NOW I LAY ME DOWN

Last month I visited my internist and was given a paper on heavy, green card stock. I recognized it immediately because each of our residents have a completed POLST form in their documentation. But this must be for my mother, not me. I was confused why the doctor’s assistant was giving it to me. We talked and I realized how enjoying a 97 year old parent has lulled me into thinking that I have miles to go before I sleep.

Last year I re-wrote Loveliest of Trees by A. E. Houseman. My apologies to Houseman who wrote:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

My second stanza hobbles along thus:

Now, of my three score years and ten,

sixty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs three score,
it doesn’t leave me many more.

If you call me I’ll even sing it for you, complete with disgusting sound effects.  And if you’ve convinced yourself you’re younger than Housman who passed in 1936, here is the web site for POLST, Physicians Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment. Just look at it. For your parent of course.

http://www.wsma.org/patients/polst.html

WHEN I DIE…Thoughts on Talking to Your Parents About Death

Guest Blog by Alice Kelso

Death. Have you and your aging parent talked about it? It's difficult, without a doubt. Yet allowing your parent to express his or her end of life wishes can be sacred, for all.

Trudy James knows. A Seattle-based trained hospital chaplain and Episcopal lay minister, James has facilitated end-of-life planning groups for years.

"People can solve their own hurts if they're listened to," says James. "Your job (as adult children) is to listen without talking, allowing them to tell you what they want."

But how to start? Be open-ended so your parent can fill in the blanks with what they desire, James advises. One idea is to ask your parent to complete the sentence, "When I die, I want..."

Typical answers include:

1.  When I die, I want things to be in order. Your parent may be adamant about dresser drawers being straightened, wills being finalized, or dishes, trinkets or antique guns parceled out to children.

2.  When I die, I want my loved ones to be OK.  That may mean adult children and others are provided for financially. Or it may mean a desire for emotional and spiritual peace, with kids getting along.


3.  When I die, I want a peaceful death.  At life's end, your parent may have specific requests such as music playing, scripture being read, an absence of pain, etc.

4.  When I die, I want to know my life mattered.  This statement speaks to the idea of legacy and may take many forms:  verbal or written blessings for loved ones, donating organs for research, giving money for significant causes, etc.

5.  I want my physical body to be laid to rest. Knowing your parent's preferences regarding funerals or cremation, and the specifics of the chosen method, allows you to do everything within your power to implement their wishes.

The sentences above can be boiled down to two basic questions:  "What are your parent's wishes?" And "Who will carry out the wishes?" For specifics on starting the discussion, The Five Wishes is a guide available from your local Hospice organization. http://www.agingwithdignity.org/

http://boomersguidetoeldercare.blogspot.com/2011/04/afraid-of-talking-about-end-of-life.html

Trudy James presented this material earlier this month at the Seattle Senior Care Coalition, a group of professionals in the senior care field.

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.

ABOUT TIME 2

An assumption necessary for my 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 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

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.

TOO MUCH WORTH DOING

“The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of contemporary violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.” Thomas Merton

Merton’s choice of the term “violence” interests me. My thesaurus equates it with madness, struggle, confusion, exhaustion, demonic frenzy. All the antithesis of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control.

To try to do too much constricts passion, starving reason and constructive purpose. Violence fights counsel and wisdom from others. It charges in where angels fear to tread. It spearheads solutions when the question has not been clearly defined. It camouflages ambition with good intentions and passion. Perhaps not so much ambition as fear.

Traumatic syndrome is not just a result of military battles. Within homes and professions stress assaults us physically, emotionally and spiritually. If we succumb to the pressures without protecting space for nurture we think violent thoughts, rage at people around us, deplete our energies and ourselves. The organizations and friendships meant to grow us themselves grow into monstrous appetites. 

So, lists are composed of worthwhile options, a hierarchy of emergency, and needs to be read with an eye to living fully in the moment. We assign the A and B and C with an understanding that we will never live these minutes again. We do not "should" on ourselves but breathe through the boundaries, always with an eye for the serendipitous. And a task that doesn't get done because the sun is shining through rain on glorious rhododendruns can be moved to the next day, or the next.

Sounds good.