On Mortality
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It seems that the older I get, the more I understand the way mortality shapes our perception and our willingness to be fully in this world. It’s not something I used to think about directly—too scary—but now I often find myself reading the obituaries, musing on what I would want my own to say: What are the things that will sum up my life? What will stand out? I know this sounds a little morbid, but as Mother Theresa has said: “Each of us is merely a small instrument; all of us, after accomplishing our mission, will disappear.” I wonder what small things people will remember: my dinner parties on the deck? My love for my dog? My weird obsession with cooking magazines? Will they remember my writing, my teaching, or will they remember a particular morning with coffee, a conversation that delved deeper than expected?
We can’t really know. All we can do is keep learning, until the very end, how to live an authentic life. How to be really here. And we can look to others as teachers in this lesson.
My next-door neighbor, Winton Manley, is just such a teacher for me: He’s ninety-eight years old and still drives his own car. I see him in the afternoons, backing out of the driveway, swerving a little wildly sometimes, but he always makes it safely into the street, then putters away in his white Oldsmobile to wherever it is he needs to go. He takes care of things. He takes care of his wife, Dorothy, who is ninety-four and has such bad arthritis now that she can’t move without her walker. “I have to persuade her to get up,” Winton says to me sometimes, when he walks over to admire my petunias or my pansies. “There are good days and there are bad days.”
I remember so clearly a day last summer, when I saw the two of them sitting out on their new deck in the sun. (Winton had it built because Dorothy can’t get out into her garden anymore; here she can admire her pots of geraniums.) The light glinted off their white, white hair. They were just sitting and smiling, not saying a word, and when I finally waved to announce my presence, Dorothy gazed at me as if I were just the most blessed creature on the planet. Her face looked translucent with love, with her expectation that I was exactly what the doctor ordered.
“A beautiful day!” she exclaimed, in a voice that’s grown so wavery in the years I’ve lived next door. I echoed her, speaking as loudly as I could: “Yes, a beautiful day!” And because I was on my way to my own back patio to do who knows what—some reading, some weeding—and because it would have been exhausting to keep talking in that loud, hearty voice, I just waved again and continued on, leaving them sitting there, nodding, enjoying their beautiful day.
And I know that sometime soon, their daughter or grandson will come to my door and tell me that one or both of them has “passed.” And I know I’ll gasp and say, “I’m sorry,” because I am: sorry not only for their passing, and for a daughter’s grief, a grandson’s pain, but truly sorry for all my moments of inattention, my reluctance to keep talking a few minutes longer, my unwillingness to walk the few steps necessary to chat. I’ll remember all the cucumbers and green beans Winton left on my doorstep—bags of them, more than a single woman could ever eat—and I’ll wish, so heartily, that I’d had even a sliver of such abundance to return.
There’s a poem I love by Miguel de Unamuno called “Throw Yourself Like Seed.” In it he exclaims, “Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field….”
When I consider my life as one defining moment after another, I see that I am most fully alive when I “throw myself like seed,” not holding back. I ask myself: What am I holding in reserve? Why? So I take this as my lesson, allowing Winton and Dorothy to be my unexpected teachers: As much as we can, we must never pass up the opportunity to connect, to be fully with each other and with the world, to make each day beautiful for the time we have.
From The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World by Brenda Miller and Holly J. Hughes. Published by Skinner House in 2012, this book is available from the UUA bookstore or 617-723-4805.
There is an interactive website for The Pen and the Bell at www.penandbell.com.
By Brenda Miller
On Mortality
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Until I turned forty-six, it was easy to imagine that growing old was something that happened to others, that death was a long way off. While I hope death is a long way off, I’m coming to accept that it will happen to me, that none of us—no matter how healthy or fit—will escape it and that, much as we might wish, we won’t be able to choose our departure.
Listening For Our Song
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I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung.
