July 9, Thursday - Lesson #2

A rocky monster in Bomarzo Park, Italy, photo by Robert Fogliardi (click on picture to enlarge)

There are in life many things over which we have no control. In fact that might be the first big lesson that most of us need to learn. There are also some things in life, over which we are the only one who has any control. This may certainly be the second big life lesson. We all have our tendencies to either try to control everything or refuse to take control over anything. For much of my life I have been one of the former types, totally exhausted most of the time from trying to keep everything together. Believe me it's hard and most importantly, it doesn't work. One thing I have noticed from talking with my friends, control is a pretty common addiction

More than any other situation, being the mom of a son with mental health and addiction problems has taught me the lesson of letting go, not once but over and over again. I cannot ensure that he has a safe place to live, adequate food, or even that he does not kill himself in the process of satisfying his addictions. There is no bottom line, absolutely nothing to hang onto. Anything could happen and much of that anything has already happened.

I was first aware of his drug problems when he was twelve. He's now nearly forty. I could not even begin to tell the story of what he has been through. Note I did not say what "we" have been through. That's progress. He has been through scores of treatment programs, hospitals, jails and violent, horrific situations on the street. When he was younger, I felt as crazy as he was most of the time. As he got older, very gradually, I was able to create some space between us, to extricate myself from the craziness some of the time. I never stopped loving him. I just started noticing that nothing I did to help ever made any difference. It is a humbling experience not to be able to help your child. But by the time he was thirty-five I pretty much had it figured out and had my control impulse under control. Have you ever noticed that someone up there seems to be watching these things, so that as soon as you have one life lesson under your belt you get sent a package marked "Lesson #2"?

Lesson #2 in this case came in the adorable package of a baby boy. In other words my son who was barely able to navigate the world on his own, now has a child. This means of course that his decisions, however misguided, now affect not only him, they directly affect a little boy. When the baby was born, I rallied to help with essential needs. Now a year and a half later, they live one step from the street. I want my son to get a job and take care of his child. But I know this may not happen.

On Monday I am leaving for Minnesota to visit them. Since my "fix-it" mode of control is not totally dormant at this point, I started to think of ways I could help the situation. I spoke with my son about the possibility of his entering a treatment program to start the process of being a responsible dad. He didn't say no. So I made an appointment for an intake assessment at a facility that specializes in the treatment of mental illness complicated by drug addiction.

For a couple of days I went around congratulating myself for being a helpful mom and grandma. But that didn't last. Today my son called to tell me that he is not going to the appointment because he has been through a million treatment programs and what he really needs is a job, not a program. I tried to explain that he can't get or hold a job given his present state of addiction. He thinks other people won't notice. As we talked, I felt the old lesson come back. It is time to back off and stop trying so hard to control something over which I have no control. I could probably talk him into going to the assessment interview. But as soon as his addiction is confronted in the program he will be out of there. I'm pretty sure that this little dream of things getting better for my son and grandson is not going to happen in this way.

Letting go is hard, but not as hard as it used to be. Part of the difference is my maturity, a euphemism for aging. But also some of the difference is a benefit of my spiritual practice, especially silent meditation. Sitting in meditation, and continually letting go of thoughts as they arise is good practice for letting go in real life. Maybe that's why they call it "practice". Letting go of my plan to help seems easier than it used to be. I still have an ache in my heart, still a glimmer of hope that something good may come of this. But I am very clear that what I need to do now is to "let go, and let God" as they say in Twelve-Step teachings.

I came upon some appropriate words of wisdom in a little book that I have been reading over the last few weeks. Notes From the Song of Life by Tolbert McCarroll is a book of thirty short lessons. These lessons are meant to be read and contemplated one a day for a month. A few days ago the lesson was entitled "Detachment". So I went back today to reread it. Sure enough, the shoe fits:

To detach from your preoccupations is to have faith in the life process and to know that you are a part of it. Through detachment you do not forsake people and your environment. Detachment is a means of connecting with them at a deeper level. For it is not people or things that distract you, but your desires. It is from these desires that you must learn to detach.
Desires are like demons. There are many demons, each with his own name and characteristics. Some are called respectability, security, superiority, control, recognition, stubbornness; all creatures from the hell of self-centeredness. These are the demons that separate you from people and life.

When I go for my visit to Minnesota next week I trust that there will be one less demon separating me from my son, my grandson and our life together for that time. All the problems will still be there. But I will try to be there too. That may be the best gift I can give them both.

June 1, Monday

1952 Dad and me

Four months ago I retired from my job as a home health nurse. I had been nursing for 25 years ever since my youngest child started to school. Nursing was an amazing opportunity for service. At the same time, for me anyway, it was very stressful. It's only now after stopping for a while that I can see how stressed I was. One of the consequences of stressful work in the world is that significant inner work piles up unattended. Being a mom of three and working as a nurse made my life so full that there was no time to process much of anything. Now in the relative quiet of my life in the woods there is time to look deeply at those places where I had only peeked before.

