About my 'big sister,' the times and seasons of life, and love eternal

 Her name is Carolyn.

She has always been my "big sister," being born three years before me.

But because of her oxygen deprivation in the womb, and the cerebral palsy she was born with, it was my role from a young age to be her "big brother."

She needed surgery to correct her crossed-eyes as an infant, and physical and often painful strap on leather and metal braces to hobble a few steps. I was five years old when Mom took me outside on a warm Norwalk, Calif., day and explained why my sis still could speak only short sentences, and then only with intensively exhausting stutters.

"Carolyn is what the doctors call 'mentally retarded,'" Mom said softly. "She won't be able to learn like you. And since she is crippled, people stare at how she walks, and some kids will even tease and try to hurt her."

There were tears forming in Mom's eyes. "You will be her 'big brother,' more and more as you grow," she said, trying to smile encouragingly.

And so, I tried to be just that. Protecting my sister from neighborhood bullies got me in my first fights as a young boy, and the violence escalated from a punch in the stomach for a kid who pushed her to the ground, to blood and chipped teeth for both me and one, sometimes more bullies as I grew into adolescence.

But I could not protect Carolyn from the emotional swings and physical tantrums that came as she grew, too, though physically handicapped but strong as an adult. Still, she had the cognitive limits of a 4-to–5-year-old.

Mom, barely 5-foot-2, would try to keep the larger Carolyn from biting chunks out of her own arms in self-destructive rages; and often, Mom, too, would end up with bruises and lumps from my sister's kicks and bleeding, whaling fists.

When the rage subsided, a confused Carolyn would see, but not understand injuries to herself and Mom. Sis would cry, "S-s-s-orry, Mom, S-s-orry!" Mom would wince, but always hug, whispering loving assurances, her own face wet with tears.

Half a century ago, there were limited choices to address this crisis. Special Education classes then were little more than dumping grounds for any and all mentally and physically handicapped kids. 

Group homes for their care did not yet exist where we lived in Eastern Washington. But the situation with my tortured sister could not continue, and eventually medical and social workers consulted advised placing Carolyn in institutional care -- a nearby state-funded dormitory facility where she would be cared for along with 80 others "like her."

Mom and Dad reluctantly agreed. I was 12 when my sister was moved to a multi-story, brick Lakeland Village. Oh, we visited her there often, and holidays she would join us at home -- for a night or two -- but then would come time for her to go back, and still sometimes, not peacefully.

Over the ensuing years, Lakeland Village gradually placed its charges in smaller group homes. Physicians would now prescribe medications to ease the mood swings, social workers arranged regular outings and crafts, exercise, trips to the movies and church services.

The years passed. Mom and Dad would regularly visit Carolyn, keeping track of her clothing, medical, bedding, and growing stuffed animals collection. But then came their own aging, dementia, assisted living and then nursing home care, finally ending with their deaths in 2019.

I could not qualify under Washington state law to myself serve as Carolyn's legal guardian, since I had lived and worked 800 miles away in Utah for several decades; my sister came under the care of professional state-appointed guardians.

I have been able to talk with her on the telephone often and visit her in person on several occasions over the past few years. I saw her health deteriorating, her mobility requiring first an aluminum walker, and then a wheelchair. Her breathing became increasingly labored, and then in the past few months, trips to the hospital and long-term nursing care before a brief return to her own room and belongings at her residential group home.

I have been able to talk with her on the telephone often and visit her in person on several occasions over the past few years. 

Her breathing became increasingly labored, and then in the past few months, trips to the hospital and long-term nursing care before a brief return to her own room and belongings at her residential group home.

Last night, the call came from the director of her home. My "big sister" may not make her 74th birthday in July. 

Again she was rushed to the hospital, where doctors found her unable to safely swallow, her blood oxygen levels in the low 80s. She was put on supplemental oxygen, and a feeding tube inserted to stabilize her.

Once that is done, it was hoped Carolyn could return to the comfort of her group home room, in her own bed, surrounded by those stuffed animals, and what had become her caregiving sisters and family.

"Comfort care," was the term. It was an echo for me, being the same words that had been used to govern the final journeys of our parents, before they passed away in their sleep, just months apart a few years ago.

Despite my lack of legal status in Carolyn's case, her caregivers have been willing to keep me regularly apprised of her status. The immediate future, and how it unfolds for her, and me, her distant "big brother," is known only to the God we both love.

And so, once again, I wait, and I pray. 

I ask for physical healing, knowing that even if it comes for her, it will be a brief reprieve. Rather, I pray, too, for her ultimate healing -- a peaceful, painless release when the time comes -- and a heavenly welcome and embraces from Mom and Dad.

Love, after all, is eternal.

