Everything that lives dies 
Dying is the hardest thing we do 
Everything that breathes eats 
Dying is the hardest thing we do 
Everything that teaches grows 
Dying is the hardest thing we do 
Everything that loves spreads 
Dying is the hardest thing we do
Everything that wakes sleeps 
Dying is the hardest thing we do 
Everything that endures forgives 
Dying is the hardest thing we do. 

And when we die, the hardest thing our people do is not fear. 
And when we die, the hardest thing our people do is to grieve.
And when we die, the hardest thing our people do is to live. 

​Grief is an act of humanity. 

I have always liked to drive fast. I remember some time ago traveling on I95 South, a sports car appeared and blew past me. The license plate was WAWAZAT. A 1973 red De Tomaso Pantera was what it was. It made me look. It slowed me down. I have remembered the experience. The car did not really come out of nowhere. Neither did this pandemic.
 
What was it that brought us to now? How will we remember this time? What will it take to make this “pause” a “reboot”? “This historical memory is very critical because something happened that was incredibly scary. After the Spanish Flu Epidemic, we began forgetting...as soon as the dying stopped, the forgetting began.” ~Harold Ivan Smith, COVID19 and the Centennial of the Spanish Flu Epidemic.
 
“There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.”~Aeschylus. There will be much to remember about this pandemic if we ‘don’t count the days but make the days count.’ “Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.” ~Helen Keller. “Lest we forget” ~Disegno Daily.“We run from grief because loss scares us, yet our hearts reach towards grief because the broken parts want to mend.”~Brené Brown.
 
Looking at our grief through rituals helps us to make our experiences mean something. Rituals let us hold space and sort our mundane from the significant persons, places and things of our affection. At my house, retail therapy is a ritual which excites our boredom and mitigates our frustration and disenfranchisement especially when bargains are involved. And subsequent therapy arrives delivered...and the receipt of the package...is it for me? What is this? Ooh la la. I feel pretty! This is when stop our working and celebrate. “Fashion never dies. It adapts, advances and evolves with us as a society, while helping us express ourselves as individuals. It’s more than just clothing, it helps us build our image of how we see ourselves as well as how others see us: it’s art, it’s therapy, it’s memories...” ~Ruth Shaw. 
 
“It is a serious thing to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.” ~Mary Oliver. It is serious business to be alive. We have already been given so many opportunities to make something of this!  One rallying cry of this time has been ‘we can do hard things,’ but the rest of the quote by Alan Packer is “it’s the impossible that takes a little longer.” To create meaning because of this- choosing to engage with our grief is a lifelong process. For me, this is about loving what is and so owning ‘that which cannot be fixed with butter or whisky probably should not be fixed.’ I’m not interested in the consequences of ignoring, deferring, or delaying rituals. That’s a friction I know metastasizes. Next week I shall jam the Maryland strawberries and preserve this spring. I will savor it on my toast. I will bake it into my pies. I will gift it. It will be my homeopathic story: “similia similibus curentur or “like cures like”. Or also maybe, it will fuel me to “be the things you loved most about the people who are gone.” ~Lisa Scrivens.
 
If this pandemic is a wake up call to us, I hope we will look hard, slow down, and remember- remember to remember.  My story features a pelican because of her symbolism: it is told that in times of need, a mother bird will pluck her breast until it bleeds to nurture her starving young. Pelicans are also known for their buoyancy and unselfishness. “How do you build a pelican? Do you study the beak? the labored flight? the pierced breast? No, first you study the pond.” ~The Bishop Craig B. Anderson, Ph.D.. I believe we are still in the benevolent stage of this pandemic and that an important dimension of resilience is prayer where “we humble up.” ~Caroline Myss.  The following meditation Encountering Grief is from the On Being episode “Finding Buoyancy Amidst Despair” and is led by Roshi Joan Halifax.

