SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL

Posted on April 15, 2012 by Amy Getter

balancing actDo days sometimes just blur together into a big grey mess?  I was looking at my niece’s note on Facebook, her feeling of juggling so many colorful balls at once while riding a unicycle and the knowledge of how fragile the balance is, how easily all the motions become uncontrollable and all the things we thought we were managing become unmanageable.  None of this life seems to respond to our desperate desire for balance and control.  We all talk about it, quoting phrases like “just roll with the punches”; “don’t sweat the small stuff”; “when one door closes, another opens”; “just let go”; and my personal favorite: “get your act together”!  This seems to be my self-talk when things look like they are dissolving into a gelatinous mess.  (As though I personally can make life a perfectly molded aspic with the right design, color, flavor and finish!)

I came across this quote recently; for some people who don’t get to observe the dying process on an almost daily basis, they may think it has some merit.  “Death is an inevitable cycle. But sickness before death is a symptom of resistance. Most people think they’ve got to get sick to die. But, you could be like the cat who chooses to get run over. Or, you could just lie down in your bed happily one night, so content and thoughtless, wanting nothing in this physical world; and just reemerge into Pure Positive Energy… You can play it out any way you choose.” (Abraham-Hicks publications)

Wow, I said to myself, and you thought YOU had control issues.

We are ultimately NOT  SO in control of our dying as we come to the end of our existence.  (Perhaps  we possess the power to control our response to the uncontrollable.) Many wise people have made reference to this ability of ours as human beings in the midst of disasters great and small, to control our response to life.   But in charge of how it all ends? I don’t think so.  I just recently was a witness to the unbearable unhappiness of a man who was losing control of his decision making ability along with his strength to get out of bed, and the perplexity and confusion as he entered his last 3 days of living were beyond the ability of himself or the medications or his medical team or his family’s love and concern, to manage.  He was not the first, nor will he likely be the last, patient that I frantically try to keep on top of the wall, but like Humpty Dumpty, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men….some things cannot be put together again.

Another very sentient and peaceful patient who was awaiting her death, knowing it was close yet unable to hasten the timing, told me how tired she was, and how much she wanted this to be over.  (She really wanted to lay down in her bed happily and not wake up the next day.) I have heard this many times, in many ways.  Do we think we can actually control life and ultimately our dying, or is it one of the most profound yet simple truths of our existence? … that we are not in charge.   Yet, I could argue, those times that someone absolutely willed themselves to go, in the inexplicable way that a dying person says a few phenomenal last words, or a long-gone relative arrives at the bedside to hold a hand, just as the last breathes are taken.  These things I cannot explain. (Oh, sweet mystery of life!)  I am forever awed by these life and death moments, and all our moments leading up to this, the right now of our existence, not for me to control, but to respond to… To live this life fully, to the last.

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NO WHINING

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Amy Getter

old woman on cutchesI’ve transformed into a whiner recently. In a wash of self pity, I rubbed the side of my head, hard-hit as I had reached for my cane which had fallen beneath the kitchen table. I was obediently performing my hated left knee strengthening exercises that the evil physical therapist, nicknamed Daemon, and his co-conspirator Maleficent, (who possesses the same level of sympathy as that famed wicked fairy from Grimm’s tales) had together devised for my “speedy” recovery.

I’d grouched at the only person within hearing range earlier as I plopped down on the chair to elevate the nasty appendage.  These same legs that carry me hither and yon, with never much gratitude from me, have disappointed me considerably this past month.  I’m reminded of the time I unintentionally stapled my thumb; followed with a period of perpetual awkwardness as I tried getting things done with my right hand without the use of said thumb. Who knew how difficult it is to do practically anything without a usable opposing digit?  Moments like this bring me to a heightened awareness of how much I expect things to work, how accustomed I am to good health and busy days, (mostly taking it all for granted), and what a whiner I become when my norm is interrupted!

