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Voices of the Northwest
Alaska Life
Hospice
Reflections: To Live with Abandon
by Paula Sanders McCarron
We laughed with abandon. The way women laugh when there are no children, parents
or men present. The four of us were bone-tired but we were smug with pride and pleasure
for having stolen one last glorious weekend from the all too brief Alaskan summer.
Our hair smelled of smoke and our eyelashes were sticky from the salt of the ocean
air. We'd spent three days kayaking the waters of Prince William Sound where our
boats skimmed over glittering beds of jellyfish. Water danced off our paddles as
we rode past glaciers, waterfalls, eagles, otters, streams choked with salmon and
one black bear.
And now we were were now sitting in a line of cars, waiting for clearance to drive
through the mountain tunnel that connects the town of Whittier to the Seward Highway
where we'd turn north and drive back to Anchorage. Our thoughts were of warm beds,
clean sheets, hot baths and steaming cups of coffee.
We got the signal to proceed and began heading into the tunnel. A small of amount
of light could be seen at the other end. "It's like a near death experience,"
someone joked. "Head toward the light. Just go toward the light."
"We're passing through the veil," someone else said and the rest of us
laughed in agreement and acknowledgement.
Passing through the veil. The ethereal place where life and death meet. We live most
of our lives in denial that the veil exists. Sometimes though we are forced to see
it and when we do, we hope itsí folds will not drape over us.
My first significant experience with death when I was twelve years old and my dad
died. Then as a teenager and into my twenties, I spent many years working in nursing
homes where the doors of patients' rooms where closed whenever the funeral home staff
came to make a call. Following the nursing homes, I worked sixteen years in a home
care hospice program. None of those experiences make me presumptuous enough to believe
that I could cope with death better than anyone else but I did believe that I had
at least grasped some of the rudimentary lessons that death teaches.
But that was before September 11th.
When I'd heard about the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center, my eyes
had not yet fully opened. What a terrible accident, I thought as I glanced over at
the clock radio, squinting my eyes to read the time. 6:03 a.m. Alaska Standard Time.
10:03 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
The broadcast continued with the news that a second plane had crashed into the towers
of the World Trade Center. What could account for such a freakish thing as two planes
hitting one building? A complete breakdown of the F.A.A.? I was struggling with my
incomprehension when the announcement came that a third plane had crashed into the
Pentagon and a fourth plane had crashed in Pennsylvania.
The Pentagon? How the hell does anything crash into the Pentagon? I sat upright on
my bed, too paralyzed to move. Time slowed in the way it does when you are ten and
your cousin holds your head under water too long and your words gurgle into bubbles
while you push to fight your way back to the surface.
What do I do now? I wondered. It seemed absurd to take a shower and go to work. But
how much longer could I sit here in my bedroom? I did the only thing that made sense
to me. I picked up the phone and called my family who live in Massachusetts and California.
Then I broke down and cried in a way I'd not cried since my divorce a decade ago.
In the weeks that have followed, I've tried to cope with reports, both confirmed
and unconfirmed of terrorist cells, anthrax, truck bombs, crop dusters filled with
biological agents, armed guards and federal marshals in the airports, exploding bridges,
the return of smallpox and a whole lot more that I'm simply not able or willing to
recall right at the moment.
And how have I coped with all of this? Not as well as I'd hoped. I've had moments
of anxiety, days of unshakeable sadness and weeks of feeling overpowered and helpless.
And I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about the people I've known over the
years who have lived with full awarness of their impending death and how much more
I have yet to learn from them.
"None of us has any guarantee on how many years we get" or "all we
have is today" are fairly typical statements made by family, friends and hospice
workers to the person living with terminal illness. And yes, I've said those words
myself. I've even had them said to me by dying friends on those occasions when I
hoped to offer some support and companionship to one of them and found that in fact
these were the same things my dying friends were offering to me.
I've found solace and spiritual strength in the company of the dying. Iíve
found tremendous gifts in their words, their spunk, their sadness, their resolve,
their pain, their acceptance, and their grace. But the events of September 11th and
subsequent events have brought me into a terrain that I had never before been asked
to negotiate. The situation had moved from the philosophical to the personal.
The poets speak of the "little deaths" and how one will die a thousand
little deaths before the time that death does arrive. In the past month, Iíve
come close to dying a few of those little deaths. I almost cancelled a long-awaited
reunion visit with a friend out of fears that the plane would crash. I considered
skipping my annual tradition of mailing Christmas cards because of anthrax. I wondered
if I should bother to keep up with my writing or maybe at least stick to non-fiction
because "after all what would my poems matter in the end".
But then I remembered David telling me how it felt to be dying in one breath and
listing his Christmas gift list in the next. I thought of Steve recounting the details
of his most recent trip to Europe which included the misery brought on by his AIDS
medications. And I remembered sitting with Christa who told me that she loved me
"just so you know" as she asked me to help make her funeral plans. Where
did each of them find the strength to live in such openness to their dying and with
an even greater determination to be present for the remaining days of their lives?
I need to know. I need to know because if I don't learn how to live in the face of
death then my life is going to curl up like a dry, shriveled leaf, scraping across
the sidewalk as it is tosses aimlessly in the wind. I don't want to live that way
-- in a state of decay, without direction, powerless. I donít want to die
that way either.
Instead I pray to live with abandon. And when it is my time to die, I hope to feel
a smug sense of pride and pleasure from having stolen every opportunity to love and
laugh even as I feel the soft sweep of the veil brushing against my life.
Paula's web site, Free Flight, can be found at http://www.customcpu.com/personal/psm/index.html
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