The Square, Oxford, Mississippi

A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

During the holidays, not everyone is all joyful, all the time. We may sing, “Joy to the World,” but some hearts are heavy.

Maybe your person has died this year, and this is the first Christmas without them. Maybe they died 25 years ago and every Christmas since brings a sadness.

Maybe you can’t be with the one you love. Your heart is in another city. [For those of a certain age, complete the song lyrics, “love the one you’re with.” I digress.]

The message we get from our “friends” social media and TV commercials and “holiday specials” streaming our way is that everyone is happy, even joyful. What’s wrong with you?

My message?

If you are feeling joyful, by all means, enjoy yourself. Spread your joy. God knows we need it.

At the same time, keep in mind, there is a lot of grief and sadness out there. Comfort the broken-hearted. Give space to those who need some. Even the Messiah in the Hebrew scriptures was thought to be “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”

The post Happy Holidays? Joy and Grief Collide first appeared on Hank Dunn.

Photo by Chris F, Pexels

Have you ever laughed at a funeral? It might happen more often than you think. I’ve joked that laughing at a funeral is to be expected. After all, what are the first three letters of “funeral?”

Of course, I wouldn’t say this to a grieving family. But when I am sitting vigil with a family in the last hours or days of their person’s life, or when I’m preparing for a funeral, I make sure to ask, “Tell me a funny story about your dad.” Or “Did your mother have a favorite joke?”

Almost always, when a family member gives a eulogy, they include some humor. Even in the saddest of times, people want to remember the laughter.

These thoughts came to mind on a recent camping trip as I was reading Margaret Renkl’s book, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year.

Camping and Reading

Camping and reading

Full disclosure here: Renkl’s book has been on my nightstand for at least six months, maybe for 18, since the Christmas I received it as a gift. I read books more when I am out of cell phone range, where there is no wi-fi, and I am by myself in the woods. So I decided to pack it.

Margaret Renkl is a regular columnist for the New York Times. Her Crows book is a gathering of essays about the natural world she observes in her own backyard near Nashville, Tennessee. Occasionally, she expresses concern about the negative effects of climate change that she can see before her very eyes.

“We are creatures built for joy”

The following paragraphs come on the heels of her expressing her concerns about the world:

“We are creatures built for joy. At the very saddest funerals, we can hear a funny story about our lost beloved, and, God help us, we laugh. We can stagger out of an appointment where a person in a white coat has given us the news we think we cannot bear to hear, and still we smile at the baby in the checkout line clapping her chubby hands at the balloons by the cash register or kicking her feet in pleasure at the sight of a stranger’s smile.

“This is who we are. The very best of who we are.”

You can see why my “grief and joy” antennae perked up upon reading this. Renkl concludes,

Margaret Renal

“The world is burning, and there is no time to put down the water buckets. For just an hour, put down the water buckets anyway. Take your cue from the bluebirds, who have no faith in the future but who build the future nevertheless, leaf by leaf and straw by straw, shaping them into the roundness of the world.

“Turn your face up to the sky. Listen. The world is trembling into possibility. The world is reminding us that this is what the world does best. New life. Rebirth. The greenness that rises out of ashes.”

Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows, p. 57

Photo: Kevin Blanzy, Pexels

__________________

Author Chaplain Hank Dunn, MDiv, has sold over 4 million copies of his books Hard Choices for Loving People and Light in the Shadows (also available on Amazon).

Follow Hank: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

The post Grief and Joy at the Same Time? first appeared on Hank Dunn.

Penny Hawkins Smith, RN, educates and entertains (yes, entertains) her followers with short videos (okay, “reels”) based on her experience as a hospice nurse. She now has brought her earthy take on death, dying, and hospice to written form in her book, Influencing Death: Reframing Dying for Better Living.

Spare me a moment of shameful self-promotion — my Hard Choices for Loving People is one of just four books she recommends in her “Resources” section…I digress.

Like many of us in hospice work, Nurse Penny has learned how to live a better life as she watched her patients and their families navigate the journey unto death. In her words, “Being present with the dying and those they love has brought me joy, happiness, meaning, and purpose.”

