Lois

Jim and I sat with Mom for the last couple hours of her life last night.

Before sunrise on Wednesday, I had awoken from a powerful dream, in which the vibrant, out-going Mom whom I haven't seen in several years was holding everyone's attention at a party with her three brother and other family and friends.

Later that morning, when I visited her at St. Catherine Labouré Manor, I found her in her recliner in the sunny hallway outside her room, her head pillowed against the hand rail since she could no longer sit up straight. As often happened, when she awoke and saw me, she lit up.

I told her briefly about the dream, and she smiled and nodded. We sat for a while. Once I saw that she was drifting off to sleep again, I said, "I love you." She mouthed the words back to me.

Last night, the nurse phoned us to say that Mom had labored breathing and very low blood oxygen. We sat with her as her breaths became slower and shallower, until she stopped breathing around 10:17 PM.

We are grateful for the time and love she has given so many of us.

1924 - 2011

And so it is.

Blessèd Be,
Michael Bright Crow

Senior Witch in stir

Just about everyone Walhydra knows at work, at home and online seems to be hanging by a thread right now.

Between deaths, illnesses, severely increasing staff and budget austerity on the job, loss of jobs, loss of homes, and so on, friends are barely managing—yet still managing, somehow—to hold each other up in tenderness. Forgiving each others lapses and sharp edges, simply because Something keeps helping them to remember that they are all in this together.

Walhydra and Hubby Jim, themselves, have been struggling for weeks with the reality that their Mom, Senior Witch, can no longer live safely in assisted living.

She has fallen five times since the beginning of September, three of those falls in one week, all of them alone in her room.

Three trips to ER, two cuts to the forehead which required stitches, a hospital stay for CAT scans, MRI and ultrasound of the carotid arteries, but no explanation for the falls—except that she is increasingly neglecting food, water and hygiene and probably standing up too fast.

When Walhydra brought Senior Witch back from being stitched up after the latest fall two weeks ago, she knew decisively that it was time to move her Mom into skilled nursing care.

This has been a wrenching experience...and Walhydra is so exhausted that she is letting her amanuensis fill out this post with excerpts from an email exchange with R, JimJim's ex and still a dear friend and mentor for both Walhydra and her hubby.

Here's the gist of it.

Monday, R:

Thanks for the update, how are you holding up sport? Love you muchly.

Tuesday, W:

I feel like I haven't slept in six weeks, since Mom's first fall (Sept. 5). Not constant worry, but constant background worry. You know how that goes.

Lot's of friendly support, good on-going contact with my sister and brother.

Thanks for your love.

Tuesday, R:

Hugs babe.

Wednesday, W:

Thanks, R.

I'm concerned, because I catch myself being tempted by the old lure of depression, that false escape from difficulties. Don't want to go that road again, precisely because it makes it so much harder to act decisively...but I'm sad and tired...and everyone around me seems the same.

Running on faith without the accompanying feelings at present.

The coincidence of autumn and Mom's drastic decline leaves me plodding along. Jim's very burned out, too, from a very heavy work load this semester. And we're struggling at the library due to hiring freeze, budget cuts and, now, seasonal illnesses.

National and global news is not uplifting either.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

[Thanks, Walhydra, for the note of levity. :-) ]

All sounds worse than it probably actually is...but that's the difficulty.

Where did I leave my bootstraps?

:-\

Wednesday, R:

I gladly will loan you my boot hooks to go into your bootstraps, dear friend, and I praise God that you really do not need them.

You are your mother's witch child, and you know the things you must do, even as tired as you may feel.

I can and do send you my energy to share and use just as quickly as you need to. I am with you always and will give you strength to persevere my friend.

"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence comes my help." (Psalm 121:1)

Blessèd Be.

Thursday, W:

Thanks, Dear One.

As you point out, there is that higher order level of awareness which continues to say, "You know the things you must do."

This morning, when the alarm went off at 6:30, I found I wanted to get out of bed at once.

That's progress.

I did my lower back exercises for the first time in weeks. I dressed. I fed the furry brothers. I actually ate breakfast myself, instead of running away from the house in the morning dark and getting just coffee at Starbucks.

That's progress.

Mom doesn't understand why she's where she is now, and she wants me to "take her home."

I know she has to stay in skilled nursing—regardless of how well rehab goes.

Somehow, we all need to help her to understand, at some level, that this new place is safe and wholesome.

Aside from the dementia, there is the dislocation for this very private person of being in a hospital-like room with no privacy, and the noise of other residents and staff (and the beeping of alarms) all around her....