I visited Charlotte this week.  She has a bum right knee, but unlike my left knee, her’s is not going to respond to therapy, nor is it going to get stronger or less painful.  She has not only a serious, inoperable injury but also severe osteoarthritis, in addition to a terminal illness with significant pain which in spite of numerous trials of medications has become her constant companion.   Charlotte has been a very active woman all her life; she now spends her waking hours in a recliner and requires help to do nearly everything in her day.  I set her TV tray up for lunch, and we chatted a while.  Although her life is waning, and her long days of forced inactivity loom ahead with only weeks left for her, I have never heard her whine.  I’m recollecting all our visits, even when pain overshadowed the opportunity to converse much; Charlotte is at times subdued, but never a whiner.  I have a brief thought- what the heck would I be like long-term if my partial immobility and intermittent pain became my norm?

Nurses talk about what happens when symptoms become constant, and personality traits develop and become heightened accompanying chronic illness.  We have labels for certain disease processes, and are aware of some commonality among patients.  But this week, I was reminded how individual we all are, and how our experiences, though similar, carry our own unique responses.  The same day I sat with Charlotte, I also visited Paul.  He, like her, is living with chronic disability and pain, now in the late stages of his disease with likely a few weeks left at most.

They are racing to the same finish line, neck in neck.

He complains bitterly about the things he can no longer do for himself, and how cruel life is to hand him this blow. (Dying.)  He has lived with a chronic illness over 40 years, but is much younger than Charlotte, and feels cheated in life.  The old adage, a glass half full, applies to Paul.  Both have chronic pain, have daily losses to deal with, an awareness that life is ebbing and a need to come to terms with that reality.

The similarity stops there.

The difference in their one-room worlds is like Alice going through the looking-glass; nothing is at all what it seems.

What a puzzle it is to me, to see how different people respond to their life and the daily choices made, that we all make- our own response to life.

Sitting here with my leg elevated at the end of my day, having done my RICE routine (rest, ice, compression and elevation), I contemplate my earlier visits.  There is a baby- blue sky outside with hummingbirds fiercely fighting over the feeder on my porch and providing me instant entertainment.

I shake myself a little, and say aloud to myself, “Stop your whining!” I want to spend my days, not complaining, but eagerly anticipating what the day holds, and thrilled to be experiencing life, with its inconsistencies and burdens and little joys and ecstasies and small problems and sometimes huge trials.

 And every day I want to remind myself of Mary Oliver’s

“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished. 
 Tell about it.”       

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ADVENT OF SPRING

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Amy Getter

dying doctorOver the years, I have worked with many intelligent and incredibly competent physicians that have earned my respect and certainly the respect and trust of those who were their care recipients. In the past decade, I have cared for only a few hospice patients who were physicians themselves.  I think it must be both humbling and difficult to be the one receiving care and medical attention when your role was always the “director” of the medical team.

Perhaps that is why it was such a lovely complement from my physician-patient to hear him say “The team has made this whole experience so much better, I couldn’t do this without you all”. This from the man, that I recall, had resisted hospice services for many months, even with a rapidly deteriorating terminal diagnosis.  His agreement to enlist in hospice was only conceded if able to keep us very peripheral, and because close friends and colleagues essentially “twisted his arm”.   But slowly, the team was proving worthwhile.  At this last visit, I had made a rather simple recommendation, one that hospice nurses would find fairly ordinary, we both laughed when he said, “See, that is just what I mean.  I would never have known to tell my patient that.  This is why doctors aren’t hospice nurses!”

I am humbled by his praise, and by his acceptance of the hand he was dealt.  Having been the physician who studied and cared for every kind of pulmonary disease and disorder, he himself is dying from slow paralysis of his respiratory function, incrementally losing his ability to breathe, and one day in the near future his lungs will stop functioning altogether.   But every day, he is making the huge effort to get out of bed, into a wheelchair that supports his now immobile limbs, and keep his mind actively learning.  He tells me that life will have nothing left for him when he is no longer able to use his voice activated computer and read, communicate and learn.

