What I Learned When I Was Dying

Edge of the Conodoguinet Creek, Still Waters Retreat, Carlisle, PA

“Don’t forget, you’re going to die.” – WeCroak.com

I had been keeping an eye on the spot for weeks.  I thought it was a bug bite.  I thought it would go away.  But it didn’t.  Finally, on the first free morning I had, the morning I was set to go on silent retreat, I googled my symptoms and found out I was dying.

Well, I’m not dying (I repeat: NOT DYING), but that morning, based on what I read online, death suddenly seemed like a plausible possibility.  Not only was my symptom a possible sign of something bad, it was a symptom of something very bad.  I called my Dr and made an appointment for the following day.  I called back again and said I’d be more than happy to come in that very day if they happened to have a cancellation. 

Then, with nothing more to do, I left for my scheduled retreat, for six hours of silence and solitude with the news of my own impending death tagging along, an unwelcome, nagging companion. 

//

My husband and I recently learned about an app called WeCroak which sends users a text, five times a day, with a simple reminder, “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”  The text arrives at random intervals (like death) and keeps things simple, clear, and direct.  

My husband learned about it through a counselor, discussing humanity’s fear of death as a source of generalized anxiety.  I heard about it from my Spiritual Director after sharing about my silent retreat.  “These kinds of experiences can help us wake up,” she said.

//

One would think a silent retreat, with death as your companion, would be The. Worst.  But, it wasn’t.

After driving to the tiny house in the woods, I sat in the kitchenette drinking tea.  Surrounded by windows, I watched bees flitting from plant to plant.  Upstairs, later, I rocked in a cushioned chair, reading Richard Foster’s, “Freedom of Simplicity.”  When reading grew tiresome, I stared out another set of windows and watched witless carpenter bees droning in lazy, senseless circles.  I took a nap, half-wrapped in a downy quilt, while the sun shone down on me.  I woke to a stink bug landing too near my face. 

Don’t get me wrong, I was distracted.  I fought back tears from time to time and found it nearly impossible to focus on my original intentions for the day.  I spiraled into moments of worry and anxiety.  

I thought about my kids and what would happen to them if something happened to me.  I want to say my concerns were selfless, but they weren’t.  I mourned my loss of influence in their lives, the things I would not get to see.  I realized, I will not last the test of time.  Which is to say, I will die, and the world will go on without me.   There isn’t really a single thing I can invest in that will last; as Theresa of Avila said in her famous bookmark prayer, “All things are passing away.”

Except, that is, for love.

//

Later in the day, I ate my lunch sitting in an old Adirondack chair near a wide and lazy creek.  The surface of the water hardly seemed to move at all.  If I shifted my focus, I could see long fish swimming loops along the muddy floor.  Dandelions, with heads gone white like old lady’s hair, stood along the edge of the water, bearing witness, I thought, to its passage.

Those dandelions are, I’m sure, gone today.  But the creek remains. 

It seems to me, that love must be something like that stream – constant, slow, enduring, and we are like those fading flowers on the shore.  In which case, the only sane thing to do is cast ourselves, wholeheartedly, into love’s great stream, to become – with heart, soul, and mind – part of the love that never fails. 

//

This is what death told me last week, when I allowed it to draw near via a googled symptom and online self-diagnosis.  Maybe others might learn the same by answering death’s texts five times a day for months on end.  The apostle Paul, who had his own travels with death as a companion, tells us the same, “now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” (I Cor 13:13)

Death’s message was clarifying and simple.  It put my world, which I thought had been tipped on its head, right-side-up again.  It brought my feet closer to solid ground, which is to say, it gave me level footing in the land of acceptance.  

I did not make peace with death over the course of six silent hours spent in the woods on a sunny Wednesday in early May.  I’m not that naive.  But I did catch a glimmer of a gift hiding in death’s hand, enough to make me understand what we lose living in a time and place where death is treated as an inconvenient truth, a reality best avoided at all costs.  

You can read more about the WeCroak App in this article in The Atlantic.  Let me know if you try it out! 

I Die A Hundred Deaths (Halloween and the Grouchy Ladybug)

This post from 2012 is one of my favorites.  The twins were just over a year old, Solomon was four and Sophia was in first grade.  I can't find the pictures that go with that Halloween, they're on an old computer, but the story should suffice.  I hope you enjoy it and find some grace for your own moments of surrender and resurrection.  Happy Halloween!

