infants awakened me to the randomness of life and death. It was this awareness that helped me cope when I was confronted with my mother's death at the age of thirty-eight, a year older than the current age of my eldest son, and the passing of my father a year and a half later.

It was in the presence of my father that I had my first experience of not just death, but dying.  He was an alcoholic, a veteran of three wars, and courted death throughout his life. But it wasn't until my mother unexpectedly passed away that my father seriously begin moving toward his own demise, as only an alcoholic can do. It took him a year and a half. We had moved to West Point the summer before the winter of my mother's passing so I wasn't present for much of that time, nor was I aware of how lost he had become; the short visits home after my mother died did not allow much of a window into his intent.

A year and some months after we lost my mother, as we were on the road moving back to Augusta, I was tracked down by a sibling asking for my consent to a DNR for my just hospitalized father. Do not resuscitate. The joy of moving back 'home', which was Augusta, where not only had I lived for five years but where my parents and two of my siblings resided, was quickly extinguished.

My father did not die immediately, the call came in July and he died on September tenth, twenty-three years ago this past week.  That summer was horrendous; moving into a new house, transferring children into new schools once again, daily visits to the VA hospital, all contributed to a sense of displacement. There were times when he recognized me and times when he didn't. Times when he was kind and times when he was incredibly cruel. There were moments of hope that he would recover enough to return home and the moment when we knew that was no longer possible. And then there was the movement to a nursing home and, one week later, the call informing us that he was on his way back to the hospital in an ambulance.

Three of his four children gathered at the hospital that morning and stood by his bedside as he struggled to breathe. My father was a son of a bitch, a brutal abusive alcoholic much of our growing up years, but he was still my father and I had to play this out.  I had been at many births in my years as a nurse, and I am now aware how that work formed my thinking about death. We do not come into the world alone and I was determined my father would not go out alone. I stayed by his side as he drew his last breath.

Later I would have the honor of helping my father-in-law, a kinder man, as he lay dying. I was able to use my nursing to ease his pain and open the passage to his death.  My mother-in-law died seven years later and I was with her almost to the end, singing hymns as we waited for her son, by then my ex-husband, to return from out of town. But it was my older brother who taught me the most about dying.

Three years ago my brother Michael died shortly after his sixty-second birthday. He was only two and a half years older but he was my big brother in every sense of the word and deserves a whole post to do justice to the relationship we shared. But it was in his last few months that he was most excellent. Having recovered from throat cancer only two years earlier, his thoughts about living and dying were greatly formed by the time he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and he was generous in sharing them with anyone who cared to hear.

A month before Michael died I was able to visit him in Texas where he lived. Unlike previous visits we didn't do much, although at that time he was still trying to live so we walked a little and even went to a movie; but he was coming to terms with his death and he shared a lot of his thoughts. It was a mystical time for me and returning home I felt a sense of peace. Still, when I got the call telling me the end was near, I hopped a plane and returned to Texas.

Michael, thinking he had more time, had asked me to return after giving my other brother and sister a chance to visit. He asked it in person as I departed from my previous visit and on the phone a week before he died. When I arrived at his home at three in the morning I was not sure what to expect but was certain it was the right place to be.

My brother died that evening after a pain filled day. Hospice failed him. We were all very distressed by that failure. But when the help finally came, and he was at last able to rest, he died within moments. And I was able to be there with him and for him. And for me.

Being in the presence of death, of a human dying to this physical reality, is an experience of sadness but also of wonder and awe. And because I have been able to do that I think I was able to be with this new widow, a relative stranger, in her fresh, raw, grief. I don't know what that means for any future relationship but I know we connected on the physical plane we found ourselves yesterday, and that we held each other in love and regard. It was a wonder-filled experience and one for which I will always be thankful.

Life is a miracle. Death is something onto itself. I am sure it is part of the life experience and that if we shy away from it, remain afraid of death, we are missing out on some aspect of living that makes us fully human. After all, life may be about many things but most importantly shouldn't it be about becoming human? Within the human community? Communion is what I think about when I think about death; a communion of saints, a communion of angels, a communion of brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren. Communion in its purest form.  And if we fail to enter into communion with death I am not sure we are ever fully alive.

Life is a gift we are often told. It was in the presence of my brother as he died three years ago and, again yesterday, with my husband's cousin's daughter and her grief, that I was reminded of that truth.