the cassandra pages

Something Good

They were right. He’s better.

Yesterday evening we went over to say hello. The night-shift nurses were just leaving after giving him his medicines and changing the bed, and my sister-in-law greeted us at the apartment door: “He’s asked about you specifically three times today. Go in and say hello, he’s awake.” I went in and sat down on the bed, and called him by name.

“Well!” he said, opening his eyes and looking at me with surprise and pleasure.  And then: “You look beautiful!” I was wearing a tweedy, rust-colored sweater and a hand-knit lace scarf in lavender lightweight wool; probably the colors were cheerful and different, too, from the nurses’ uniforms and my husband’s and brother-in-law’s usual dark t-shirts and jackets. “Wait a minute,” he said, turning his head to the right. “Let me give you my ear. OK! I thought you were gone, back to Montreal.”

“I just went up for a couple of days to get my stitches out and check the apartment, water the plants.” He smiled. “But I came right back. I wanted to see you.”

“Do you like my flowers?” he asked, nodding toward the bouquet of red tulips on the windowsill, nearly full-blown now.  I told him of course I did; they were lovely. “What did you do today?”  he asked. I told him I had been to church and then worked on our taxes. He raised his eyebrows disapprovingly. “So my two daughters-in-law both went to church: one to that Quaker gathering and one to the Episcopal one…and they’re both wrong!” I laughed and told him he was probably right.

“There are angels around here all the time,” he said. “They come and wash me. I told them tonight that if all they do is wash me, and avoid certain parts, then they are angels. But I think they were being bad – they kept asking me to turn from one side to the other and I couldn’t tell if it was to help them or if really they were trying to inspect me. I suspect the latter!”

“They say you’re much better,” I said. “And it looks like you are.”

He looked at me skeptically. “Not really,” he said. “But I was really lost for a while. When you’ve had 76 years without serious illness and then something like this, you aren’t prepared. The last time I was really ill was when I had pleurisy when I was 12.” He pulled one arm out from under the covers and I saw that he wasn’t wearing a nightshirt; he’d always liked to sleep in the nude. “I’ve lost 14 pounds!” he said.

“Well, you haven’t been eating much for a long time. But I hear you’ve been eating more in the past couple of days.”

“I don’t’ feel like it, but I know I should. Today I asked for two soft-cooked eggs on bread and ate them.”

“That’s good, you need to eat some protein.”

“Eggs have protein.”

“Yes. And you could eat a little fish, maybe, or some chicken?”

He made a face. “I’ve eaten so much chicken in this place I never want to see it again. If I see a chicken, it will run away from me!” We both laughed, and I told him I didn’t blame him.

“Maybe you can help me,” he said, changing the subject. “I’ve decided to say something good about Islam.” My face probably betrayed my surprise; what was he talking about now? “I’ve spent two years thinking about a lecture I want to give on Islam, but haven’t been able to put it together. Last night I had an inspiration -- and it came to me. But I need pictures of all the different Muslim headdresses that men wear – there are lots of them: the turbans, the Saudi thing – I had a friend who had a picture that showed them all – he lived south of Hanover on the road to New York – but he had the bad manners to die. Anyway,  I need those for my lecture.”

I told him I’d look on the internet and see what I could find. Knowing him, once we have the pictures he’ll want the actual headgear to wear during his lecture. But one step at a time.

He was silent for a while, his beautiful silky white hair flowing on the pillow around his face, his face thin and more serious; he seemed to be deep in thought. “My mind is very busy with what happens to our consciousness after death,” he announced, at length, and for the next half hour he talked about this subject, speaking of how his wife appears to him in all his dreams – asleep, but smiling – and asking me questions about my own mother’s death, and whether I’ve seen her in my dreams.

“I do see her, but it’s always as she was – in the past. It’s not like she’s dead and communicating with me from wherever she is now.”

He considered that. “I’ve never dreamed my own death,” he said.

“Me either. I’ve dreamt I was dying, but I always wake up just before it happens. I don’t  think we can dream our own death. Not the whole thing.”

“That’s an interesting theory. I wonder. Well, no one has ever come back to tell us!” He talked again about a friend who had made a pact with his wife that whoever died first would make every effort to communicate with the one who was left. “He told me, ‘I wait, and wait…nothing!’” My father-in-law looked at me intently. “But I think he was wrong,” he said. “I think they did communicate.”

I told him again about my experience the morning after my mother’s death, when I felt she spoke to me, saying “I am all right, and you will be all right.” “My rational mind discounted it immediately,” I said. “But it was a very powerful experience that broke suddenly into my consciousness. I can’t entirely explain it away on the basis of emotion or exhaustion. It felt very real.”

“Your mother was a very good person,” he said. “I think she did continue after death.”

I was very surprised to hear that from him. “She didn’t believe in it herself,” I said. “She was a skeptic, like you.”