He whispers in response to my remark about springtime arriving, “I never expected to make it to spring. Six months ago my doctor thought maybe two months.  It’s like every day is a gift.  You know, as a physician, I used to think it was bunk when people talked about knowing when their time came to die.  Now that it is happening to me, I know my time is almost up.”  Then in a pensive tone, “I haven’t done everything in my life as well as I could have, but I did my best.  I have enjoyed life…I still have a lot of joy in life.”

Stripped now of what has been years of an identity so difficult to release, he has learned, like we all must someday, the art of letting go.  Rich and poor, wise and foolish, esteemed and scorned, we will all face this same realization: Naked we come…naked we will return.  I have the hope that I could be as gracious as he.

Phrases come to my mind describing this man:  acquiescence when faced with the inevitable;  humility amid great accomplishment;  grace in spite of deprivation; and mastering the art of treasuring what is available today.

Recognizing that this spring day truly is a gift.

Thank you for sharing that gift with me.

…..and I think of each life as a flower, as common

as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,

tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.

(from When Death Comes by Mary Oliver)

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THE SOUND OF AN EMPTY HOUSE

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Amy Getter

lonely house

Someone mentioned today, how difficult it is to be left behind when the person you loved and cared for is gone- “the sound of an empty house”.  I thought back to a time when I was a newly single mom, a number of years ago, remembering a conversation with my oldest son sitting on the stairs with me.  He was the first one to leave the nest, and it was the summer before his first year of college.  We were having one of those rare moments that should be treasured with a teenage boy, just like two friends hanging out together.

He looked at me, and asked “Mom, are you lonely?”  I responded, “Not so much lonely, but sometimes I feel alone”.  (Sounds like picking at semantics, but it’s actually very different to be lonely, and feel isolated and unloved, versus alone; the definition of lonely being desolate, not frequented by human beings, destitute of sympathetic companionship.)  So many people loved me and I knew this, it was something I often suffered guilt over, since I wasn’t forgotten and actually rarely had “alone time”- how could I possibly feel separate or alone?   But I felt it; alone sometimes at work; alone running my kids to their many activities; alone in the midst of the grocery store pushing my cart down the aisle and trying to avoid people’s gaze; alone in my loss.  I felt marked.  I felt different.  I felt like all humanity, when a loss visits us in this life.

There were occasional weekends, when the kids were invited to friends’ houses for sleepovers, and I actually was alone.  I remember feeling the quiet like a heavy blanket over me, and sometimes I would wander past their bedrooms and feel a physical pang, knowing someday they wouldn’t live in this house.

I know the loss of a loved one.  My life is busy, and there are many wonderful people that fill my thoughts and days.  But I still wish sometimes I could just pick up the phone and call my mom, who has been dead for eight years now.  Once in a while I am reminded of what it is like to be alone; to find yourself, in the midst of a busy life, listening to the sounds of an empty house.

What does it sound like, an empty house? I think of the faint creaks, the hum of the appliances, the occasional beep of an electronic sound and it all reverberates on empty walls and empty halls.  There is sometimes that occasional twinge of fear, when something bumps against an outside door, or the wind blows the lid off the trash can.

Our needs and fears are not as unique as we think.  Our experience is unique; I feel the loss of my mother in a unique way.  I share with others who have lost someone dear in their life; I know those moments of overwhelming sadness, the zinger pain that comes out of nowhere, and surprises with its depth of anguish, the sense of emptiness, aloneness.

I think of the comfort that we are able to extend to each other, as humans sharing the experience of grief; many different losses but a companionship in mourning….. And I remember my closest friend and sisters listening to many one-sided conversations as I processed my own grief…..sharing, listening, the simple comfort of a human hug.

The sound of an empty house…..lessened if we are able to welcome others in.

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A MONSTER IN THE CLOSET

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Amy Getter

Mmonster in the closetary and I sat quietly together, talking about her dying.  Light increases her headaches, so she lays in a dark room most of the day.  She is rather pragmatic, facing her death many years before she ever expected with frequent stark remarks like “I don’t have anything left to do now except die” and “This is the first time I’ve ever been dying”.  She has said that there really isn’t any big thing left on her “bucket list”.  I asked her what did she need today?  Her answer…..“More time”.