HelpMeLeaveMyHusband.com

This outlook did not come easy for her. This book is, in part, a memoir about how a troubled young mother survived her own addictions and reckless living. Her life story is woven into the fabric of a book to help people have a better death and, she hopes, have a better life.

It turns out that Smith was an internet sensation long before TikTok and Instagram. With her first marriage dissolving and having child-rearing and nursing school expenses, she set up a website (no longer active), HelpMeLeaveMyHusband.com. This led to national publicity, including an interview on “The View” and a mention in Time magazine. Who knew?

Practical advice on having a “good death”

The real power in this book comes from the stories of her patients, their families, and her own journey with death in her family. Because of her large platform, Nurse Penny has a good read on what people currently think about death, fear of it, and how to prepare for it.

Questions and comments from Smith’s social media followers appear in Influencing Death, allowing segues to practical end-of-life advice. Here are just a few nuggets of Penny’s wisdom found in these pages:

• “The earliest signs [that death is near] are eating less, sleeping more, and socially withdrawing.”
• “[T]he reality is that thinking about our inevitable demise, accepting it, and planning for it are the best ways to have a good death.”
• “People seem to think that saying words like ‘death,’ ‘dying,’ ‘died,’ or ‘dead’ will cause it to happen. Death is what it is, and calling it by another name won’t change that outcome.”
• “No, they don’t need to eat. They’re dying, and they aren’t dying because they’re not eating. They’re not eating because they’re dying!”
• “He, like many, many family members of hospice patients, was worried that he would cause her to die faster by giving her morphine. I’ll reiterate for the people in the back that this couldn’t be further from the truth.”
• “Being present with the dying and those they love has brought me forgiveness—forgiveness for the people who hurt me and, more importantly, forgiveness for myself.”

“Is there an afterlife?”

When I started work as a hospice chaplain in 1996, two nurses at our agency had authored what became a very popular book, Final Gifts. Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley told stories of patients having deathbed visions or telling family members they were going to “take a trip.” It is still selling 33 years later.

Photo by Aamir Suhail on Unsplash

Fast forward to now, when Penny Smith (and two other social-media-influencer-hospice-nurses-turned-authors) address these fascinating phenomena and delve into the question, “Is there an afterlife?” Smith recounts many of these stories in a chapter titled “The Woo-Woo Stuff.”

All these influencer-nurse-authors tell similar stories of dying patients having visions or dreams of dead relatives coming to visit them. These visions are very comforting to patients, although sometimes discomforting to their families. Nurse Penny adds her own experience… read the book to find out how that goes.

Penny is very clear that she does not believe in God, nor does she practice religion. At the same time, she is also clear that observing these deathbed visions and having had her own experience, she believes that we do still exist after death.

Are these visions “real?” That’s not even a good question. They are “real” to the people who experience them. That should be the bottom line.

Thank you, Sergeant

Penny’s story takes us through some very dark places of her addiction journey, including when she spent a night in jail. The next morning, the police sergeant told her, “You are not the same person who came in here last night. You seem very bright. Why are you here? I really hope you can get on the right track because it seems like it would be such a waste if you didn’t.”

I was touched to see him listed with others in the “Acknowledgments” at the end of the book: “The sergeant at the police station, I’m sure I will never see you again, but I do hope if by chance you read this book, you will know how ultimately life-changing your words were.”

I, too, thank the sergeant.

__________________

Author Chaplain Hank Dunn, MDiv, has sold over 4 million copies of his books Hard Choices for Loving People and Light in the Shadows (also available on Amazon).

Follow Hank: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

The post Book Review: “Influencing Death: Reframing Dying for Better Living” first appeared on Hank Dunn.

A flood of memories came back to answer that question.

“Schloss” is German for “castle”

In my blog and the video I posted last week, I talked about my recent backpacking trip to the summit of The Big Schloss with my future son-in-law. As I shared this story at my weekly men’s group meeting, one of the guys, who has known me for over 30 years, said, “Hank, didn’t you throw your wedding ring off that mountain?”

Well…yes. But there’s a bigger story.

