All Things Connected: What Are You Hospicing?

On Saturday, I FaceTimed with my Nana Ollie. On Sunday, I took the first flight out of Missoula to see her. On Monday and Tuesday I sat with her all day, and finally on Tuesday — yesterday — we took deep breaths and her energy left her body to enter mine. Today I cleaned out her apartment.

This is to say, on Saturday when we FaceTimed I asked her how she was doing and she said, "Oh, you know, same old shit." But her voice was wrong. It was anything but the same old shit. I was in a snow-covered construction site, throwing snowballs for my dog, when the call came in. I hurried home and ordered the next available plane tickets out of Montana, which weren't until the following day. My best friend picked me up from the airport. I'll spare the details of her decline but it was rapid and heartbreaking, then peaceful.

Around 6:30 Tuesday evening, while people were discussing caregiving plans, I sidled back over to her and rubbed her back, held her hand, kissed her forehead. She'd been laying on her good ear but had just been rolled back over so her hearing ear was facing up and she could finally hear me. "I'm here, Nana. You're safe. You can let go whenever you want to. We are all here, and we are ready to say goodbye whenever you're ready to let go. You can relax. We will miss you very much but we're OK. We aren't going to leave until you do, you won't be alone. We love you so much." Right then, she took a last gasp, then I watched her pulse slow to almost nothing, and called my family over to say goodbye while she was still hopefully present. You can read more about her here. I felt honored to be the one she, a stubborn and self-determined woman, allowed to coax her into the next realm of being, whatever that may be. I think it was a final gift between two people who love each other very much. She lived well into her 102nd year, and volunteered at hospice into her 90s to "take care of the old people." I hope, in her final moments, she felt as taken care of.

My personal belief, which is a blend of science and spirit, is that when the energy leaves the body, it isn't abrupt, but the last moment is our core of being and that energy disperses into the atmosphere to be absorbed by the air and living beings and even objects around it. So being there to hold her hand, to breathe in as she breathed out, to sit in pain and patience with her, to soothe one another, was ceremony, was spiritual in a deep and literal sense. This woman who helped raise me now is me.

As you sink into this meditation, I want you to think about the ways we are all connected, the ways we absorb each other, and the energy we cultivate and put out into those around us. I don't have the energy myself today to give a whole guided meditation, so please bear with me:

There are a handful of metaphors that have come to mind: a city park sidewalk water fountain, a fireplace bellow. What I think feels correct in the moment in sourdough starter. How are you being fed, how are you feeding others? Sourdough starter was scraped from a clay bowl excavated from a thousands-year-old community, reanimated, and baked into delicious (so it was reported) bread. We don't cease to exist so long as we are activated and utilized. The recipes, ovens, and hands that knead us may change, and the flour that nourishes can influence the outcome and turn our starter into something that changes taste over time, but we remain nonetheless. So what hands are kneading you, what flour is feeding you? And who, in return, do you nourish?

In that sense, we don't live forever, life itself is forever and it's what happens in that life that has end stops as we cease to be the flour that once was. It may be time to hospice some recipes, some cracked clay pots, and find a new way for your sourdough to rise.