Holding Space
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Make a Will (Lenten Practice)
You’ve likely heard the phrase, memento mori. Or you’ve seen those 17th century paintings with the skulls in them. The Latin, “remember you must die,” refers to such visual reminders of death. Some saints are depicted with human skulls—constant reminders of their mortality. And you thought Ash Wednesday services were morbid. The remembrance of death isn’t about death itself. It’s about life. It’s about honoring how precious it is and paying attention to how we want to live. I can tell you with complete confidence that we live in a culture that denies death, despite entertainment media filled with it.…
4 min read
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What Is Spiritual Direction?
My first spiritual director was Sister Catherine. I’d read about direction, and the only way I knew to find someone was to call the local Catholic center. Also, I figured a woman whose life is devoted to prayer has to be good one to learn from. Whatever your feelings about religious orders, they do a lot of praying, and I’m not going to knock that. We met in her small office, filled of books and upholstered chairs—she an old woman in a navy dress and bulky cardigan, me a twenty-something freshly landed from living overseas, trying to sort out where…
4 min read
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Wounds
One January morning I woke as I had every other morning that January, only this time I could not remember how to make my limbs move. I lay in bed watching the clock creep closer to the time I needed to get up. I tried to remember how I’d done it in the past; it had always seemed so simple. Maybe if I spoke to my body: “Arm, move!” That wasn’t it. Somehow, I knew it wasn’t physical paralysis. And it wasn’t that I was unusually depressed or tired—I felt that way on days I did get out of bed.…
4 min read
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The Man on the Mountain
After we watched the helicopter depart with its black body-sized package hanging below, watched the new widow follow a ranger down the trail, retrieved the backpack that had flown into a ravine from the circulating air, we contemplated what to do next. “Well, shall we finish?” We were half a mile from the peak and both needed badly to eat, so we proceeded to the top for a view that stood in stark contrast to the rest of our morning. We’d made a last-minute decision that morning to take a different trail, which was how we happened across a couple…
4 min read
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“I Thirst”
When a person nears the final days of their life, their organs slowly shutting down, their sleep stretching around the clock, they usually lose the ability to drink water. Sometimes they become too sleepy and disoriented, sometimes they simply aren’t thirsty anymore, and sometimes they begin to choke when they swallow. In hospice, when this happens, we use a small, colored sponge affixed to the end of a stick, soaked in water. This is used to wet their lips, wipe the crusty buildup from inside their mouth, give them a sense of having had a drink, to quench their thirst.…
4 min read
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Luna Moths
The first time I saw a luna moth, Max was letting it flutter around the room, retrieving it when it landed on a table leg, the arm of a couch. He’d caught it, somehow, in the Arkansas night and had brought it in to show me. I thought bugs that size only existed in the tropics, but there it was—huge and pale—its majesty defying what the word “moth” typically brings to mind. Several inches long, luna moths are light green, with small brown eyespots on paper-lantern wings. I was enchanted—with the moth itself, and with the man who’d caught it.…
4 min read