In June 1996, my wife moved out the day after our 26^th wedding anniversary. In the following months, I went through all the stages of dying or grief I have witnessed in my patients and their families while I was serving as their hospice chaplain. In the face of an unwanted divorce, I experienced denial, anger, and depression, along with a layer of a sense of betrayal and rejection. And like those families, I was waiting for the last breath, or in this case, a “Final Decree of Divorce” granted by a Fairfax County judge.

I imagined I would stand before a judge in a courtroom and hear them say, “It’s over.” But it didn’t happen that way.

My wife called me two days before the court date to let me know it was happening and asked if I wanted to be there. I said, “Not particularly, but do you have a preference?” She said she would rather I not be there, and it was so.

The court date was October 2^nd, 1997. Months before, I had made plans with one of my best friends, James, to go on a one-night backpacking trip starting on October 1^st. Destination? You guessed it: The Big Schloss.

A day for an ending and beginning

James had traveled from Atlanta to attend a workshop at the Lost River Retreat Center in West Virginia, only a few miles from the Schloss. I picked him up and drove to the trailhead. We walked the two miles up the mountain and set up camp near the summit.

An excerpt from a piece I wrote about this at the time:

“The end came with a suddenness that did not allow me to plan how I wanted the day to go. What happened was better than anything I could have scripted.… What better way to start the last day of my marriage than with a good friend on a mountaintop, drinking coffee and watching the sunrise.  

“We hiked the two miles into our campsite yesterday and set up camp near the summit. Last night, we sat by the fire and braced ourselves against the cold wind. We talked for hours. James slept in the tent, and I stayed outside so I could keep watching the stars all night long.

James at sunrise

“I woke up at first light and put a pot of coffee on the stove. James soon joined me, sitting on the rock on the edge of a cliff which drops perhaps a hundred feet to the ground below. The darkness was being weakened as the light grew. We sipped our coffee and ate pop-tarts…. This place, the Big Schloss, was home to me.

“James knew what this day meant to me. He mentioned it. We discussed it briefly. He read a Celtic prayer and a scripture. As the judge and my soon-to-be ex-wife were each preparing for their days, we were walking down the mountain. Someone to walk with me. What a wonderful metaphor! Too often, over these past sixteen months since she moved out, I have had a great sense of someone walking with me. Sometimes there was nobody with me, but I was not alone. Now James walked with me on the first day of a new life.”

The Ring Toss

Photo by eyestetix on unsplash

Fast-forward nineteen months to May 1999, and I prepared for yet another trip up the Schloss — this time with another friend who was attending the same workshop at the Lost River Retreat Center. She had told me about a ritual she did to help her process her own sense of grief and anger. She threw her wedding band from her failed marriage into the water off a ferry at the Outer Banks. Hmmm?

Yet again, I wrote of what happened next, this time in June 1999:

“A couple weeks ago, I had a little ritual to symbolize my moving on from my marriage. I was camping with a friend on my favorite close-to-home campsite, the Big Schloss, a rock outcrop on the Virginia-West Virginia border.…

Ritual site for the day of divorce and ring toss

“The air was so clear I didn’t even bring a tent, and we slept under the stars. I brought my wedding band, anticipating a ‘ring toss’ ceremony. After arising in the crisp May air, I took the ring out of my pack. This is the ring my wife had inscribed with the scripture reference for the passage ‘Wherever you go, I will go. Your people will be my people.…’

“I stood on the edge of the cliff, looking down at the trees and rocks below. I held the ring. I was surprised that I felt as emotional as I did. I thought this would be a mere formality, tossing the ring into the wilderness. But I threw it. Another little piece of letting go. It landed somewhere on the floor of an old-growth hardwood forest. The fall leaves will cover it in October, and the winter snows will pack it down further. Next spring, perhaps the dogwoods or redbud will bloom nearby. It’s going to be there for a long time to come.

“I was surprised by the tinge of sadness I felt at the prospect of tossing away this symbol of my marriage. I have been so happy in my alone life. I have a normalcy in the living of my days. I have no desire to be reunited with my ex-wife. So, what was the grief about?