No surprise to me, I actually thought those exact words as I asked the question and she paused a brief moment. More time… I feel the same, she is too young. I would be asking that question “Why?” … some people get 90 years.  So arbitrary, it seems.

Then she asked a question that is always hard to hear, and even harder sometimes to answer.  “Am I getting close, then?”

As we sat, Mary shared a new sensation and asked me what I thought.  She described a feeling of running as fast as she could, not aimlessly, but also not certain of her direction.  And something behind chasing her… certain a huge monster was chasing her.  No matter how fast she ran, it was behind her.  “Sounds scary”, I said.

“Yes, scary.”

When I was a little girl, my younger sister and I shared a room.  With six children, there was always sharing involved.  Your bathroom, lunch, clothes, toothbrush and even gently chewed gum was shared (I know that sounds gross, but if there was flavor left in the gum, this was announced and someone always wanted it).  The room sharing was a significant part of my childhood.  Then the older girls left home and the three of us still living at home had our very own rooms.  But my younger sister spent most nights in my room anyway.  We used to say she was a scaredy-cat.  I was thinking of this little sister the other day, the one who had great fear of the closet door being left open at night.  Just like in Monsters, Inc….that closet, we all know, is where the scary things live in the dark, but if the closet door is shut they can’t get out.  We ALWAYS closed the closet door tightly before jumping into bed (you jump so that nothing can grab you from UNDER the bed, because once you are in the bed it is SAFE!)

Some things are the same, no matter how many years we live.  Our fears might take a different name, but “as I lay me down to sleep…if I should die before I wake…” that is a fear we carry with us in some unnamed place, that we try to ignore- but all of us will have to face someday.

Mary knows the scary thing is out of the closet.  She is so brave, in her fear, to look back and see the monster chasing her.  One of these days, fairly soon, she will stop running.  I can visualize her throwing off the covers, bravely putting her two feet on the floor, throwing open the closet door, and like Lucy in the Narnia tales, walking through the wardrobe.  I think she will find something truly awesome waiting for her.

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NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION

Posted on January 7, 2012 by Amy Getter

disposaphobia

A man lay dying in his living room.

His spouse of 30 years was the other sole occupant of an upstairs apartment.  She was exhausted and I asked about sharing the care giving with the young adult children that lived in the area, or friends who continually offered to help.

Jan explained to me that it was hard to ask someone into this scenario, and she waved a hand across the room; including the messiness of a leftover holiday season, the disarray of laundry piled in the corner, and the emaciated, unresponsive (but for an occasional gasp or groan) man who lay in the middle of the room, with the pervading smell of death in the air.

I asked if there were relationships left in his life that he was hanging on for, some goodbye not yet spoken or some other “unfinished business”.   Jan began to tell me their family’s story.  They had married young, and had children in the first twelve years that remembered the “good years”.  Those years were filled with hard times and hard work but also togetherness and shared goals and treasured times.  That was before the drinking.

 She explained that the next 17 years were a spiral into alcoholism.  She had been the one who had the steady job and held things together when he lost one after another battle during the rollercoaster ride of clean and sober, then back into the clutches of the bottle.  There was always the desire to fix the broken things in his life, but Jan explained that her husband never had the ability to stay on the path….. until he heard his diagnosis and was told he had months to live, if he was lucky.

“Strange, sometimes, what it takes in life for a wake-up call,” Jan remarked.