He shrugged. “I think it has to do with how you live while you’re here,” he said. “And she was good.”

He had speculated, some weeks earlier, about being reunited with the source of our bliss. I offered: “Some of the Eastern religions say it’s as if we are separate drops of water, while we’re here, and then we become reunited with the river after we die.”

He looked at me skeptically. “It doesn’t satisfy me,” he responded instantly, and then smiled. “I want something really good!”

I laughed. “Do you think you will see people you’ve known? "

“Yes. I think I’ll see lots of people I’ve known. There are some very good people I look forward to talking to again.”

He was quiet again and then spoke: “Alice and M. died around the same time – I think they wanted each other’s company.” Alice was the woman he almost married; M. his wife.

“M. is so happy in my dreams,” he repeated, and then added, “Happier than she was in real life.” He paused. “I think… I annoyed her.”

I couldn't think fast enough to respond. “Mashallah!” he said, for me. (It means, literally, ”whatever God wills,” but Muslims also use it when giving Allah credit for things that humans might otherwise claim on their own: if someone says "what a beautiful daughter!" the parent might respond " mashallah!" But in this case he meant it in the first sense, "that's the way it is, so be it.")

“Mashallah,” I repeated.

“Alice was always waiting for me to ask her,” he went on, then, speaking much more slowly and deliberately than usual. “But I was afraid.” The room had become quite dark as the last light left the evening sky. I searched his face, wondering what was coming next. “But I think now that I made a mistake,” he said. “I think I would have had greater companionship with her.”

He had spoken so much about the series of events that had led to his unconventional marriage to a non-Arab woman, to coming to America, to teaching and living in this particular corner of the country. “All because of coincidence!” he had said, over and over. Now my own mind reeled with that other possibility, that he could have married a different woman, and all the events of my own adult life would have been totally altered as well, had coincidence not crossed my own path, allowing me to meet and fall instantly in love with the dark-eyed man who became my husband, this son who would not have been. He began singing the song in Arabic that he’s sung several times since becoming ill, and then, smiling to himself, for the first time translated the whole verse: “Come to me, love, come in the night! Let people speculate. Sleep is for the dead, lovers don’t sleep.”

He turned to me and spoke, as if coming back from a reverie. “This has been a very helpful conversation,” he said. “It has shown me that I really do think we continue.”

Tonight J. and I are taking over, and we'll try to manage the transition to a team of caregivers. He did get up and join us for dinner in the living room, and ate some moussaka that C. had brought, after admonishing all of us on our pronunciation of the word and making us repeat it until we said it correctly. "I feel normal now in my head," he said, after sitting up for a while, and so far as we could tell tonight, mentally he seems about the way he was a few weeks ago. Who knows where we're going from here.

Flocks

From Tuesday through Thursday afternoon, I was in Montreal checking on our apartment and getting the stitches removed from my dental surgery of a few weeks ago. Feels better! Late yesterday afternoon I drove back, and stopped the car along the stubble-filled cornfields just north of Lake Champlain to watch clouds of snow geese wheeling and settling among their darker Canadian brethren. I have a thing about snow geese, not for any particular reason except that they seem particularly beautiful to me, and until recently, have been relatively rare in the parts of the country where I've lived. Oddly enough, on the way up to Canada this time, I saw a flock of snow buntings in the same field: much smaller, but equally special.

My brother-in-law and his wife took over the care of my father-in-law for a week, starting last Monday. So I hadn't seen him for three days, and when I visited today, he didn't really recognize me, and this evening my husband felt the same was true for him. It's painful, but we expected it. He can only process so many faces amid the comings and goings, and he seemed to be confusing us with my in-laws. That may change again next week; who knows. He is eating more than he was, and still able to get up; in fact last night he had a shower. And although some family members insist otherwise, he told me today, quite matter-of-factly, "I'm not getting better." Mentally I think he is less "there" than he was three days ago; the bandwidth seems less, the processing and connecting weaker. But while he doesn't seem likely to get up and around again, clearly we are not looking at an immediate demise; he could go on like this for some time. So our family has engaged the services of a caregiver agency and will be working out a schedule to provide round-the-clock care in conjunction with nursing from the facility where he lives. We are going to be staying down here much more than we were, at least until we see how this goes and how he reacts.

There was something almost exhilarating about his precipitous decline at first: so much to do, so many adjustments to make, so many emotional and physical demands that we became completely absorbed and focussed on the person needing care.  Now, having stepped back into a secondary role, and looking at all the other neglected work that now has to somehow get done, I finally feel the exhaustion as well as a pull back toward normal life. The fatigue comes not only from cumulative sleep deprivation and that inevitable let-down after intense events, but from dealing with family dynamics and the awareness of different members' simultaneously-existing views of reality, with my father-in-law's altered world at the center. "When I first became sick I thought I was still at the school where I had taught," he said. "Now I know that's not right...but still, I can't quite make out where I am."