These mountains absorb grief

“I have concluded that everyone experiences a certain amount of sadness and grief in response to any loss. If we have not completed our quota of grief, it will come out at a future date, and almost anything can set if off. So, I held this ring in my hand and got a little more of the sadness out. I won’t have that same exact piece of grief to do over again…that feels better.”

A quarter century has passed since those two events on the Big Schloss. The mountain is still giving me its gifts. I even put up a recent short video about how special this piece of God’s green earth is to me. This place has quite easily absorbed my grief. I’ll be back.

__________________

Author Chaplain Hank Dunn, MDiv, has sold over 4 million copies of his books Hard Choices for Loving People and Light in the Shadows (also available on Amazon).

Follow Hank: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

The post A Divorce and the Mountain of Grief — Priceless first appeared on Hank Dunn.

It’s Wednesday. Any Wednesday. 2:00 PM.

Photo by RDNE Stock project:

I am sitting in silence with inmates at the Lafayette County Detention Center in Oxford, Mississippi. The local pronunciation of the name is “la-FAY-et.” The men are here awaiting trial, sentencing, or their “more permanent home” in the Mississippi or federal prison systems.

You can stand at the front door of my church, St. Peter’s Episcopal, and see the jail less than a half-block away. Some men in the church have been coming here for years, doing various outreach like starting a library or bringing Christmas cards for the inmates to send to friends and families.

Weekly Centering Prayer

About four years ago, I joined the group in a weekly “centering prayer” session, a form of silent meditation. Twice a month, we bring communion. I previously wrote a blog about me offering “The Serenity Prayer” to those gathered.

Our gathering was modeled after a group at Folsom Prison in California. The Prison Contemplative Fellowshiphas a great website with resources for those who take on a project like ours. They have also posted a 22-minute documentary video about the Folsom work titled Holding Still.

“God’s Child”

Ken begins every session here in Oxford by saying, “We want you to know that we know you are here. You are not forgotten.” In my mind, I recall the words of Jesus, “I was in prison, and you visited me.”

As the men gather each week, we hand everyone a name badge. Instead of “Hello, My Name is Hank,” each one says simply, “God’s Child.” We all wear one. Incarcerated and free.

The Jewish proverb says it best: “Before every person there marches an angel proclaiming, ‘Behold, the image of God.’” It refers to the story in the Hebrew scriptures about how humans were created in the image of God. All of us. Us do-gooder Episcopalian men and those jailed men — all the same image of God.

On the weeks we bring communion, we read from the Book of Common Prayer as part of the service:

“Lord Jesus, for our sake you were condemned as a criminal: Visit our jails and prisons with your pity and judgment. Remember all prisoners and bring the guilty to repentance and amendment of life according to your will and give them hope for their future. When any are held unjustly, bring them release; forgive us, and teach us to improve our justice. Remember those who work in these institutions, keep them humane and compassionate, and save them from becoming brutal or callous. And since what we do for those in prison, O Lord, we do for you, constrain us to improve their lot. All this we ask for your mercy’s sake. Amen.”

_____________________

Author Chaplain Hank Dunn, MDiv, has sold over 4 million copies of his books Hard Choices for Loving Peopleand Light in the Shadows (also available on Amazon).

Follow Hank: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

The post “God’s Child” Holding Still in Jail first appeared on Hank Dunn.

bomb, chronic disease, demonic, homework, influencer, milestone, remix, Roman Catholicism, swampland, unattainable, worthwhile

Milestone: 100K on 2017 VW Passat

The answer in just a moment. I emphasized “milestone” because I hit one last week. Our 2017 VW Passat passed 100,000 miles. I go into buying a new car with the hope of getting 200,000 miles out of it. We’re halfway there.

It’s funny how we have so many “milestones” in our lives are related to automobiles. Think of getting a driver’s license (for me, at 16) or that first car (for me, a 1969 Camaro). Heck, getting the Passat in September 2017 was marked by another milestone — Hurricane Irma in Florida.

My wife and I were signing papers in the VW sales office when we noticed a long line of people holding propane tanks across the street. My wife commented, “Look at all the people getting ready to grill on Labor Day.” The salesman responded, “Are you crazy? They’re getting ready for the hurricane.”

