Showing up when you can't control the outcome
I sat with a woman as she was dying this week.
First was the Covid-19 screening at the front door.
Wow, this is really happening.
“No sir--no fever, no coughing, no traveling in the past fourteen days.”
Entry permitted.
Five minute walk down winding hallways to the other side of the hospital,
Past two doors to the outside, blocked off so that they could filter all visitors through the same entrance for Covid-19 screening.
I passed many people wearing face masks, something that was so ordinary only a few weeks ago that had now become a societal trigger for anxiety.
I wonder how bad this is going to get.
Shoved down coronavirus anxiety because that wasn’t why I was there.
Found the right elevator, took it nine floors up.
Washed hands for twenty seconds with warm water. Entered room 953.
There was resistance in my chest at first when I saw her, her ninety-year-old body barely taking up half of that huge hospital bed.
Death is just as natural as birth. It doesn’t have to be scary.
I took a deep breath and coaxed myself forward.
I sat down next to her and said hello, called her by name, said it was good to see her,
Though I knew through the morphine that she probably couldn’t see or hear me.
She looked frail, but I smiled when I remembered her crying in her kitchen
When we showed up to sing Christmas carols as a surprise only a few months prior,
And the sound of her lively voice when she joined in.
She had told Peter a few days prior that she wanted to spend her last days with her family close, and she wanted to sing lots of hymns, to read scripture, to pray.
Peter opened the hymnal, and flipped through until we found one we both knew the melody of,
Mostly from the pews of our childhoods.
Most days those songs would have been triggering for me, for they speak of an image of God I don’t believe in like I used to, but this day, they came out even and smooth.
I wasn’t doing it for me. I didn’t need to connect to the songs. I didn’t need them to be ultimate truth.
But they were the songs that Betty wanted to guide her home,
whatever home is, whether it’s Heaven, union with ultimate reality, or nothing.
So Peter and I filled the room with our voices, because it was the best way to honor and love a woman within days of her passing on to that Great Mystery,
It was our way of saying goodbye, and I think I’d always like to say goodbye by singing.
I recently watched the Mr. Rogers movie with Tom Hanks.
I cried through the whole thing.
I can’t really give a list of reasons why.
Maybe because it felt so true.
Maybe because it felt so raw.
Or maybe, because it was just so,
Human.
Honestly human.
The love.
The heartbreak.
The risk.
The anger.
The grief.
The sickness.
The mess.
The family.
The broken relationships.
The laughter.
The humor.
The despair.
The hope.
There is a part in the movie where Mr. Rogers asks a dying man to pray for him. He says,
“Because a dying man going through what he was going through must be very close to God.”
Sitting in that hospital room felt like that. It felt close to God, whatever mystery we try to point to with that loaded word.
Time slowed down, changed dimensions, became hazy in that hospital room, and I don’t know what that means, if it means anything, but the power and mystery of sitting with someone transitioning from life to death was piercing.
I looked out to the hills from the window of that top floor hospital room, toward Pisgah and Black Balsam, mountains and ridge lines I am getting to know better every day as I walk them,
And I thought of all of my loved ones who have already passed on, specifically my grandfather, who passed a few years ago. I brought him into that space, and remembered him in all of his livelihood and humor. I thought about all of the people I had yet to lose, and swore that I would be more present to soak in every second I had left with them. I thought about all the people I have been, and wondered about all of the people I would become, how many years I had before passing on into that Great Mystery as well.
It’s funny how grief and death do that. Bring up everything you’ve been trying to hold down.
Grief brings up more grief.
Death reminds us of the fact that we also are going to die one day,
Sometimes that feels too scary, too much, and that’s okay.
But friends we’ve been dying since the day we were born.
We’ve always been mortal. We’ve never been the gods we make ourselves out to be.
We just find really great ways to distract ourselves,
By making the machine go faster and faster
Believing that there’s no maximum output.
Consume more.
Buy more.
Do more.
Be more.
More.
More.
More.
Until the whole world is told to stay in their houses.
And we realize that the machine isn’t as invincible as we thought.
That we’re still human.
That life is still fragile.
The entire world is experiencing drastic change at the same time.
And like my friends have heard me say a thousand times,
Any change is a form of loss, and loss must be grieved.
A lot of change.
A lot of loss.
A lot of grief.
What are we going to do with all of this grief?
Will we let it turn into fear? Into anger? Will we turn against each other? Hoard and fight to protect ourselves?
Or will we let it guide us back to ourselves, back to our families, back to our neighbors?
Will it remind us that we need and depend on each other to survive?
What life are we going to come back to when all of this is over?
What are we going to change?
How are we going to respond?
Somehow, sitting in that hospital room, looking death right in the face, I didn’t feel despair.
I felt hope, which was the last thing I expected to find in that room.
As we sang songs that people have been coming back to for hundreds of years to ground themselves when they don’t know what to do, or how to prepare, or what to say, I felt solidarity in the humanness of what it means to not know in a world that is addicted to knowing.
It was a way of showing up
To the mystery
Of what it means to go home
Of what it means to live, and love, and to die.
Of what ties us all together,
in our beautiful, fragile, messy, sacred, loving, chaotic humanness.
What is the song you need to come back to?
What is the truth you have forgotten?
What is the hope you have lost sight of?
Where is the meaning to be found?
How is this time going to be your teacher?
Where might you greet God, or love, or friendship in the ordinary and hidden moments of the paradox of being forced into mundane isolation in the midst of this crisis?
Might you hold tenderly those you are able to encounter in your social distancing? Might you reach out to someone you know might feel isolated or alone during this time to help them feel seen and loved? Might you buy a meal for someone who has been unexpectedly cut off from their hourly pay with no compensation?
The existential dread and anxiety and fear people are experiencing right now are real and important to look at. I have felt each of them, and I continue to feel them as they rise up at different times in me as this situation progresses. You are not alone! I know how tempting it is to numb with netflix or video games or Instagram, but I urge you to look reality in the face and sit with the emotions that rise up in you, name them, write them down, dance them out, give them language with guitar strings, draw your emotions, chop firewood, dig a hole, do whatever you need to do so that they aren’t repressed. Repressing these emotions and not dealing with them is where the real monster of this thing will be formed.
I’ve been trying to write this blog post for a week and kept finding distractions.
Brene Brown (DARN YOU BRENE FOR MAKING ME LOOK AT MY FEELINGS YET AGAIN) says on “The Call to Courage” (on Netflix, highly recommend!) that “vulnerability is choosing to show up when you can’t control the outcome.”
This is the point in the video at which I was propelled into finally word vomiting this post. I felt all the feels I needed to feel. I’m not a machine. I’m human. This time is anxiety-stricken. It’s uncertain. It’s confusing. It’s new. There are a lot of emotions going on in all of us, and we’re going to feel them at different times. This me choosing to show up when I can’t control the outcome. I don’t know what life will be like next week, or even tomorrow, but I can show up today. We all can, and we must continue to do so.
Friends,
Who is your neighbor,
And won’t you be mine?