It's perhaps appropriate that my current reading is Arnaud Desjardin's Un grain de sagesse. Whether talking about the spiritual path in terms of educating children, or growing in our own awareness, he speaks often about the difference between living in "my world" and in "the world". And long before our bodies intervene, imposing biological disorder, we persist in creating worlds of our own, with their complex invented realities. Part of maturity, Desjardins points out, is the ability to see and accept things as they really are, not as we wish them to be, as well as moving from a "me"-centric view to one where "les autres" are the focus.

Maybe that's why I felt compelled to stop the car and watch the flocks of geese who, at that moment, crossed my own southward path as they moved north. And it's not one, or several, but the host of black-tipped, white wings that transcends individuality to become something so beautiful, so poignant, so mysterious that your breath catches in your throat and you somehow feel your own restlessness, your own self rising along with them, drawn inexorably toward some destination that could be seen, maybe, if you could only fly high enough.

Companions

A week ago, when the severe disorientation began, I arrived in the late afternoon and for the first time there was little recognition. I went home and tried to resign myself, but when the statement, with such finality, formed itself in my mind: "The conversation is over; he doesn’t even know me anymore…” the tears came.

But the next morning, he had been clear, happy to see us, ready to converse. Later I stood at his balcony window, looking out at the hills, covered with soft dove-colored branches just emerging from winter sleep, and a liquid grey sky hovering above them. What can I say these moments are like? I wondered. They’re not like jewels, not like diamonds, not like gold…all those things seem tawdry compared to the preciousness of what we’re experiencing. No, I thought, these moments are just pure light.

He looked around his room at the pictures there. One is a print of a Van Gogh painting of a bridge in Holland; it's quite calm, even static for a Van Gogh, in shades of blue, green, and yellow. "I always liked his work," he said. "I used to use that painting in class; my point was in getting my students to see the symmetry in it. It’s an odd picture, really. Very emotional."

He turned toward the other wall, above his bed. "But this one is the one I associate with the most," he said. "It's an odd picture, isn't it?" He was lying flat on his back, looking over at it: it's an oil painting, quite naive, of trees in autumn foliage, along a straight canal or river. And down in one corner there is a little white duck with a yellow beak, swimming on the water. "It was a view out our window at the school where I taught," he said - but I don't think that's probably correct; it's the sort of embellishment he's adding to stories now, as his memory wobbles between fact and fantasy. "A young girl painted it, she was one of my students. It was her first painting and she came to me with it one day and said she wanted me to have it. So sweet! And I've always kept it, because of the spirit in which it was given." Then he looked up at me and added, “but I see a lot of weaknesses in it!” He told us that she became a sculptor and lives in Mexico; another day he said she was in Texas; another time he didn't know if she had ever painted again, or what happened to her. But in his disorientation about place, the painting has been a constant. "It's the only thing I recognize consistently," he said, in wonder. "Wherever I am these days, this painting seems to stay with me."

"Is there a kitchen here?" he often asks. "A bathroom? A living room? Where are you sleeping?" None of it seems to make sense; he shakes his head saying he can't orient himself at all - only the "ugly television and these paintings" seem familiar. Once I picked up his carved cane, and gave it to him to hold; I showed him his Moroccan leather slippers; brought him a photograph of the family that he's always had next to his chair. "Yes," he said, both puzzled and amused, "all the details are familiar but they don't add up!" He looked carefully at the photograph and handed it back to me. "I have one just like that," he said.

"When you get up, do you look out the window?" I asked.

"Not usually," he said. "But I know - if I look over there, across the way, I can see the light in Myrle's apartment. And that's familiar. but the rest of it doesn't make sense."

Once, when he seemed the most lucid and alert, I asked him if he'd like to get in a wheelchair. "I could take you around the apartment, and maybe it would help you orient yourself." But he declined. "I'm too tired," he said. "It's all right."

One evening about a week ago, after he was first in bed and before this deeper disorientation began, we were alone in his room.

"My only worry is what will happen to my things after I die," he told me. "If there’s anything in my rooms that you want, anything at all, take it." He paused. "Because afterwards…it might be messy."

"I don’t think they’ll fight," I said.

He gave me a just-slightly-skeptical look. "I mean it," he said.

I hesitated, and then spoke. "Really, the only thing I would like to have someday is Socrates."

He smiled, "Take him!" he said, and then I saw a tiny cloud pass across his face. "I’d miss him," he added.