I have hope that we find fortune in this pandemic. I read the following parable 25 years ago and saved the publication it was printed in. I intended then to remember it. “Once upon a time a young prince was making a journey alone on horseback to another kingdom. He had come a long way and he had a long way to go. One night as he was crossing a stream he heard a commanding voice call to him out of the darkness. “Stop and fill up your saddle bags with the sand of this stream.” The young prince reined in his horse for an instant and deliberated. He was awed by the voice and wanted to obey but he was also impatient to ride on. So all he did was to reach down and snatch up a handful of sand from the bottom of the stream, put it in his pocket and gallop off on his way. The next morning he remembered the stream and the voice and the sand. Out of curiosity he reached into his pocket and lo and behold it was filled with diamonds. And so, as the story goes, the young prince was both glad and sorry. He was glad that he had stopped and taken some sand and he was sorry that he had been impatient and not taken more.” Faith is a tricky thing; first you have to believe. In the writing of this blog, I had a special correspondence with the raconteur of the parable and this he told me “Dear Réné, Your email confirms Einstein’s comment that “coincidences are Gods way of remaining anonymous.” ~Charles Scribner III.
 
Looking at this time. Slowing down. Remembering. Pausing or rebooting. Please enjoy “David Byrne’s buoyant countercultural hymn of optimism, resistance, and resilience” found at Brain Pickings by Maria Popova. 
​

Today, Tuesday, May 5, 2020 is six weeks and 6 days or day 48 of my count of our pandemic quarantine. Many of us will come through these days without any visible scars. I’m shattered to learn that others, like actor Nick Cordero had to have his right leg amputated after suffering complications from COVID-19. This experience may not change us as much as it reveals us.  For some, this time is pushing up all the old traumas. For others, this time is creating new fractures. Do we really have to make meaning here? If today is my last day is this how I want to spend it? Is my conundrum or my opportunity to calibrate my re-entry to our new world?
 
What if these days are whatever we make of them and what if that is enough? “The truth is that life is a grieving process.” ~Dr. Carter Stout. Aristotle taught to be is to do. Voltaire posited to do is to be. Sinatra sang do-be-do-be-do. What will it take to get over this? “We did not have and could not get the tools and knowledge to do our work.  And soon enough we were forbidden to do it by general fiat.”~Larry P. Arn Thoughts on the Current Crisis. My awareness is wobbly. I have a vulnerability hangover.  I’m breathing I’m breathing I’m breathing into Compassionate Abiding. Kindly.
 
And now we’re Zooming deep into technology. Rose colored glasses were never my style but I’ve just bought blue glasses. Blue is the color of my throat chakra. “Blue is also at the cooler end of the spectrum, where things slow down, allowing you to take time to be still.” Chakra Anatomy. 
 
“And she took the time to believe to believe in what she said and she made me love she made me love she made me love more.” ~Love More, Sharon Van Etten.
 
Children love us just as we are. “When you teach the children teach em the very best you can. The world won’t get no better if we just let it be.”

Once upon a time we had the smartest carpool. Six growing girls who were old enough to have a sense of themselves and young enough not to be afraid of themselves. They would quiz one another “tell me everything you know about (‘rocks’ or ‘rational exponents’ or the verb ‘vivir’).” The girls are now capable young women who are curious and listen generously. They want to know what you see, what does it sound like to you, what does it taste like to you, what does it smell like to you, and how does it feel. Asking how not why. Observing not judging. “There is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others.”~Mary Shelley. We need and need to be loving helpmates who will elicit what is strong and not what is wrong. We must discern what we have outgrown and what it is time to gift with a warm hand. What we will hold dear and keep is as important as what we discard. “Unfortunately, there are wounds that time doesn’t heal. Fortunately, healing is intentional.” ~Marie Empowered Through Grief.
 
Organic is defined by life and death and expressed as love or grief. We humans are organic and when stressed especially need to breathe deeply, stretch, move and rest. I am grateful to have a memory for perspective on this time. Years ago we did a whole house renovation refinishing the oak wood floors, stairs and bannisters and kitchen counters and repainting three floors- 9 rooms- of living space. On each floor, we moved everything into a middle room during the floor work so we had two phases to the work or two jobs. The floors and then the walls and ceilings. Brené Brown explains that ‘so much of emotion is biography’.  With all the stacked feelings I am right now, I am reminded to tend to that which I stand on as one job and to tend that which is around and above me as job two...or too!). “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” ~Mother Theresa

Big trees grow slowly as much rooting down into the earth as reaching toward the sun. Trees in my purview have grown a lot in these 48 days. And one had one of its powerful limbs torn off in the wind and rain and smashed a car across my street today. Another death that will be lamented and grieved. But what will it create? What is reaching up in you?  What is smashing down in you?
 