It’s rainy and cold and we’re all keyed up and worn out from being trapped indoors for two days by Hurricane Sandy.  I wake up late and squeeze in a shower while the twins, still in dirty diapers from the night before, wander around the living room.  Their whining amplifies to full pitch as my shower cues them in to the possibility that I’ll be (gasp!) leaving for the morning.  The preemptive separation anxiety continues through breakfast and packing everyone into the van to take my oldest to school. 

After drop-off I cart the remaining three kids back into the house.  We mull around, waiting anxiously for the babysitter who'll stay with the twins while the four year old and I head to his Halloween party at a local nursing home.   

The twins settle for a few minutes, their anxiety lulled by the fact that I haven’t left yet and simultaneously my son's anxiety about the party rises.  He peppers me with questions, 

“Will there be people from the nursing home in the party?”

“Um, I’m not sure, honey.”

“Will they see me in my costume?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to dress up?”

“No”

“I don’t want to wear a costume.”

I've been dreading this party from moment it was first mentioned, knowing that my son, so robust and cheerful at home, will be shy and clingy in a new place.  Committed to accompanying him, I hired a babysitter for the twins, despite my own teeth-clenching, foot-dragging antagonism toward it all. 

“Solomon,” I say, “what if I wear a costume too?”  I emerge from the back room wearing the fuzzy black antennae from my daughter’s ladybug costume.

“Ok,” he says, brightening, “you can be a black beetle.”

Then, I can feel myself giving in, letting go a little more as the idea strikes and I say, “What if I’m a ladybug?  I can steal Sophia’s costume.”

He approves and I have just enough time to gather the red and black-dotted wings and my camera as the babysitter arrives and the oldest twin dissolves into a raging stream of tears, protesting my impending departure.  I run in circles grabbing things, carrying the littlest one and nearly run out the door with him, before the sitter stops me and grabs him saying, “This one’s staying.”

Then we’re off to a party I don’t want to go to, but also don’t want my son to miss.  We drive through the rain and find his friends in a large room coloring at a table while elderly people in wheelchairs are set in a wide circle around them.  The residents watch, their eyes hungrily absorbing the beauty and innocence, the luxury of so much youth in one small space. 

My son is clingy, shy and tired, overwhelmed by the noise, the crafts, the games and I do my best to get into the spirit of things.  I help with glue and tear bits of tissue paper, I assure another child that it doesn’t matter where he puts the eyes on his pumpkin.  I laugh with the other Moms over the resident who rides in on a wheelchair, pretending to scare the kids with a mask, all the while giving a growing peep show as his robe slides further and further open.  I take a smiling picture with my son, a little Iron Man snuggled up on a ladybug's lap. 

By the time we get home, though, I’m over-stimulated and frustrated at my inability to love Halloween, to love loud parties and candy.  The twins are exhausted and hungry when we walk in and they’re drawn to me like magnets, pressing their tiny bodies onto me in desperation.   

It’s all I can do to untangle myself, causing more tears and desperation, as I head to the kitchen to make lunch.  Solomon is sorting and dumping candy, dancing and singing and blowing the whistle from his party bag and the twins are screaming in their highchairs, desperate to make it clear how deeply my absence has wronged them.   

Then I’m yelling, “Stop it” and throwing an apple-peel all the way across the kitchen til it bounces off of one twin and they both sit staring, shocked into silence and my son, that sweet four year old boy, offers to play his whistle to settle them down.  

//

There are days when being a mother feels like dying a hundred tiny deaths.   A hundred letting-gos, a thousand surrenders to more noise, more movement, more demands than I feel capable of handling. I’m not complaining, I simply want to be honest about the stretch of motherhood and how quickly, how fiercely, I shrink back from it.  

I died a hundred little deaths this morning and will surely die a hundred more before nightfall on this, the day of the dead.  But I know, thank God, that this dying, this surrender, makes me new again.   

I may die a hundred times a day, but I'm just as often made new, reborn in the face of a chubby, gap-toothed grin, a gentle hand seeking mine for reassurance.  Just today I was resurrected by the voice of my son calling cheerfully from the back of the van as we made our way home, “I can’t wait to be old so I can go to the nursing home to live.”

//

Later in the day as I'm making chili for friends who're coming to trick-or-treat with us, as the twins again stand whining at the gate that divides them from me, my Dad calls with the news that my maternal grandmother has died in the nursing home where she's lived for years now in North Carolina.  