I immediately regretted speaking at all. "No, I’m absolutely NOT taking him, not now," I said. "I was just telling you what I liked. He's staying right here, with you." I searched for a way to change the focus. "Tell me where you got him. "

"At the British Museum," he said. "We used to stay nearby and whenever I went to the museum I always headed for the antiquities and went straight to look at him. I don’t know why, I just liked that statue. It had been ploughed up in a field, and there's a mark where something struck him in the forehead, even in the reproduction. He’s always been with me…I always took him to class with me because I wanted to infuse my students with... the spirit of the Greeks." He smiled. "I once asked an expert in antiquities about it, asking how anyone could have known that this is what Socrates looked like. And he replied, 'Just look at it! No one could have invented that face!'”

Calgary

Easter hasn't arrived here yet; it feels like we're in a different time zone, a different world running on a different clock. We're still stuck on Calgary, the drama unfolding toward its certain ending.

He's not talking about death anymore, but wondering, in his few waking moments, what sort of sickness he has. This morning he asked for some fruit, and I cut an orange into thin slices and then halves, and placed the golden half-moons in his mouth like communion wafers, one after another, as he chewed with eyes shut. "This is...delicious," he said. In the afternoon he asked for a piece of bread with cheese. We had some labneh, yogurt cheese, and he ate that. Everything is a huge effort: opening his eyes, speaking, thinking, and especially, remembering; it is life pared down to its essence -- I thirst,  I hunger; I sleep -- the frightening unknown apparently kept at bay by love.

Is this in the world?

We stayed on the floor in his study  last night, and got up with him three times in the night, awakened by his groans as he tried to get up out of bed. He was practically sleep, walking with great difficulty to the bathroom, but determined to get there, groaning heavily all the while. Then he would fall back into bed with a great sigh. The third time he just let himself collapse, headfirst and face down across the mattress, and we had quite a time turning him around so that he was comfortable, but at the end of that process we could tell he was smiling; something about it was still amusing.

The disorientation returned with the dawn. He took the walker out into his living room, asking "where have all the books had come from in this place?"

"There are wonderful books here," said C. "Even books in Arabic!"

"Qu'est-ce que tu dis?" he said then, with some annoyance, leaning forward.

"There are a lot of wonderful books here,"

"Did someone steal them?"

Finally we got him to go back to bed. "Is this my bed?" he asked, and once he was settled I sat next to him. He looked at the wall and the familiar painting, shook his head, and said, "They even have my picture here!"

"Yes," I said. "It's your picture because this is your own room in your own house. Everything is OK."

"Is this a real place, then?" he said, looking at me inquisitively. "Is this in the world?"

I said, "Yes! It's very much a real place. You're still alive, J. is here, I'm  here, and C. is here -- we're all right here with you."

"Amazing!" he said, and fell asleep.

Trying to Get Home

Yesterday was Maundy Thursday, my fifth blogiversary,(follow link and scroll to the bottom) and the fifth year of the war in Iraq. I almost forgot all those things, so caught up are we in one small human drama amongst the millions that go on every single day, in spite (and because) of war, famine, natural disasters, and the mere passage of time. It was a happy day - even joyful - because it feels good to take care of another person so completely that I forget myself.

--

He spent an agitated night, getting up suddenly and insisting on going to the bathroom several times. My sister-in-law stayed with him and got very little sleep; my husband arrived to spell her this morning. When I got here, an hour later, my father-in-law was up in a chair, surrounded by his son and three nurses, one of whom was giving him some anti-anxiety medication from a dropper bottle. Beepers were going off, the phone rang loudly – it was the office calling to say the hospital bed was being delivered.

When the nurses moved away from his chair, J. and I spoke to him and held his shoulder; he looked unhappy and confused. “I need to go outside!” he said. “Get me a cane.” The walker wouldn’t do, he wanted his cane, and was becoming belligerent. “I have to go outside!”

“What’s outside?”

“My uncle’s house, it’s in the street. I need to go there.”

The room was full of commotion, comings and goings as a hospital bed was delivered. “What’s happening?” he kept asking.  I tried to reassure him that he’d be going home soon. He calmed down a little and said it was very strange, he had been in a big house “full of people.” “It’s odd that my parents haven’t been there yet,” he said. “Or Fuad.” (his older brother). I convinced him to sit down for a few minutes but he struggled up again, grasping the handles of the walker. He tried to push it toward the door, and then  turned around and sank down on the seat, putting his head on his arms.

One of the nurses came out of the bedroom and asked him how he was. “I want to go home,” he said, like a little child. “Let’s go.” He rocked the walker underneath him, trying to put it in motion.

“You are home,” she tried. “You’ve lived here at this place with us for a lot for years now."

“No,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “Home is Damascus.”

She patted him and went out. Then he looked at me pleadingly and said, “I really want to go home! Have J. push me. I know the way.”

“What’s the way?” I asked him. He spoke slowly, tracing the route in the air ahead of him with his finger:  “We go...across a very beautiful field... then a vast forest... then...home.”