And no room in the room. Just the bed, the nightstand, the cupboard...and the other bed. That bed is now empty, but it stands as a further "threat" to personal boundaries.

Oy!

I hate it myself. When I first saw the room, I felt despair, even knowing she has to stay here. Especially knowing she has to stay here.

I can't tell how demented she is, how much or little of this she normally notices...because when we visit, she is still able to come into focus and present something of the old Senior Witch persona and intelligence.

I can tell she is unhappy.

Prayers for Mom. Inward assurance and peace.

What else can we do?

Love, and
Blessed Be.

Walhydra realized today that this space also reminds her of twelve years "behind the wall" as a prison counselor...watching pairs of inmates share rooms the size of her bathroom.

Senior Witch jokes that, as a child, she distressed her beloved maiden aunts during a holiday visit by singing a song she'd learned on the radio.

It was one she liked the sound of, but whose lyrics she barely paid attention to as she sang them.

Her aunts thought she was singing about staying with them.

Now if I had the wings of an angel,
Over these prison walls I would fly....

Now Walhydra will have to hang the picture of these two aunts over Senior Witch's bed and tease her into singing that song.

Senior Witch does still have a sense of humor...thank Goddess! It's in there...somewhere....

Here's Hubby Jim's response to Walhydra's latest email (which she CCed to him):

I love you very much, Sweet Man. Let’s work together to help her to adjust to the new environment, and to assure her that we will be there when she needs us.

Walhydra says, "Let's all work together to help all of us, to assure all of us."

What else can we do?

Blessed Be.

---

Another sweet reply from our friend R:

I find so very startling at times to realize that no matter how much I wish to ignore the hard decisions of life, the inner spirit always guides me in the right direction to do the things I must do for peace of mind.

Be at peace with that which has presented itself to Senior Witch as she walks softly into the sunset of her mind for I am convinced that when we may be presented with what appears as confusion, she is in some special mode of recall that allows her to persist in the life and loves she has left in this life.

Confusion to us may be a process of discarding the unwanted and, more importantly unnecessary baggage, to allow for the warmth or grace to seep into the very marrow of her being.

May it be so for her and eventually for us as well.

Selah!

Peace is with you, in you, and around you; stop and take notice of the peace of God.

(Please note that I am in tears because I am preaching to my self as well brother.)

Ahhh, Blessed Peace...

I love you, R

Hafiz, again

Walhydra was looking this morning for something she could use to comfort her brilliant brother and his wife and son, all of whom are going through major challenges.

She wasn't surprised to find it here:

You Were Brave in that Holy War

You have done well
In the contest of madness.

You were brave in that holy war.

You have all the honorable wounds
Of one who has tried to find love
Where the Beautiful Bird
Does not drink.

May I speak to you
Like we are close
And locked away together?
Once I found a stray kitten
And I used to soak my fingers
In warm milk;

It came to think I was five mothers
On one hand.

Wayfarer,
Why not rest your tired body?
Lean back and close your eyes.

Come morning
I will kneel by your side and feed you.
I will so gently
Spread open your mouth
And let you taste something of my
Sacred mind and life.

Surely
There is something wrong
With your ideas of
God

O, surely there is something wrong
With your ideas of
God

If you think
Our Beloved would not be so
Tender.

—The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the great Sufi Master
translated by Daniel Ladinsky

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

The Virgin of Hollywood, Florida

Walhydra doesn’t like to acknowledge her East Coast liberal condescension toward the popular gullibility of “the masses,” especially their love-hate relationship with celebrity and their gleeful embrace of “miracles” which claim to trump science.

She and hubby Jim have not had a television since 1992, shortly after the now-departed Miso the Cat came into their lives. This means that they learn about news and culture the old fashioned way, through the newspaper and the radio.

And...by browsing the tabloid covers at the grocery checkout. One of their favorite games is to count how many different covers show Brad, Angelina, Jennifer and Company in how many contradictory combinations of adoption, jealous spat, breakup, secret meeting, ecstatic reconciliation, etc.

Given her myopic view of the world, Walhydra was delighted to have her eyes opened a bit by Elizabeth Svoboda’s recent New York Times article about University of Bremen neuroscientist Doris Tsao’s research. Intrigued by how readily people will claim to see “faces” given the right configuration of light and dark areas, Dr. Tsao eventually discovered three regions of the temporal lobe in macaque monkeys which fire at the slightest glimpse of such a configuration.

Of course, Walhydra was also fascinated, and she plunged immediately into an extensive Google search.

[Aside: “I became a librarian,” she says, “because I can’t remember anything any more, but I know how to look things up.”]