Getting older: Walking through the valley of the shadows

 
 "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me."  (Psalm 23:4)

   In the past couple months Life has had me glancing at the shadows in that valley we all begin walking through the day we are born. The shadows have taken recognizable form of late, along with that feeling of having far more years behind me than ahead.

   It is a growing realization not of fear, nor unease, even as it is a bittersweet, decreasingly vague recognition.

   In May 2018, it was the too-soon demise of a lifelong career in journalism, scythed by economic imperatives of a newspaper industry on its knees. About half of the staff  eventually accompanied me out the door, a sort of death, professionally. I endured the cycle of grief in my own fashion -- sort of in reverse . . . internally forced acceptance, but inevitably spattered by the sense of loss, anger, depression. 

   "Closure" took months, and if I am honest years to process.

   But that was nothing. In 2019, I lost both my parents to dementia. It was not unexpected, and they were both in their 90s. Still, their "golden years" were anything but; along with the grief there was relief the ordeal -- theirs and, ignobly my own -- was over. 

   Last year, two beloved aunts passed, as well as an uncle I considered something of a second father. A couple weeks ago, my father-in-law, his long battle with cancer and pain over, died in hospice care.

   Live long enough, and the circle of mortality closes around you, slowly, like a lazy but persistent, patient fog.

   Finally, you are confronted with the perils of aging, and medical surprises. First, it was learning the artificial heart valve I received 11 years ago was wearing out; it will have to be replaced at some point in the near future. I'm a good candidate for the procedure, whether the same open-heart operation I had the first time, or an arterial insertion of an implant, a far-less invasive prospect.

   But it won't be the heart problem that puts me on a University of Utah Medical Center operating table this coming Thursday. That will be brain surgery to remove a meningioma pressuring my optic nerve. While believed to be benign, it has grown incrementally since being discovered by an MRI; not life-threatening, but eventually my eyesight could be at risk.

   Headaches, double vision, and brief but increasing bouts of vertigo have born witness to what that second MRI confirmed some weeks ago.

   As the neurosurgeon told me. removing my cranial interloper is a highly successful procedure. A few days in hospital, then home to recover for a few weeks.

   In a follow-up this week on the heart issue, my cardiologist assured me the valve replacement was not an immediate need, and we can revisit that after I recover from the brain surgery. So, that was good news.

    "What you need to understand is that both of these things are readily treatable. You have many years to look forward to," he said with a smile and pat on my shoulder.

   And, I do believe he is right. I am at peace, and my Eastern Orthodox Christian faith is a comfort that I am, have been and always will be, in God's hands. (As are we all).

   The point, and I know I have taken way too long to get to it, is that Life -- perhaps especially in one's sixth and seventh decades -- has a way of spotlighting those mile markers along the path through the valley of the shadows.

   We need to be aware of death, not with fear, but with sober acceptance that it comes to professions, loved ones, and us. And, as I've contemplated this of late, I am not ignorant of the all-too-human tendency to see the deaths of our loved ones, even ourselves, as somehow an especially grievous wound on the Cosmos.

   It is not entirely a sort of spiritual narcissism to feel thus. Still, when it comes to the grave, we often lack perspective. Tens of thousands of Turkish and Syrian innocents died in the recent earthquakes; tens of millions have been sacrificed on the altars of Nazism, Communism, and in endless wars large and small. 

   Suffering is humanity's common currency, not the dollar or Euro, Yuan or Yen.

    And in a matter of degrees of suffering, how many of us -- too often outraged at the vagaries of our mortal existence in a society where shelter, food, comfort, medical care, and mindless entertainment are considered our due -- dare to compare our sufferings to the myriads of those who perish horribly who so rarely enter our thoughts?

   It shouldn't, then, be a matter of "Why me?" Really, it is "Why not me?"

   For me, my faith has become not the expectation of divine rescue from trials and tribulations, but rather the expectation and belief that we are truly never alone -- and that life's detours and pain can, however unbidden or unwelcome, birth a sort of wisdom, deeper compassion, and banishment of mortal fear.

 

   St. John Chrysostom put it this way:

   "What is dying? Just what it is to put off a garment. For the body is about the soul as a garment; and after laying this aside for a short time by means of death, we shall resume it again with more splendor."

   In the meantime, we live. We love. We comfort. We judge ourselves harshly, even as we forgive liberally.

   Whether I have weeks, months, years or decades ahead, I want to live this way. That is my prayer -- borrowed from St. Philaret of Moscow and posted on the wall of my home office:

"O Lord, grant me to greet the coming day in peace. Help me in all things to rely upon Your holy will. In every hour of the day reveal Your will to me.

"Bless my dealings with all who surround me. Teach me to treat all that comes to me throughout the day with peace of soul and with firm conviction that Your will governs all. In all my deeds and words guide my thoughts and feelings.