He began to earnestly change.  Over the next 8 months, he listened to what his family needed to say to him, and they in turn knew their remaining time together was too short to spend with excessive effort in recriminations or regrets.  They planned some trips together.  They gathered for family meals.  The sons heard their dad’s voice say “ I’m sorry, I love you” and it soothed hurts from years before.  Jan said they spent the time given to them each day making new memories, and not trying to sort through too much of the past.  And she said a most remarkable thing.  “His dying has taught more than you can imagine to all of us.  We wouldn’t trade this experience for anything.  So, yes, I will be glad when this is over.  But I am so thankful.  We all learned to live in the now, and not waste any more time. ”

His goal had been to live through Christmas.  That goal accomplished, some of his last spoken words were, “I want to see the new year”.

New Year’s Day arrived, and he was imminently dying.  On this day of making resolutions and setting goals, somehow, it seemed to me, his life these past 8 months had actually been his new year’s resolution.  Everyone who touched it was reminded to make the time count, forgive the past, and look forward to these moments shared together now.

People usually fail when they are on the verge of success.

So give as much care to the end as to the beginning;

Then there will be no failure.                                                                                                          

The Tao

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WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW, IS LOVE…

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Amy Getter

auschwitzAt times, I am caught off guard by a word or a gesture.  Today, a group of numbers stunned me for a long moment.  I cradled Sara’s arm while I took her blood pressure, and saw the blue-black tattoo along her forearm.  Not the artistic tattoos so many are fond of these days; just a row of numbers, depicting her identity those many years ago when she was a young woman, stripped of everything, including her name.  Just a row of …numbers…

We never fully know someone’s story.  The description of “holocaust survivor” immediately generates the mental pictures of prisoners behind barbed-wire and watchtowers, with their emaciated limbs, shaven heads and striped bodies that we have seen in the movies; safely remote from our daily existence.

This is not a movie, but Sara- a flesh and blood person, with the stamp of oppression and hatred that brings shame to the word human.  Another human being placed this stamp on her arm.  This sweet faced elderly woman, a survivor, carries the mark and memories of experiences I will never have, thank God…but a reminder for us all.

Our shared annals of history tell the human story of hating others’ religious views, skin color, cultural differences, tribal affiliations, and the list goes on.  According to some statistics, somewhere between 160 and 200 million people died in the last century from oppression, wars and genocide.

We light up lovely signs with words like Peace and Love this time of year.  Have we learned these lessons? Not just an ethereal view of peace, but truly loving and accepting of each other?

Some learn. In the words of Viktor Frankl, he describes what the basest and most inhuman experiences taught him during WWII:

“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – THAT LOVE IS THE ULTIMATE AND THE HIGHEST GOAL TO WHICH MAN CAN ASPIRE. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way  – an honorable way  – in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory….”*


My hope for all of us, as we come to the close of yet another year, is this: to lose ourselves gazing at glory, to know Love that surpasses understanding, and to share peace together.

Blessings from Amy

*from: Frankl, Viktor E., Man’s Search for Meaning, Washington Square Press, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1963.

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A THIN PLACE

Posted on November 22, 2011 by Amy Getter

a thin place In the Celtic tradition, a thin place is the meeting of something spiritual with our earthly time, a glimpse of the divine…Heaven and earth kiss each other.  Where two worlds intermingle, something happens; inexplicable, sacred and people describe a sense of “walking on holy ground”.

For those who sit with a dying person, these thin places often occur at the bedside.  In spite of how a person describes their own spiritual practice, or even an absence of such, I have been a witness as they visited the thin places. 

I sat listening to Howard, seeing the look in his eyes, feeling the pervading sense of other-worldliness in the room, as he described his grandmother’s visits.  He’d had several, with her black skirts swirling in the hallway like a hologram in some Hollywood version of Wuthering Heights- that was a thin place.

Bill had many months on hospice with a loving family that hated to see him go. He’d spent Thanksgiving shortly before his death surrounded by his children and grandchildren.  When the time came for a hospital bed, he’d had it placed right in the middle of the living room where the wall of windows looked out over the Sound.  In Bill’s final moments, the sun slipped behind the horizon with a burst of bright golden light and an eagle flew overhead- another thin place.