She quickly found the term pareidolia, referring to the misperception of vague and random stimuli as recognizable. As Dr. Tsao’s research confirms, we have a “hardwired” survival technique enabling us to recognize faces from a distance with poor visibility—but this wiring also “sees” what isn’t there.

Or so the scientists claim, say Walhydra’s skeptical masses. For every space probe photograph revealing the natural structure of the Cydonian “face” on Mars, there is a True Believer who can prove that it is actually artificial.

All of which brings us back to Walhydra’s condescension and subsequent enlightenment.

What mainly caught her eye in the Times article was the picture of Diana Duyser’s grilled cheese sandwich. After keeping this sandwich in a reliquary for ten years—during which time she insists it got neither moldy nor crumbly and brought her miraculous blessings—Mrs. Duyser sold it on eBay for $28,000. Definitely a miraculous blessing.

And why all the attention? Because you can see the face of the Virgin Mary on the toast.

Umm....

Walhydra sees it too. Or, rather, some cells in her temporal lobe fire because a certain configuration of light and shadow matches the hardwired primate pattern for recognizing a face.

A woman’s face. Gazing upward. With lipstick and, Walhydra imagines, the permed wave of her bangs falling coyly over her right eye, in the manner of a Hollywood starlet—if that isn’t going too far....

So, this is a case of religious pareidolia. A Catholic woman seeing the Virgin Mary, where a Muslim might see the name of Allah or a verse from the Qur’an, written in Arabic script.

But, um.... Walhydra furls her eyebrows.

Could it be, then, that Mrs. Duyser’s reaction to the toast means she had already experienced Mary as the personification of divine feminine benevolence and compassion breaking into her life?

Sort of like the Tibetan Buddhists’ acknowledgement of Green Tara, who refused to become a bodhisattva until she could do so in female form, and who then returned to bless the world, as she does to this day.

Maybe Mrs. Duyser came to her lunch already imbued with a trust in and longing for Divine Presence, and her temporal lobe—and the toaster—just did the rest.

Hmm....

That gets Walhydra to wondering, a bit ruefully: How does one move from scorn for the credulous to a working, sustaining faith for oneself?

Increasingly as she approaches—eek!—sixty, Walhydra finds herself suddenly awake at 2:30, 3:30, 4:30 in the morning. Wide awake, with “monkey mind” jabbering away, listing off and analyzing all the problems ahead.

How to provide long distance care and safety for her Mom, Senior Witch?

How to trust her knowledge that, beneath their well-guarded father-and-son barriers (“After all, boys will be boys”), she and her Dad, the Lutheran pastor, live in the same land of the heart?

How to sustain hubby Jim’s career hopes, when the alpha male-driven winds of academic bureaucracy may be forcing them to move again.

How to get the code on that library web page to put the pop-up menu where she wants it?

How...how...how...?

For her first thirty years, Walhydra alternated between her favorite pastime of despair and her search for the right combination of outer world rituals and magical thinking.

Hoping to find the perfect grilled cheese sandwich.

Now, instead, she drags her old bones into the dark living room to do limbering exercises flat on her back. Stumbles into her meditation room to sit a squirmy, inattentive zazen....

And at some point, amidst the monkey chatter, glimpses the right combination of dark and light patterns to remind her of a face which no one can see and no one can name adequately.

It is a face of calm certainty, saying, “Be still.”

Walhydra exhales.

“Be in the present moment.”

Walhydra inhales.

“Walk in this moment throughout the day.

“Everything else is in your mind. Memories of what’s happened. Imaginings of what you hope or fear will happen. Struggles to control and reshape both.

“It’s just monkey mind, doing its hardwired job of trying to survive in the jungle.

“But you don’t have to give it all of your attention all of the time. After all, it’s had millions of years of practice.

“And eventually you’re going to die anyway. Everybody dies.”

Walhydra has stopped squirming.

“So just be in the present moment. It’s the only place your awareness can actually be.

“Five hours from now, you can only be in the present moment. Five days. Five years.”

Walhydra grins silently. She bows, rises to her feet—much lighter than when she sat down—and stands before her Jesus/Buddha altar.

The words of the old ex-slaver John Newton come back to her:

Amazing grace,
how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me.

I once
was lost,
but now am found,
was blind, but now I see.

Amused at the horror of her Lutheran ancestors—not to mention a number of Pagan, Quaker and Humanist friends—Walhydra giggles as she feels her right hand lift to the ceiling on its own, in good Pentacostal style, to send this blesséd energy back to the Source who has graciously shared it with her.

Blessèd Be.