LETTING GO IN TIME

No matter how long we care for people in our home, Adagio AFH, we never get used to experiencing their decline. We resist their disintegration as vigorously as possible without impinging on their right to die.

After only two weeks working with Hospice, we succumbed to the inevitable and gave comfort care only. Early Wednesday morning our resident took in a shallow breath and then no more.

Saturday we attended a continuing education class at our pharmacy supplier considering the subject “End of Life.” Considering our recent experience, the presenters helped me differentiate Palliative Care when the symptoms are serious but not fatal, and Hospice Care when we no longer look for solutions and a cure. Our ultimate goal is to help give “good death.”

Our grieving family has been gifted with exceptional weather for travel back to home base and warm, sunny days as they circle around the area of their childhood making their plans.

Viewing the pastel sunset last night, I reviewed a few comments made in our training.  Our 30ish pharmacist reminded us of the earthquakes and deadly landslides we have experienced this past month. “We never know if today will be our last.” We treasure each sunset as though it is our last.

THAT TIME OF DAY

Sunsets are valued as beauty in nature at its best, and highly desirable even though they indicate the movement of time through another 24 hours we will never again see.

The best sunsets require clouds. Clouds change their shape and basic nature in less time than it takes to run throughout the house closing windows. Clouds are seen to hide the sun in the sky overhead, and in metaphors holding truth in a small, vowel congested word. Every cloud has a silver lining. Her head is in the clouds. There are dark clouds on the horizon.

In 1802 William Wordsworth invoked a lonely cloud to represent his solitude, writing, "I wandered lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o'er vales and hills/When all at once I saw a crowd,/A host of golden daffodils;/Beside the lake./ Beneath the trees,/Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."

Float clouds, cumulous or cirrus, above the western horizon as the earth turns your small plot of land away from the sun and you have potential for a breathtaking sunset. Growing up on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan my father would scan the early evening sky and announce, “Red in the morning, sailors take warning. Red in the night, sailors delight.” And another day passes into our memory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

ABOUT TIME

Last night the sunset took us by surprise as it exploded into streaks of pink orange across the horizon. The blazing sun furiously hurled brilliant red light as if it understood its near, inevitable demise while steadily sinking into the shadows of Whidbey Island. The emanating colors leaned low across Gardner Bay as if stretching their wing span like a heron seeking to roost on the hospital towers in town miles away to the East.

Lighter hues filtered up to the lowest clouds. And the sun pierced through our living room blinds seeking to incorporate us into the process for a few minutes. Then the sunset faded to common evening blues. The process was an unanticipated gift we accepted with appreciative sounds even after it left us. 

It was time for reverie and near silence. Mundane tasks we thought essential twenty minutes before, faded in the shadow of the brilliant sunset. For too brief a time everyone in our home simply lived in the moment of celestial grandeur.

 
Memory held the colors in our minds for a bit longer after the sun’s reflection in the clouds faded and the grey of evening rapidly focused our vision indoors and back on the activity of getting ready for sleep. And the sleep following glorious respite beyond our control was sweet. As if beyond time.

ABOUT TIME 3

There is something I want to do. Correction, I want it done. The area is prepared; the next action is identified. But this project depends on several people not just me. They obviously have priorities that do not include my project. Working with others demands I experience process. My project moves forward only as fast as the slowest member of the team.

We talk about the mental process, the manufacturing process, the decision making process, and due process of law. Then there is processed cheese, processed rubber, and processed information. Job hunting is a process. The inception of a thought must process through the synapses before it achieves recognition, before it can be named.

If there is something that does not involve process, I can’t think of it. A meal, dressing for the day, garbage collection, the hangnail developing on my left thumb, a storm, a sunset, an argument: all take time. I can think of nothing that skips beginning and jumps immediately into the past, fait accompli.

And time is one of the crucial realities of living we cannot control. We may anticipate as we move toward a desirable process like a train trip through Pennsylvania, or a week of vacation at the beach.

At a different time dread overwhelms our emotions; we fearfully trudge through a painful, inevitable process. We endure until the process is finished with us.

Process takes time. Even though nothing can try my patience like waiting for process to unfold, time is necessary. Grace allows others time to proceed on their course as it intersects ours. And through process we learn about ourselves, both good and not so good. It’s about time.

It’s all about time.

ABOUT TIME 2

My necessary assumption for interior and productive living is that there is a God. Not a dogmatic compilation, nor a wood or metal impressionistic form, but a mysterious being I cannot specifically at this time describe. He is reflected in my potential, but knowing myself I know nothing in me is God. Mystery puts him beyond my control, my shabby attempts to manipulate. All I know of him is what he has chosen to tell me. His self-definition does not bequeath me pellucid clairvoyance or special endurance.  Merely a place in his created time.

I am reticent to place money on the first date life materialized. Others may and declare the days of the earth boldly as if their surety matters. A video production at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry seriously pictured life wriggling from a lapping body of water, some ancient primordial ooze. I laughed out loud at the faith required to believe such mud-hued fancy.

I knew a man who rashly told God the date and time creation would burn. He presaged the finality of frog calls at twilight, of murders of crows silently concealing mischief under their wings in the trees jutting from the darkening gulch, of moles spilling up soil from beneath the iris and campanula as my shovel and water hose rest for the day.

When we are tempted to over-define ourselves, time serves as a reminder that life roots about in the landscape and survives or not regardless of our brief tenure. Our evanescence rises and sets with the sun. It’s about time.

 

ABOUT TIME

Reprinted from June 2012 because I need the reminder.

There is something we sense in our bones, we feel with the pulse of our blood from the start. We speak it impatiently at first, until age and experience bring us awareness we can never sufficiently say it so we will come to it prepared and attentive.

It is the surety of personal aging, of slipping from days to years as we appreciate goals accomplished in their time and admit we would do it differently if we had been who we have become.

It is that no one is singular, exempt from the course that follows our ancestors, and the time we have left waits to be gracefully used as we work slower and less, and rest more than work.

We never think we are old, or done with growing. But such possibilities slip in on a contrary breeze, the dim suspicion that our fundamental accumulations clutter and encumber the accommodations we now need for breathing. More and more we gratefully experience our busyness unwind to leisure, and we are content to savor the dimensions of our remaining space.

I am more willing to indulge interior living with less urgency to produce. Like my few essential household supports, I am becoming more form than function. It’s about time.