We were new arrivals in the state and failed to make the connection with the approaching hurricane. That memory is now a milestone — or rather two milestones: our first hurricane and the purchase of our ’17 Passat.

Defining milestones

Photo by Steven Brown on Unsplash

The best I can tell, the Romans were the first to use milestones along their roads. I found a photo of a milestone after the Roman era marking the distance to “London.”

There are two definitions of “milestone,” according to Apple Dictionary:

1) A stone set up beside a road to mark the distance in miles to a particular place.

2) An action or event marking a significant change or stage in development.

Synonyms of “milestone” include climacteric, climax, corner, landmark, milepost, turning point, andwatershed.

1990 – Fairfax Nursing Center. Photo by Hank Dunn

As a hospice and nursing home chaplain, I observed many milestones in people’s lives. The most obvious milestone for the patient and their family is the event of the death itself. But there were also milestones leading up to the death.

I would hear about the milestone of someone’s diagnosis, “I will never forget sitting in the doctor’s office and hearing ‘You have cancer.’” Or the milestone of the day someone entered a nursing home. A turning point at which the patient loses their freedom, and the caregiver is freed from the burden of constant caregiving.

Use rituals instead of stones

Milestones: A new Tampa home in 1961 for the Dunn family and upon selling it in 2000

I am a fan of using rituals to mark milestones in our lives. For a chaplain, of course, that can include a prayer at the bedside after the patient takes their last breath.

When my parents sold the home they had lived in for almost 40 years, I felt it was important to mark the milestone. Mom and I picked up Dad at the nursing home and went to the house before the closing to sell it.

I pushed Dad in his wheelchair from room to room, and we recalled the people and events that took place in each. We had a prayer of thanksgiving. We wept.

So, what does “milestone” have in common with “homework,” “influencer,” “swampland,” and those other words I listed above? The first known use of each in the English language occurred in 1662. Who knew someone could be an “influencer” hundreds of years before the internet existed?

_____________________

Author Chaplain Hank Dunn, MDiv, has sold over 4 million copies of his books Hard Choices for Loving Peopleand Light in the Shadows (also available on Amazon).

Follow Hank: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

The post Milestones first appeared on Hank Dunn.

Grief never goes away. Significant losses come to mind throughout a lifetime.

I have often said we all grieve in different ways. Some may cry a lot after the death of their person, others very little. Some can’t part with the clothes of the departed, others clean out the house within weeks of the death. Grief expresses itself in a wide range of actions, thoughts, and feelings that would be considered “normal grieving.”

I had a brother who died a week after being born when I was six years old. It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I asked my mother about Randy’s death. When I did, she burst into tears and said, “My father wouldn’t let me go to his graveside burial service.” I never knew she kept such grief just below the surface. I told this story in more detail in a previous blog.

Although my mother carried that grief all those years, she functioned fully engaged in our family’s life. She had found a new normal as a mother who lost a child. She was in this range of “normal grieving.”

But there are ways of grieving that could be considered abnormal – check out the podcast titled, “Prolonged Grief Disorder.” You can listen to it or read the transcript at Geripal.org. In the podcast Holly Prigerson, Ph.D., describes prolonged grief disorder:

Photo by Meruyert Gonullu:

“So those symptoms were symptoms of yearning after 12 months post-loss and or preoccupation with thoughts of the deceased, but it’s really yearning.… You feel like you don’t know who you are anymore, where you fit in to the world. You feel disbelief. You feel a sense of meaninglessness. You feel extreme loneliness. You feel bitter and pangs of sorrow, emotional pain is how they they’ve phrased it.… It’s mostly meaninglessness, purposelessness, disbelief, yearning, loneliness. These symptoms in and of themselves are very distressing. They feel detached from others. The only person they felt they really could connect with is the dead.… So, they have to have these distressing symptoms and they have to be significantly impaired by those symptoms. So, by definition, their dysfunctional symptoms, this isn’t normal level grief.”

I’ve witnessed this type of grief firsthand. I was a nursing home chaplain; a co-worker lost a teenage son to a hit-and-run accident. She believed it was murder, but the driver was acquitted at trial. She, understandably, became obsessed with this loss. She even bought a house next to the cemetery so she could always look out on her son’s grave.