Standing over the stove, stirring the chili, I find myself surprisingly grateful.  Grateful that, athough I couldn't be there with her, I was here, at a nursing home with my son, the very same morning.  I think of my Grandmother's life and the many little and big deaths she endured.  I think of the ways I get so focused on what I'm giving up, that I nearly miss what I have right here, right now in front of me.  It occurs to me that I live such a grace-filled life, full of opportunities for surrender, continually pressing me toward the edge.  

//

Dinner is finished, the kids and husband are home and the poor older twin, who just can't pull himself together, sits crying on the floor.  I scoop him up and settle in the rocker and watch as he drifts into a heavy sleep.  I love the moment - the rocking, the sleeping child so sweet.  

Then he lifts his head and looks around, disoriented, before throwing up all over both of us.  Leaning forward, exhausted, he lays his head back on my chest with that pile of warm, smelly goo spread like a layer of glue between us.  I died again in that moment and rose again to hug him tight until my husband came to help us both get cleaned up.  

//

Every day of the dead, every Halloween, gives way to all saints day and I wonder if we too, dying in our little and big ways, aren't also being moved, continually, from death to new life.  This dying is a surrender, a stripping bare by letting-go until all that remains is love.  

 This is the whole gang this year.  Aren't I a lucky Mama?!

Every New Arrival (Lazarus)

 

In mid August I spent some time in a local Behavioral Health Hospital due to the sudden onset of severe panic attacks.  I continue to write about it as a way of processing the experience.

 

Every new arrival receives the same tour – 

here's your room, your room mate.

This is the nurses’ station, the meds window; 

here's the bathroom and shower,

a towel and washcloth, a blanket, 

all bleached white.  

The newest is heavyset, balding, 

with stringy dark hair.  He wears jeans

and hospital-issue paper top, 

the kind they hand out in the ER

when the clothes you wore upon arrival 

were torn or bloodstained. 

He carries the rest of his belongings 

in a brown paper bag tucked under one arm. 

A shower is the first order of business 

for every new arrival, then meds. 

Standing behind him at the window 

I notice the band aids on his wrists.

No one is ready for eye contact 

on their first day, each one jittery 

like a wild animal, trapped and wary. 

But on the day I will be discharged

he shows up in Group and tells us all his name.   

His words come slow like his voice has gotten lost 

somewhere deep within his body, a small sound that fell 

deep into a chasm of fear or pain or despair, but now 

he speaks, sitting at the end of the table, 

every syllable a step toward resurrection.

He is Lazarus, we all are, here in this tomb 

of dying and learning to live again,

and the therapist at the opposite end 

of the table calls us out each by name. 

This post is linked with Playdates With God  and Unforced Rhythms.

Harvest (I want to be home when the combine comes)

Photo Source: HERE.

The neighbor’s dog killed

our kitten.  He’s an old

speckled hunting hound

who hobbles painfully

through a large fenced yard.

Our kids feed him handfuls

of bone shaped biscuits

through the fence

and run back and forth

calling his name. 

The kitten, slender and spry,

climbed the fence, curious,

and the old dog found

youth coursing through his

veins.  It was quick, they said, 
she didn’t comprehend the threat, 
he acted on training and instinct. 

The daycare children who played

nearby watched it all go down.

Crying, they were hurried

inside, to where the classroom bunny

sat safe in its cage. 

We weren’t home at the time. 

Later, when I sat in the grass snacking

with my boys, the neighbor called me

over to break the news.  We stood there

on opposite sides talking for a long time, 
our conversation divided by the fence.

He was apologetic, I was trying to figure

out what to tell the kids. 

“I didn’t think he still had it

in him,” my elderly neighbor observed.

We talked, as usual, about the woman

who owned this house before us - 
born here and died here at the age of ninety-seven -

and about the neighbor's own twin brother, a monk

in his seventies still making plans to teach overseas. 

The cat was handed back

over the fence, stiff and oddly heavy

in a plastic bag.  I put her in a box,

then went to wait for the school bus

to crest the hill, delivering

my happy children back home to me. 

//

The farmer has started cutting down

the dried brown corn that shines golden

when the sun hits just right.  Any day now

the field across the street will be empty

again.  The harvest feels like an inevitable 
end, the cutting down of it all and already 
I feel a sense of anticipatory loss.

I want to be home when the combine comes,

to witness the transformation.  Then 
there will be the long wait of winter
before seeds are sown in the quiet earth
and green shoots break through again. 

This is our sweet Tiger who loved to curl up and nap in my Asparagus fern.

Linking with Jennifer Dukes Lee for #TellHisStory.