I asked J. to get the wheelchair from the hallway; we put him in it and I rolled him around the apartment a little while they finished setting up the new bed. The motion seemed to help. “Not this way,” he said, when we got near the balcony windows. “There’s no way out that way. And look,” he said, noticing the faces of his great-grandchildren in the pictures on the bookshelves. “Even the grandchildren are here!” “And they have all the same books here as I had in my apartment.” We turned toward the table and the kitchen. “They even have my book here!” he said, noticing the yellow cover of his book on Jesus and sounding astonished.

“Yes!” I said. “Your book is everywhere!” and he laughed. Everyone had finally left. We headed toward his bedroom.

“Is this my bed?” he asked. We told him it was. “OK,” he sighed. “I want to go to sleep.”

He slept soundly  for a couple of hours, then woke up and began yelling very loudly; just noise, no words. I came in immediately, sat down, touched him, and said, “ I’m here, everything’s all right,” and he retorted, “Where were you?”

”I was just doing the dishes,” I said. “I was right in the kitchen.”

“You were both far away,” he complained, and then added, “Why don’t you go home and go to sleep?” J. came in, too, and we reassured him that we were with him, and we’d stay right there. J. went out and was talking to one of the nurses in the hallway. “That’s J.,” he said, listening. Intently. “He’s telling someone a story.”

“Your hearing seems to be making a miraculous recovery!” I said.

“Yes,” he smiled. “Unfortunately!” He shut his eyes again, and I stayed beside him, my hand on his arm, as he drifted off.

In a little while he woke again, much calmer.” I’m really having the strangest experience of my life,” he told me. “I can’t make it out. There’s a big house, very big, full of people I don’t know except for a few. J. is there, and I can see Anwar (his next-to-youngest brother)." He said there were also a lot of chairs – leather ones – and lots of children, who go to sleep and wake up at odd hours.” He opened his eyes again and said, “It’s night, but it looks like day. Were you wearing a dark red dress?”

“I’m wearing a red shirt right now,” I said.

“No, it was a long dress. But that’s funny, because I think of you as a human being.”

He slept again. His friend C. came in mid-afternoon, and the atmosphere became more normal and quiet. At five the hospice doctor arrived. He spoke with the three of us for a while, and then went in to talk to my father-in-law. We listened, astonished: the patient was totally clear, rational, described his symptoms and mental state perfectly. The doctor came back out, a bit bewildered. "Well," he said, "he seems to be doing pretty well..."

So later I made egg-and-yogurt soup and took a small bowl in to him. "This is what your dear wife always sent over to me when I was sick," I said.

"Leban?" he asked, perking up. I nodded.

"OK," he said, holding out his hand. He took a sip, declared, "This is what I eat best!" and drank the whole bowl, scraping the rice and bits of meat from the bottom with a spoon.

And tomorrow...well, tomorrow will be whatever it is. We're very much in the moment right now.

What begins well ends well

Sitting at his bedside, I listen to him breathing. Every now and then a hand emerges from beneath the blue comforter to scratch his neck; a smile plays across his lips; the deeper sleep resumes. For the past three days, since another "heart event" on Sunday evening, there's been a precipitous decline. His legs will barely support him now, and only by strength of will has he managed the trip between the bed and his chair. Yesterday he didn't get up at all; today when we arrived he was sitting in the chair trying to eat some soup a nurse had brought him, but he was having so much trouble breathing he was quickly exhausted, and fell asleep between breaths. Then he asked for a cheese sandwich, and I made him one, against our better judgment, but after two bites he began coughing and said, "I've eaten, my stomach is nourished, and now I think it is time for bed." He struggled to his feet with the usual exclamation of  "yu'allah!" and grasped the walker while we both supported him, and fell into bed with a sigh.

He doesn't know us now, all the time. Two nights ago, yes, but last night in animated, happy conversation, lying on his bed, he wove in and out of the present and the past, sometimes completely here with us as his son and daughter-in-law, sometimes back in the Damascus of his youth, talking to J. as if he were his brother Fuad, or Henry Nachtman, his old friend and rival for the same girl's affections.

"She had such a long list of suitors," he said, smiling, his eyes tightly closed, "She was beautiful, and had quite a presence. I used to take her to the symphony concerts - she loved music, and I of course knew nothing about it - but I always orchestrated our entrance, and people would turn their heads! She was the favorite of all the intellectuals at the university. There was Charles Malleck, a philosophy professor, and Henry Nachtman, a doctor -- six or seven men were fighting for her. And I was the one she wanted." He shook his head slowly from side to side, on the pillow. "The night before she left for Cairo I was with her at her house, and we were talking, and talking -- she was waiting for me to pop the question. But it got later and later...and I didn't do it. When I walked out of her house, they were all there, waiting in the woods, hoping! So later I arranged for Henry to have an appointment with her, and she ended up inviting him to come to Cairo and spend Christmas with the family."

"Why didn't you marry her?"