“Perhaps the call ever more is to sit with the discomfort and not attach to it. Practicing Tara Brach's RAIN is almost more important now more than ever. So although it sounds simple, that's my main recommendation for you this week.” ~Kim Hennessee, Mend Acupuncture
 
These days are long but the weeks are short and the years rush past. “I wish I could tell you that it gets better but it doesn’t. You get better.” ~Joan Rivers
 
Sending my love.  Be well.  Take good gentle care of yourselves.

 One year not so long ago, we did a lot of traveling following our Denver then English athlete in the final seasons of her lacrosse career. I carried and read many books on death and dying. My companion read a book titled The Making of The Atomic Bomb. I see now that Carl Sagan has read it and recommends it as “a stirring intellectual adventure...indispensable history of events in which our future depends.” The book weighs 2.15 pounds and is 896 pages long. I don’t think anyone ever asked to sit in the unoccupied seat with us.

I still read voraciously on death and dying. I took many notes reading, Advice for Future Corpses (and for Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying. Author Sallie Tisdale recounts, “the comedian Laurie Kilmartin used Twitter to describe her father’s last days. Her comments were often funny and poignant: “Just promised Dad I’d be nice to Mom. Damnit. “ She noted how hard it was to be appropriate, to say the right thing. “Hospice says to reassure the loved one that they can go, that we will be ok. So me sobbing “Dad, don’t fucking leave me, was frowned upon.”

I’ve Seen The End of You: A Neurosurgeon’s Look at Faith, Doubt, and the Things We Think We Know, by W. Lee Warren, MD,  writes “losing a child is the most malignant disease I’ve ever encountered in my own life.“  “The most important surgery I would ever perform would be the stitching together of my faith, my doubt, and the things I thought I knew.”  “Resuscitation is a nasty endeavor. Because the heart has stopped it is very difficult for the Code Team to start IVs and many patients end up with large IV lines in their necks, groins, or both. CPR breaks ribs. Patients lose continence of their bladders and bowels. They vomit. In the end, even when we bring people back, only a small percentage of those patients survive to the end of the hospitalization; research suggests that only 16% of cancer patients who are saved by CPR are alive 30 days later”.  W. Lee Warren, MD is a brain surgeon, inventor, Iraq War veteran “and somehow I’ve been placed in the lives of other bereaved and hurting people, and I have realized in those darkest hours, the knife edge of survival or ultimate loss might be traversable only if one can see, no matter how dim, the light from a torch held by someone a little further down the same path.”  “One of the secrets to surviving the difficulties of life is to be honest with yourself about their effect on you.”

And the book Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief, by Claire Bidwell Smith demonstrates that she has “come to understand that one of the significant reasons anxiety manifests after the death of a loved one is from not allowing ourselves to fully examine the story of our loss.”  “I cannot help but look back on all of my experiences of loss, even the most painful moments of it all, with anything but gratitude.  Losing the people I loved most in the world and walking through the fire of grief broke me wide open.  Grief taught me compassion. Anxiety taught me peace and presence.  Loss taught me how to live and love.”

I think it’s the stories that empower us to make sense of it all.

People caring for people is not new, especially when they are dying. End of Life Doulas are inspired by Birth Doulas, a practice which has persisted through time. End of Life Doulas work in hospitals, in hospice and Palliative care and in homes. Choosing how you die is choosing how you live.  

End of Life Doulas provide non-medical support to people choosing to live their death.

End of Life Doulas tend to the emotional, basic physical, psychological and spiritual weather of a dying person and their loved ones.

End of Life Doulas engage with gratitude and suffering in committed community with a dying person and their loved ones.