Harold had built his home with his own hands.  The furniture in his bedroom had been lovingly crafted, sanded and rubbed by this master craftsman.  An avid fisherman, even his fishing rods had the mark of his talented hands. As I remarked to him, the pleasure these surroundings must bring him, Harold said pensively, “I have bigger fish to fry”…  In search of a thin place.

Jeanette was a devout Catholic all her life.  We were distressed at her look of terror as the family and I spoke of the changes taking place, and she expressed the necessity to live, even for a few more weeks, when we all knew she had but a few days at most.  With a furrowed brow and twisting hands she told us she needed to be a better person before she died. Her faith seemed lost in her need to avoid the end of this existence, and the fear of what lay ahead. Her daughter and I were observers the afternoon Jeanette found a thin place, and saw the transcendent expression on her face as she whispered to us that love was all around and her face relaxed with a peaceful, wistful smile that remained even after her last breathes were taken.

I know I am one among many, to have rested in the gazebo at the park, a memorial to the daughter who died too young, and heard the wind’s voice whispering through the gold-flecked leaves, or gazed at a glorious sunrise that seemed to say “it’s a good day to be alive”, or perched on a mountaintop -below me a broad expanse of misty, heather covered hills- and sensed the thin places- times to recognize the ethereal in our mundane life.  I don’t want to miss these times.

I see trees of green, red roses, too

I see them bloom for me and you

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world

 

I see skies of blue, clouds of white

The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world

 

(What a Wonderful World, by George Weiss, Bob Thiele)

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MESSAGES

Posted on November 10, 2011 by Amy Getter

rainbowI have heard in many stories from friends and loved ones, about the reassuring messages sent  from those who have died to those of us left here with feelings of loss and grief that must be journeyed through.  They seem to be reminding us, encouraging us, and still teaching us…to  look, listen and feel.

Look….a heart

Hearts and Moons seemed to speak of Molly.  She had drawn happy faces on notes over the years and love was abundant in her life.  After her death, those of us who were awake that same night gazed at the most stupendous full moon, like a happy face, that appeared to welcome her soaring spirit.  There have been many messages from her.  Molly’s motto had been to Memento Vivere, “remember to live”.  Her family and friends wore the bracelet with those well-chosen words as a reminder.

Life seems to get muddled, though, as we fill our days with the mundane and work becomes too long and too hard.  I made a kind of resolution one week to remember the significant, and not forget to find moments in my day for lessons from Molly, and others who reminded me- how short life is.  On a certain afternoon, I took a rare actual lunch break, walking in a waterside park not far from my office.  As I was hurriedly coming up the path, I nearly ran into a tremendous rock next to a chair that provided weary travelers a seat to gaze out over the water.  I suddenly realized, this was not just a great big rock.  A closer look revealed a ton-size huge heart.  A sweet reminder from my loving cousin, remember to live, to love, to cherish these moments…and I took a seat.

Listen…..well-chosen words

Jim had suffered both a severe stroke and a complex, progressive dementia.  I worked at a nursing facility at the time and had witnessed his wife’s loving care of him after his stroke and the companionship they had together remained palpable.

She shared this story in our grief group, following his death.   As he was losing his cognitive function in addition to all his physical abilities, he told his wife he didn’t want to work so hard anymore, he didn’t want to keep going and die by inches, and he was going to stop eating.  After a difficult conversation, his wife announced she was going home to call hospice, and he said “Be Brave”.

She knew they would both need to be brave.  He died peacefully about 3 months later.

A few weeks later, his wife was travelling to spend some time with a lifelong friend.  She sat in the airport awaiting her flight to the Midwest, alone and sad.  For years, their trips had been a highlight in their relationship – so many memories of being together- and then the years of care giving that had prevented any travel.  Relief had been a natural emotion following Jim’s death; freedom for him from the long weary road of disability and for her the daily care giving routine.  But suddenly she was alone in life.  As she felt the waves of pity wash over her, she looked up and saw a young woman walking towards her.  Closer, closer, closer.  On her bright green shirt, were big letters in white that said “Be Brave”.