"I don't know! But I think the main reason was that she didn't want to go to college. I remember that she told me, "Oh, I read books!' but the books turned out to be Khalil Gibran! And probably the copy I had given her, at that! We didn't really talk about anything...our summer  plans, things like that."

"Why did you arrange the appointment for Henry?"

"Because...I was 'closest to the door,' so to speak. The rest of them were all waiting outside. I felt responsible, once I had decided I wasn't going to marry her. And Henry was really the best of the lot. But she didn't choose him, even though he went to Cairo. She married a very wealthy Egyptian with an Italian passport!"

He fell silent, thinking, and we thought he had dropped off to sleep again, but then he suddenly said, "Imagine! She could have had Charles Malleck, and she preferred me!"

--

Yesterday afternoon he had told my husband that he expected to die that night. They had had a long conversation together, with his father expressing several wishes, and making a few surprising confessions. As he has been doing quite consciously over the past few weeks, he was continuing to tie up loose ends, to conclude unfinished business. For some inexplicable reason, he had wanted his son to take the money he had in his pockets: "I have 13 dollars and 50 cents in there," he said. "I don't want to die with any cash. And you need to get hold of the people in M."

"Why is that?" J. asked. (This was a congregation he had served during two winters after his retirement)

"Because I told them a lot of lies and they collected them and published a book, and I want you to find all the copies and destroy them."

"Well,  Dad, I think that's going to be kind of hard!

--

But when we came back after supper, he was even weaker. He was confused about what time it was, and whether he had eaten or not, and seemed convinced that the nurses were refusing to give him his medication because of some mix-up, but finally relaxed when J. went to talk to them. "I am perfectly comfortable!" he assured me. "I know what is happening, I am not worrying at all, and I've become rather fascinated with watching the process!"

Today he's been repeating the same theme to the nurses, and to several people who called on the phone. Any trace of anger or frustration from the past weeks seems to have dissolved and his personality distilling into the sweetness we've always suspected to be its dominant trait. He thanks the nurses and staff profusely, and praises everyone who's mentioned: "a wonderful girl", "such a kind man!", "so decent, so lovely!" whether he knows precisely who they are or not. I wonder if he's made a conscious decision how he wanted to end his days, and chosen the better part; it seems to be so.

Just now the phone rang and he picked it up, listened, said thank you very much, and told the caller his son and daughter-in-law had been there but had gone home, 'reassured that he would be saying good morning to them tomorrow.' He hung up, then turned to me and said, "My goodness, what's going on? The word must have gone out that I am dying and they're all calling to say goodbye to me." He fell asleep, then woke up and declared, "I've been here 77 years and it's the best place in the world!"

"You mean here, in America?"

"Yep! I've lived 77 years among you and they've been good years." He shut his eyes and a contented smile creased the corners of his mouth. "What begins well ends well!"

A Week of Journeying: Asking Why (2)

Duccio, "The Wedding at Cana," from the Maesta altarpiece, Siena, 1308.

I stayed in that choir for two years, loving the music and fellowship, and still struggling with the same doubts. The rector at the time was a New York intellectual and former composer who had had a critical midlife health crisis and subsequently become a priest. I felt at home in his sermons for the first time; his mind ranged over the whole of human endeavor, challenging us to look at theology in a new way. The assistant was only a little older than I was; a young man with a great pastoral gift and a deep spirituality.  I had long conversations with both of those men, neither of whom rejected me for my doubts and both of whom were willing to engage about religion on a level that was new to me.

What wasn't working for me was the church community outside the small choir. I was a young single woman; this was a parish of families, most of whom were wealthy doctors or professors or local businesspeople. And it was New England, not the friendly, outgoing upstate New York I'd grown up in. On Sunday, all the parishioners were "a family." But time and time again, if I ran into someone from church in the grocery store or on the street and said hello, they'd look through me like they had never see me before. First of all I've never gotten used to the New England attitude of not saying hello to someone who's greeted you, even if they're a stranger. But this was over the top -- without my choir robe on, had I become invisible, or unrecognizable? In actuality, I was just as wasp-y and Ivy League-pedigreed as they were, but they didn't know that and I had no intention of bringing it up. I suspected they were simply too stuck up to speak to someone not in their social or professional circle. Was this their interpretation of Christianity? Looking around I saw I wasn't alone in this; other people who didn't fit a certain mold were also less than fully embraced by that church community.

The final blow came when I decided to marry. My boyfriend was Jewish and divorced. When I approached my rector, he apologized and said he couldn't perform the wedding. I was shocked and disappointed. Another Episcopal priest, not associated with the church, married us in a secular venue, and my choir and clergy friends attended. Somehow it never felt like a real marriage to me, from the moment we spoke our vows, but not for that reason. I did feel utterly unsupported by the church through the rocky months that followed. The marriage lasted only a year and a half. I met J. and left the church without looking back; we attended Sunday services occasionally in a nearby town where my father-in-law-to-be was the Unitarian minister, and two years later, he married us on a Vermont hilltop in a ceremony we wrote ourselves that felt sacred and binding, and still does to this day.