Tragically, after some time passed, her younger teenage son died by suicide. He left a note, “Maybe now you will pay attention to me.”

________________________________________

Chaplain Hank Dunn is the author of Hard Choices for Loving People: CPR, Feeding Tubes, Palliative Care, Comfort Measures and the Patient with a Serious Illness and Light in the Shadows. Together they have sold over 4 million copies. You can purchase his books at hankdunn.com or on Amazon.

The post Grief Outside the Bounds of Normal first appeared on Hank Dunn.

Why, late in his career, would an internationally famous Christian author publish a personal memoir under a pseudonym? He hid both his identity and that of his beloved wife. Why?

I was leaving on one of my daily bike rides recently and needed to pick a new book to listen to. I selected a reread — A Grief Observed (1961). But, the author was identified as N.W. Clerk in the original rendering. Only after his death in 1963, was it published as by C.S. Lewis.

So, I am peddling the hills of Oxford, Mississippi, and I am being reminded just how good this book is. Between 1940 and his marriage in 1956, this confirmed bachelor wrote his greatest works including The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56), and Mere Christianity (1952). His brief four-year marriage to the terminally ill Joy led to A Grief Observed.

Lewis traced his wife’s life with cancer, then death and then his grief in this very thin volume (my copy has 53 pages of text.) Only, she is not “Joy,” who became his wife when he was 57 and she 41. In A Grief she is “H.” Her full name was Helen Joy Davidman, thus the “H.” They were actually married in the hospital where she was receiving treatment.

Here is a sampling of this grief journal by one of the 20^th century’s greatest writers and Christian apologists.

“No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid.”

Years ago, I had memorized this first line of the book. C.S. Lewis starts his journaling describing how grief feels to him. He keeps this up on every page.

“For in grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs.”… “Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”

How many times have I heard this? I have to remind grievers “you never ‘get over’ grieving.” Lewis sees it as a series of emerging phases always recurring. He likens it to a hike through a valley.

“Meanwhile, where is God?… But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.” 

This might come as a surprise to those who found Lewis’ writings on Christianity so helpful. He had doubts. He didn’t doubt the existence of God but that his beliefs did not take away the pain of grief. He had no time for the “trust God and all will be good” line of thinking. Perhaps, this is why he wrote under a pseudonym. Doubt was so far from the assured Lewis.

“It is incredible how much happiness, even how much gaiety, we sometimes had together after all hope was gone.” 

Here seems to be a great contradiction. In the midst of no hope for cure, Lewis and his wife had great happiness. There is a scene in Shadowlands, the biopic about their life together and her death. Lewis tells Joy not to talk about her impending death. He doesn’t want to spoil their good time together. She says, “It doesn’t spoil it, it makes it real.… I’m going to die and I want to be with you.… The pain then is part of the happiness now. That’s the deal.”

“She said not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She smiled, but not at me. Poi si torno all’ eterna fontana.” 

These are the last words in A Grief Observed. He was able to witness the exchange between his dying wife and a chaplain. She was at peace. He closed with a Latin line from Dante’s Divine Comedy. In English, “Then she returned to the eternal source.”

________________________________________

Cover Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Chaplain Hank Dunn is the author of Hard Choices for Loving People: CPR, Feeding Tubes, Palliative Care, Comfort Measures and the Patient with a Serious Illness and Light in the Shadows. Together they have sold over 4 million copies. You can purchase his books at hankdunn.com or on Amazon.

The post Alone into the Alone — “A Grief Observed” Revisited first appeared on Hank Dunn.

Bingo. Those were the two movies of my childhood fears. I was sitting through 160+ minutes of terror.

From my youth, outer space and the heavens brought a recuring sense of awe. Yes, the fear of flying saucers invading was real. But, there was also a sense of reverence as I gazed into the night sky. I was pretty small in the vastness of the stars above.

I just placed the latest “deep field” photo from the new James Webb Space Telescope to my home screen on my iPhone. This is a time exposure photo of a portion of the night sky the size of a grain of sand held at arms-length. Thousands of galaxies appear as we look back billions of years. Each galaxy has billions of stars — each star is not unlike our sun.