—Rabindranath Tagore
On sabbatical in East Africa, I heard a story of a people who believe that we are each created with our own song. Their tradition as a community is to honor that song by singing it as a welcome when a child is born, as a comfort when the child is ill, in celebration when the child marries, and in affirmation and love when death comes. Most of us were not welcomed into the world in that way. Few of us seem to know our song.
Making a Fist
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For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past
the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
From Your Minister
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I began attending the Quaker Meeting close to my apartment on Sunday mornings. Week after week I sat with them. Nope, no awakening for me there. Probably a good thing, too, because I wouldn’t have had a clue what to do with it. But at one of those Meetings I heard about a daylong workshop on Indian Treaties.
REsources for Living
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What does it take to become enlightened? What is required in order to awaken to the truth of the universe? How do you go from your ordinary “I wonder if we’re out of milk?” frame of mind into a higher consciousness? The world’s most famous story of awakening is the story of how Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha.
Everything We Need
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We already have everything we need. There is no need for self-improvement. All these trips that we lay on ourselves—the heavy-duty fearing that we’re bad and hoping that we’re good, the identities that we so dearly cling to, the rage, the jealousy and the addictions of all kinds—never touch our basic wealth. Read more →
Hospitality: Tuning Into Our Neighbors
Although I am hearing impaired, I spend time and energy each week attending to Radyo Lekól, a Creole language program on one of my local public radio stations. I always learn a lot, just as when I turn and attend to Democracy Now En Español. The news covered is sometimes the same stories as in the English language media, but often from different perspectives, and, even more often, completely different stories.
I am fluent neither in Creole nor Spanish, but tuning in and attending to the news of my larger community, in the languages of my larger community, is part of living faithfully. I listen as a stranger when I do not understand what is being said. I listen as a neighbor to seek to understand. Even though listening is exhausting—that’s part of life for many of us with hearing impairments—as a matter of faith, I need to spend energy attending to my neighbor’s concerns and dreams.
How can I care about my neighbors’ concerns and dreams if I do not know what is going on with them?
Attending to my neighbors’ concerns and dreams is the kind of hospitality we practice with committed multiculturalism, with working for justice and equality, with choosing and sustaining pluralism day after day. It is a hospitality where I am sometimes stranger, sometimes neighbor, sometimes host, and sometimes kin. But in all of those roles I am called in love to a generosity of spirit to hope, to cultivate understanding, and to care.
How are you attending to your neighbors’ concerns and dreams?
Meeting Alzheimer’s: Companionship for Caregivers
“Caregiving is a defining moral practice. It is a practice of empathic imagination, responsibility, witnessing and solidarity with those in great need. It is a moral practice that makes caregivers, and at times even the care receivers, more present, and thereby more fully human.”
—Dr. Arthur Kleinman, Harvard Medical School Professor and primary caregiver for his wife, Joan
Based on what we know about Alzheimer’s disease and the observations we may make with “eyes to see but do not see” and “ears to hear but do not hear,” we could erroneously conclude that the potential and purpose of persons with Alzheimer’s is all used up. In order to discover their potential and purpose, we must look at them with the “fresh” eyes of one who is looking for the holy. Then, it is up to us—those who know and love persons with Alzheimer’s—to reveal their value so the rest of the world can also see and appreciate them.
The Challenge of Being “All of the Above”
I’m just not willing to choose only one.
I have been a student of religion all my life, it seems. But I have lived in worlds that press me to choose. I attend a Christian seminary. I have been in a “goddess group” of Wiccans. I honor humanism. I have had the holy joy of worshiping with Muslims, with Pagans, with Protestants, with Catholics, with Jews, with Hare Krishnas.
Sometimes, kind practitioners of one particular religion or another will profess that they know what I truly am (and it is always what they are). I take these as compliments, for I know they are intended that way.
Others are not so complimentary. Mine is a deliberately syncretic faith. “Syncretism,” to many in exclusivist religions, is a heresy, an un-holy mess, something to be avoided at all costs.
Well-meaning people will explain that it doesn’t matter what I choose, but I must choose, and only one. Only then can I go truly deep into a religion.