--

For the next decade and a half, I lived outside of the church. I went back to calling myself an agnostic, as I had in my teenage years. Life was full and busy as we established ourselves in our work, our artistic lives, and the home and garden we were working on together. But in my mid-thirties, I began to experience a personal crisis. Something was missing, and I felt it first in my paintings and drawings which seemed to be reaching a dead end. I'd evolved a high level of technical skill, and the paintings sold and were praised by people who saw them, but I knew something about them was incomplete, and became depressed, discouraged, and confused. My life felt like it was lacking a center, and that everything I had thought might provide it -- love, satisfying work, friends, a home, sufficient income -- had come up lacking. I decided to learn to meditate to try to gain some control over my emotions and the fears of mortality that were beginning to affect me, and got in touch with two friends, students of Chogyam Trungpa, who taught me the Tibetan Buddhist method of meditation. I also began reading a lot of books by Zen and Tibetan teachers. It was becoming clearer to me that the problem was very much within myself, and that I needed to undergo a transformation not only in how I was making art, but why. The why began to show me what was going on with my ego, and this began a period of painful discovery, unraveling, and change during which I was committed to a daily meditation practice. I laid aside my brushes entirely, deciding that I wouldn't continue until I felt the work was coming from a fresh place, and although I didn't know it then, this self-imposed exile would continue for five years.

The rest of my life went on as it had, but at the innermost level I felt alone, often frightened, and yet determined to continue. The Buddhist teachers whose words I was reading became my companions -- Shunryu Suzuki, Chogyam Trungpa, Philip Kapleau, Joko Beck, Taisen Deshimaru. What they said appealed to my intellectual mind, but they were right: without the non-intellectual learning gained slowly from the daily practice, the books would not have helped me. As it was, insights slowly arrived, and I gradually became more peaceful. In Shunryu Suzuki's words, change was happening "like getting wet in a fog."

A Week of Journeying: Asking Why

Doubting Thomas touches the wound in Christ's side, from the Maesta in Sienna, by Duccio

This period of dryness offered an opportunity - as is usually the case - to ask myself some pointed questions. The most basic was why I had gotten so involved in the church to begin with.

I had grown up in the Episcopal church. Already a skeptic at age six, I dropped out of Sunday School but kept singing in the children's choir, became confirmed at age 12, and continued to sing in the adult choir until I graduated from high school though I had already rejected much of the dogma. (The story is told in detail in the introduction to my book.) None of my questions had been successfully answered by confirmation classes, my parents (who were also less than convinced), or other "elders" I talked to. I was completely unable to believe in the virgin birth or the resurrection, saw most of the miracles (like the loaves and fishes story) as metaphor, and found it impossible to say the Creed. When I probed beneath the surface of what others believed, I found similar doubts but an accommodation on the basis of social norms: the Episcopal Church, even in our small rural town, was where the better-off, better-educated Protestants went to church. This hypocrisy bothered me a lot, and as soon as I was on my own, in college, I stopped attending.

But it wasn't quite that simple. Also from an early age, I had been very interested in religion in general and curious about what other people believed, what their practices were, and how different cultures gave rise to their particular faiths. Maybe it was a result of being so fascinated with the Greek myths as a child - I learned all the gods and goddesses and what they controlled and why. The world of passionate interaction between Mt. Olympus and humanity was very real to me. A little later, I read everything I could get my hands on about King Arthur; the Grail quest held a mystical interest for me that I still don't fully understand, but I know that it touched something very deep in me. These legends, along with the Iliad, set a tone for the search for human meaning that has occupied my as an adult. Spirituality, morality, ethics, aesthetics; the conflict between human love and divine love; the struggle to live with integrity and maintain nobility in the face of mortality: all those themes were interwoven in the epics of the Greeks and in the Arthurian legends that had their own roots as paganism gave way to early Christianity in the British Isles, the home of my own ancestors. And it was not coincidental, I think, that strong women figured as central characters in both the Greek and Arthurian legends - whether they were Athena, Aphrodite and Hera; the Trojan women from Hecuba to Cassandra; or Guinevere and Morgan le Fey. What I didn't grasp at that age was how the Gospel narrative I had heard and absorbed from the texts read each Sunday, and the liturgical music we sang, had also become interwoven with these other stories in my subconscious mind. On the surface, it somehow embarrassed me, and I rejected it.