We come out of childhood, hopefully, putting away childhood fears. We gain a sense of control of our own lives. I am somebody. That is, until….

That is, until something reminds of how small we really are — how we really are not in control. Serious illness ranks up there with things that shake us to our core.

The Deep Field photo brings so many thoughts to my mind. What is really amazing is that there is more of nothing than there is of something. More empty space than stars. Perhaps “nothingness” is more important than “something.”

Even down at the microscopic level, scientists tell us that the is more empty space in each atom than solid matter. Doesn’t make sense when you fall on asphalt after a spill off your bike, but, I have to take the experts at their word.

The point is that emptiness and nothingness are where we live. Yes, I am glad I have family, friends, community, and this beautiful earth to enjoy. But, I also feel at home in the vastness of empty space or the silence which is a space empty of sound.

It is the message of the mystics and the dying have been telling us since the dawn of time. I am reminded of Gretel Ehrlich’s comment, “True solace is finding none. Then, of course, it is everywhere.”

________________________________________

Chaplain Hank Dunn is the author of Hard Choices for Loving People: CPR, Feeding Tubes, Palliative Care, Comfort Measures and the Patient with a Serious Illness and Light in the Shadows. Together they have sold over 4 million copies. You can purchase his books at hankdunn.com or on Amazon.

The post More Nothing than Something — True Solace is Finding None first appeared on Hank Dunn.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

My mind revisited those first weeks of the pandemic as I saw an interview with Ed Yong of The Atlantic on the PBS News Hour. For two years, he has been talking to COVID grievers. You can read his most recent article, “The Final Pandemic Betrayal,” here or watch the seven-minute PBS interview here.

I wrote blogs about the grief rituals after the death of my mother-in-law during COVID and public displays of remembrance of those who died. Now Ed Yong has written and talked in the most moving fashion about the more than 9 million fellow Americans who have lost a close relative to the virus.

COVID Grievers Face an Unprecedented Time to Grieve

Photo by Claudia Wolff on Unsplash

We who have NOT lost someone to COVID have little concept of the unique, profound, and enduring grief now being visited upon these grievers. Here is the story of a mother who watched her son die on her phone:

“Teresita Horne had spent more than a week on a breathing machine when her 13-year-old son, Donovan, died in a different hospital; she watched him die on her phone. ‘I remember screaming,’ she told me. ‘When your kids are sick, they need you, but I couldn’t be there to comfort him. I couldn’t hold his hand one last time.’”

Don’t ask, “Were they vaccinated?”

Then there was the tone in our questions to those who lost a loved one to COVID. “Did they get the vaccine?” What does that have to do with our attempt to reach out to someone caught up in grief? The mere question implies that there was something the dead person should have done or, worse yet, the griever should have done to prevent the death. Aside from appeasing our curiosity about if they got the vaccine, how does that question comfort the bereaved?

Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash

Again, Yong writes, “Many grievers end up blaming themselves. Should I have pulled them out of that nursing home? Should I have pushed them harder to get vaccinated? And worst of all: Did I give them COVID?“

He concludes: “In her book, The Myth of Closure, Pauline Boss, a therapist and pioneer in the study of ambiguous loss, offers some advice for pandemic grievers: ‘It is not closure you need but certainty that your loved one is gone, that they understood why you could not be there to comfort them, that they loved you and forgave you in their last moments of life,’ she wrote. Instead of waiting for a clean but mythical endpoint to one’s loss, it is better to search for ‘meaning and purpose in our lives after this horrific time in history,’” she said.

Do yourself a favor. Read Yong’s article or listen to the short interview. I was moved by the stories of these COVID grievers

________________________________________

Chaplain Hank Dunn is the author of Hard Choices for Loving People: CPR, Feeding Tubes, Palliative Care, Comfort Measures and the Patient with a Serious Illness and Light in the Shadows. Together they have sold over 4 million copies. You can purchase his books at hankdunn.com or on Amazon.

________________________________________

Cover Photo by Shane on Unsplash

The post The Lonely, Difficult Journey of COVID Grievers first appeared on Hank Dunn.