End of Life Doulas shepherd a dying person and their loved ones to open to the experience of dying as hopeful, natural and positive.

End of Life Doulas are trained to inspire meaning, celebrating, reflecting and witnessing what is important in the life of a dying person.

End of Life Doulas prompt a dying person to process and review their life.

End of Life Doulas acknowledge the legacy of a dying person’s life and history.

End of Life Doulas hold respectful space for a dying person and their loved ones, facilitating rituals and the vigil.

End of life Doulas hope for good mourning in the evening of one’s life.

Réné Pallace, CPCC, volunteers her time as a trained End of Life Doula and is a Candidate for Certification from the International End of Life Doula Association
 (INELDA)

Your mind does not distinguish between reality, what actually happened, and the story you tell it, or the story that you allow it to tell you.

When you use your hand to express your mind by writing free form, diary, poetry, drawing or painting or any other creative connection, your mind must stop its activity. It cannot keep spinning a story or looping a movie about an event while also engaging in your expression. By connecting your mind to your hand, you move the story which spins and spins and makes you so dizzy, out in front of you to read, consider, ponder, question, deconstruct or construct. 

Connecting your mind to your hand allows you to stop the movie that is replaying the loop of the event(s) of your crisis. Do you know that “you put your thoughts down on paper”? Putting your spinning story or movie loop to paper puts your thoughts DOWN on paper. What is true at 2 am can be ludicrous after breakfast.

This is the most time-honored therapy for grief.

Some days let it be enough that you write or make art. Other days you may be inclined to question or make meaning. On the best of days, you will have an epiphany. If you can be kind to yourself, and trust that there is no wrong way to be, you will, in time, see what all this has to do with who you are becoming.

Mindful mindwork for response-able grief.

There are many books which have been created by people writing their story. Here are a few of my favorites:

“A Broken Heart Still Beats,” Anne McCracken & Mary Semel
“Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief,” Claire Bidwell Smith
“Before and After Loss,” Lisa M. Shulman, MD
“Broken Open,” Elizabeth Lesser
“It’s OK That You’re Not OK, Megan Devine Option B,” Sheryl Sandburg & Adam
“Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life,” Eric Greitens
“The Long Goodbye,” Meghan O’Rourke 
“This Is How,” Augusten Burroughs

Mindful of my dying, and taking aim, I am inspired by a fable. 

“There is a colony of water bugs living in a pond who get along wonderfully. They all understand each other and work well together. There is only one thing that really puzzles them all. Sooner or later, as bugs get older or become sick, they find a tall reed in the water and climb it. The other bugs do not know why they just climb up and disappear.

One day, the leadership got everyone together to figure this out. They made a pact- promising that whoever climbed a reed next would come back and let everyone know where they had been.
A little time passed and unexpectedly the chief found himself climbing the reed. He was so excited. When he got to wherever he was going, he would come back and tell the others all about it. When he got high up in the water, above the rest of the colony, he suddenly found himself going out onto a leaf and spinning a soft shell around himself. Well, he thought, when I get out of this, I will go and tell them. He rested for a long time and then, for some reason, he found himself removing the soft coating. When he emerged, he struggled still upward and found himself breaking through the top of the water.

What exhilaration! There was a whole new existence up here. He found that he had wings and could float freely above the water- soaring and gliding. With great joy, all his friends that had climbed the reed before him welcomed him! He asked them about this new place and was told that he had died as a bug, but was now a beautiful dragonfly.

All of a sudden, he remembered his promise- to go back to the rest and tell them where he had gone. He looked down and saw the waters surface. Ok, he thought, I must dive down and let them know. The other dragonflies warned him against it, but he had promised. With resolution, he dove- but when he hit the water, he bounced off. He tried again and again, but could not find a way through the surface of the water. Exhausted, he floated on top watching the colony below knowing there was no way he could reach them.

In time, he realized that even if he could go back, they would not recognize him, now that he was a dragonfly. So he did what all the other dragonflies had suggested- begin his new life, knowing that sooner or later all of those below would understand.”

~Author Unknown