Choosing to major in classical art and culture in college was a way of going deeper into these subjects, which I saw being played out all around me as contemporary society struggled with Vietnam, feminism, and civil rights, but the base of my interest (which I still didn't see clearly) was neither purely political nor academic: it had to do with the inter-penetration of the spiritual search for authenticity and meaning, and the demands of individual human lives lived out in the real world.  University life had opened up a much wider world for me, and I wanted more of it: I had friends who were Jewish, black, urban, foreign; on the same floor of my residential hall were several Persian kids whose fathers had been associates of the Shah; I became friends with professors who had lived all over the world. But although I loved the intellectual life and was successful at it, the insularity of the ivory tower seemed too precious for me, and too removed from the vibrant and often violent world of those times.

Eventually I decided against academia as a career, and became a self-employed graphic designer and artist. I was 26, and had just moved to Vermont; knowing very few people other than my then-boyfriend, and searching to find my own place in a new community, I went back to church, and once again joined a choir. Soon I'd leave it again.

A Week of Journeying: At the Gates

It's Palm Sunday, the day Christians commemorate Jesus' fateful entry into Jerusalem, which set off the events of Holy Week that led to his arrest and crucifixion. After the 40 reflective days  of Lent, on Palm Sunday it always feels like events in one's own life, as well as in the Passion story, have suddenly been set into motion again - and that's how the theology of Holy Week is intended. It is a journey within a journey, where the path taken by Jesus of Nazareth can sometimes encourage a closer look at one's own path through life toward its inevitable end.

I've been thinking that I've actually not written very much here about my own spiritual path and practice, although I write a lot about religion, politics, justice, human relationships, and what could generally be called "spirit." A good friend recently put the question bluntly: "You're an intelligent person - how do you do it? Stay in the church, that is." Fair enough. So I thought maybe I would take the occasion of this week to try to reflect a little more openly on my own spiritual path and how Christianity fits into that -- or doesn't.

The past six years have been a time of unprecedented transition and change in my life. If I divide that period roughly in half, the first contains the decision to write a book about Bishop Gene Robinson and the sexual politics of the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion; the diagnosis of my mother's illness; the beginning of the Iraq war; and our decision to move to Montreal and apply for permanent residency status in Canada. The second period of time begins with my mother's death; the publication of my book; and our receipt of permanent residency (all of which happened within one month, May-June 2005); grieving and adjustment in my immediate family; leaving our rural home, friends, and garden of thirty years and changing to life in a new country, an international city based on a different language, and a much smaller urban living space. During these same five or six years I've also had a scary brush with mortality - a sudden bleeding ulcer - and gone through menopause. A lot, in anyone's book of life, but this is not a complaint - in fact I feel very fortunate. I also feel a lot older than at the beginning... and know I've changed.

At the beginning of all this, I was involved with a longstanding, very supportive, and familiar group of friends in our former community and in my church and choir, as well as friends online. I was serving the end of a three-year vestry term, and also writing about the Church, with a capital C, and in constant contact with a lot of clergy, many of whom were also good friends. Going through Holy Week together with my choir had been an annual ritual, for instance, and while I had my own opinions about the theology of what had actually happened and what it meant, I often found the week quite moving.

During my mother's illness, I was constantly worried that I wouldn't know what to do, or be able to handle things, when the time came -- but in fact I was able to do it. As I had done many times in the past, I asked for help and strength and felt I received it, or found it somewhere -- whatever. I certainly prayed for her and for all of us, but I never had illusions; where biology is concerned, I'm a realist.  But despite having a pretty profound experience immediately after her death, that time also marked a significant shift in my spiritual life and my relationship with the institutional church. I became more convinced than ever that asking for guidance or opening myself to higher possibilities, without preconceived expectations, was the only kind of prayer that made sense to me, but I also felt more alone than I ever had, and that absence included the God I might have once believed in and who still seemed to be presented by the church I had known since childhood. We then became part of a different, equally supportive community at the cathedral in Montreal, where I was - for the first time in fifteen years - a parishioner rather than a choir singer, accompanied in the pews by my husband who had never been a regular church-goer at all.

The church in Canada is dying; it's an entirely different situation and feeling to be a member of a church there than in most parts of the United States. And because of that, people were talking about different things: about post-modern Christianity; about losing buildings, clergy, members; about redefining what it even means to be a community. There was no coasting along on the same old theology and comfortable words, supported by a fairly constant base of well-heeled, pledging communicants. Everyone, including the clergy, had faced doubts and a core crisis of identity, and were willing to talk about it. I found that enormously refreshing. But it was an intellectual atmosphere that had almost nothing to do with maintaining my meditation practice, let alone prayer. My book about the American church had been published; it had its own life; I let it go. I was fed up with the political fighting over the issue of homosexuality, and disgusted with the slowness, cowardice, and hypocrisy of the Anglican leadership. On the most personal level, I entered a period of dryness and disconnection in which I realized I had left behind many of my former beliefs and sense of identification with the church, perhaps for good...

(The painting is one of many panels from Duccio's Maesta, an altarpiece at the Siena Cathedral, 1308. Thank you to A-W for putting this work under my eyes this week.)