So in the last few days I've decided to start out with one of the big ones and take a look at death. This was triggered by the fact that last Sunday was the 35th anniversary of my father's death. Every year I remember those last days of his life. He was 70. It was 1974 and I was 28 years old, a mother of two four year olds and a five year old. I lived with my husband and kids in a clapboard house in rural Mississippi with no laundry or even potable water. My husband taught at Tougaloo College and I volunteered to register rural voters for the Mississippi Freedom Democrats Party. I thought we were helping to save the world or something like that. It was all-consuming.

One day I got a call from my mom saying that Dad was very ill and in the hospital. She wanted me to come home right away. So I went. They had just moved from Minneapolis where I grew up to a small town in Northern Minnesota where Dad planned to fish for the rest of his life. He went to the hospital for a routine cardiac procedure. The admission chest x-ray showed a spot on his lung which they identified as cancer. On Dad's 70th birthday, May 21st they performed surgery to remove part of his lung but found massive caner through out his thorax and closed him up without removing anything. Ten days later he died on May 31st, 1974.

The ten days that Dad was in the hospital were crazy. Mostly I was crazy. I need to preface this part of the story by saying that, as an only child I was unusually close to my father. He was my source of absolute unconditional love. I thought he was all-powerful and all-knowing and all-wise. Kind of like the standard version of God. This adoration continued right up until my marriage. At 28 when I was called back home these feelings were barely below the surface.

I remember years earlier my grandfather died and our huge extended family sat in the hospital waiting room. I was 15, yet in front of my all my aunts and uncles and cousins I sat on my dad's lap and cried, "Don't ever leave me!" The fear of losing my father was deep. I quickly buried the fear and never looked at it again until he died. Even then I barely peeked at it; I was on the run.

At this point I've had quite a lot of experience with death as a nurse and EMT, even working in hospice for 3 years. I've read many books of the apparently required reading list on death and dying, taken a 5 day workshop with death guru Elizabeth Kubler Ross and nearly completed an MA in grief counseling. I know we all handle the death of our people differently, but when my dad was dying I was pretty much of a mess. In the hospital I sat with him day and night until they asked me to leave. I was hostile to the hospital staff, plainly they were not doing their job of making him better. I sat by his bed and cried which must have made him fell terrible since he never wanted to see me hurt. Even though I was not a religious person, I tried praying over him, saying the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm plaintively. I made pilgrimages to the hospital chapel to plead and bargain with God to save my dad. Nothing worked. When he finally died I remember feeling totally defeated. Mom and I stuffed his clothes into a paper sack and left the hospital in a daze.

Over the years the memories of my dad both living and dying have faded some. Mom and I had 30 more years together - time enough to evolve into friends before she died at age 88. I did better with her death. Again it happened quickly with eight days of vigil in the hospital. We had a hospice room. I played soft music, did as many of her personal cares as I could, talked with her gently and let her go. I could see that she was ready and at peace. We had done our work as much as possible.

As Jim and I age I realize we have a lot of work to do to get to the point of welcoming our own and each other's deaths - not in a morbid sense, but in a sense of being complete with this life. I'm not planning on either of us dying anytime soon but I also don't want to close the door to that possibility because closing the door to that possibility puts a big lid on the possibilities of living. Fear does that. The possibilities of death are all around; the possibilities of life are also everywhere and plenty, and they are related.

There is a song that keeps coming to me by the Arkansas Benedictine nun, Macrina Wiederkehr in her book Seven Sacred Pauses:

Put everything in order
as day begins to fade.
All things are passing,
moment to moment,
breath by breath.
All things are passing,
moment by moment,
birth to death.
Take off that cloak of fear,
the divine strength you seek is here,
and you know you are dying to live,
you know you are dying to live.
So put everything in order as day begins to fade.

The words in this song that really get to me are :"And know you are dying to live." Macrina must see these as important too because she repeats them, "...and you know you are dying to live."

I can see that I have made some progress over the years in my acceptance of death. But you know, it feels like there is a big piece that hasn't been looked at or faced. There is a significant Buddhist practice that I have so far managed to avoid. Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn gives us an explanation of this meditation:

The Buddhist Sutra of Mindfulness speaks about the meditation on the corpse: meditate on the decomposition of the body, how the body bloats and turns violet, how it is eaten by worms until only bits of blood and flesh still cling to the bones, meditate up to the point where only white bones remain, which in turn are slowly worn away and turn into dust. Meditate like that, knowing that your own body will undergo the same process. Meditate on the corpse until you are calm and at peace, until your mind and heart are light and tranquil and a smile appears on your face. Thus, by overcoming revulsion and fear, life will be seen as infinitely precious, every second of it worth living.

Granted at first or second glance this is not an appealing practice. I have to admit that I have avoided it for years. It always seemed too macabre. Of course the whole point is not to make yourself miserable but to release yourself from the fear, to let yourself finally live. And "you know you are dying to live."

God, or the Universe, if you prefer, has already helped me accept my death by giving me gradual loses to observe - the keenness of my eyesight, the sharpness of my memory, the swiftness of my gait have all gradually diminished. It's hard to deny, although we all try. What kindness! Helping me to see that this body, mind and personality are impermanent, easing me along. Perhaps now I am ready for the corpse meditation. I have hundreds of oak, hickory and walnut teachers and the perfect place to decay right here in the woods. Perhaps someday soon I will post a blog piece on the progress of my decay complete with photos.