 Feel…..awash with rainbows

A day following her husband’s death, Sandy was walking out of a downtown business area in a hurry; there was much to get arranged for the funeral.

She was recalling her last request yesterday, as her husband lay dying in their bed at home.  Would he just let her know that he was okay?  Ed died that same day, unable to say any more or assure her.

There were so many tasks to complete; she was “on a roll”.  As she finished her business and walked outside, she looked at the rain falling through the sunshine.  It caught her attention, but she hurried on towards her car, intent on the next item to check off her list.  A rather large woman was standing on the side walk, blocking her way. “You better stop and turn around” she said out loud.  This seemed both over-bold and irritating; she thought whatever the woman’s problem was, she would ignore it.  The woman stared.  Suddenly Sandy stopped, remembering.  Her husband often told her to slow down, enjoy the moment, and not get so caught up.  Ed was telling her to turn around and she did so.

The shards of light piercing the crystal drops of water framed a brilliant double rainbow.  She felt him with her, and she knew.  He was more than okay; certainly he was telling her so, exactly 24 hours after she had asked for the reassurance.

As the saying goes, stop, and smell the roses.  Find-even in the sadness-some sweetness.  Look, listen, feel…

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LESSONS IN LOSS

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Amy Getter

woman artistI remember my mother setting down her mandolin one day, and stating simply “I guess I won’t play anymore”.  I listened to Debra tell me that her rosary beads still hung around her neck, where they’d been for 40 years, but it was a tremendous effort to use them now.  I knew looking at Belinda’s pictures decorating her walls, evidence of true giftedness and joyful expression, that they were the last vestige of her artistic talents and her brushes and paints would lay idle in their drawer now.  They each had such graceful acceptance as life ebbed and losses mounted.

I likened my leaving this past week to a lesson in loss.  We do an exercise in hospice, it’s not a game since there isn’t a prize and I wouldn’t call it entertainment.  We hand out small squares of paper; each person gets a certain number of cards and is told to write on each of these- the four most important possessions, the four most important relationships, the four most important experiences, and the four most important senses.  Then you proceed to lose these things.  Some you give to the person on your left, some to the person on your right, some are taken from you by these people sitting next to you.  Some are losses of choice and others are losses outside your control.  Eventually, the last of the squares are gone. 

Loss after loss, until all is gone.   Many times I’ve watched my patients “letting go” of what in the past was so important, to move into the next experience- dying.

This week I left the home that was a ten-plus year labor of love.  Every flower, every rock, each window chosen with care, every surface painstakingly painted in colors chosen for warmth and welcome.  A part of me has been depressed and sad, thinking about all the work, not just the house but also the energy spent in establishing relationships and community, being a part of something bigger than just me.  And then all the memories…  My dog running off, chasing deer into the forest, my kids visiting and enjoying s’mores and campfires, walks in the park with the geese heralding fall, the leaves changing as they are now, to golden and crimson, and the love-hate relationship that I have had with the awe-inspiring chestnut tree (each leaf the size of a small car it seems when having to rake them for at least half a year).  All the things I will miss.  Losses.

In my current split personality state, a part of me is thrilled with the anticipation and excitement of a new place:  Looking out the window and watching the float planes bring commuters to work in the morning; gazing at the space needle as dusk changes to dark, and glittering lights are reflected off the lake; coming home on a quick break in the middle of my work day and eating a sandwich, something I haven’t had an opportunity to do in over 13 years.  Gains.

I am realizing all the letting go, the tearful moments, the sense of change and loss, is but a mere fraction of what will be needed some day, when I know I am dying.  Not the sense of every day,” this could be my last” but the reality of the daily changes occurring with a terminal illness. What my patients show me at each visit.  They show me the reality of losing independence, the reality of lacking the strength to get to the bathroom, the reality of every day, a little more loss, a little less life left.

The anticipation, the dread, the hope, the prayer at the close of this life, that the next step into the unknown is something wonderful.  Perhaps this week, I am getting a little practice.

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