"In unforeseen events let me not forget that all are sent by You. Teach me to act firmly and wisely, without embittering and embarrassing others.

"Give me strength to bear the fatigue of the coming day with all that it shall bring. Direct my will, teach me to pray. Pray You Yourself in me."

 

                                                    ______________

   UPDATE:  Going into my fourth week since the operation, my recovery is steady and on its own schedule. Swelling along a much-larger-than-expected incision (running from the crown of my skull across to my right ear area and down to my ear lobe) was significant until the last few days, and is now all but gone. So far, the headaches, vision and vertigo symptoms are gone, and the moments of memory gaps -- in verbal expression, but not written, oddly enough -- have diminished sharply. --BM

A eulogy for a very good man

*This is the eulogy I gave at my father's graveside memorial on Friday in Spokane, Washington. -- BM


Growing up, one of the things the family of the Rev. Robert Mims did a lot of was pack
up and leave places. We moved from one neighborhood to another, from one state to another. 

 By the time I was 11 years old, I had been in 13 different schools.

In each move, something would get lost. Toys. Pictures. Maybe a dish, and on one move there was a loss than made my mother cry: during the move from Spokane to Wilbur, a tiny central Washington farming town with an even smaller church, my parents’ large framed wedding photo was lost.

In the past year, my son, Rob, and I moved Mom and Dad from Lilac Plaza Assisted Living to the Cheney Care Center as their health, and dementia, grew worse. Like all the moves before, this mean some things got donated to charities, others were put in storage, and a few treasured items were lovingly safeguard by family
 
At home in Utah, recently, I finally opened boxes I’d brought back. There were Dad’s collection of several worn Bibles, his notes in the margins of passages of scriptures he’d used in sermons. A pressed flower in the pages of one Bible, and in others, handwritten notes and reminders of events and people long since passed.

Then, in a box Mom had treasured, there was a bundle of letters. Love letters, it turned out, from Dad, written while he was traveling as a banjo-playing evangelist throughout the post-WWII Pacific Northwest. They were handwritten pages filled with endearments, dreams and love for the future they would soon begin as a married couple.

Memories. Memories Mom and Dad lost, temporarily I believe, as their worlds shrank both physically and mentally over these past couple years.

As I have prayed about their situation, seeking wisdom for each decision came about their care and well-being, I wondered what happens to those memories, when we … forget.

“Nothing is lost in Me,” was the thought impressed on my mind. Love is not lost, nor are our loved ones. The ripples of blessing we start with each act of compassion are eternal; so are those comforting touches or embraces we give or receive, the wisdom we gain and share, and certainly the faith we live  and sacrifice for.

Mom and Dad didn’t need that wedding photo, as treasured as it was, to remind them of their love, nor their bond as man and wife, father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, and co-workers for the Kingdom of God.

You don’t need “stuff” to keep those good things of past. We will always have our yesterdays, even when we forget them in this earthly life.

I know this: even if our memories fade with the weakness of age and loss of cognitive function, on that Last Day, Our Lord will restore those memories to perfection – and that will be a perfection that is no longer distorted by the false concepts of past, present and future we wrestle with now.

In the eternal, uncreated light of our Lord, we will have a God’s eye view. Nothing of love is lost. Nothing committed to Christ is ever gone.

So, I know where Dad is today. And, I believe he knows all about us, here, as we honor his earthly years, and we ourselves glimpse Eternity. I pray for him, and he is praying for us.

And Dad today knows as tangible truth what we believe by faith here: The perfect, infinite love of God includes, sustains and restores His children, as the prayer goes, “both now and ever and unto ages of ages.”

In our sentimental memories -- those photos, videos, letters, old Bibles, the contents of cedar chests and dusty boxes -- we have our yesterdays. But in Christ, we also have our tomorrows.

A simple truth: For a developmentally disabled older sister, Daddy's death is not complicated

How do you explain Daddy's death to your" big sister," who has the intellect of a 4-year-old due to oxygen deprivation in the womb?

Keep it simple. And, keep it true.

The alleged "simple of mind" recognize truth, perhaps better than the rest of us. I have become convinced of that.

You see, ego plays no part in their judgments and acknowledgement of reality.

It was enough for my 67-year-old sister, Carolyn -- a group home resident in Washington, with the intellectual age of 4, and crippled by cerebral palsy -- to know that Dad was "with Jesus, and praying for us."

Indeed, that sums up Orthodox Christianity rather well, too. And, it sums up the Pentecostal/evangelical faith we were raised in, too (in my case, prior to my conversion to Orthodoxy last year).

Today, through shared tears, it was enough for my big sister, Carolyn. And today, that was all that mattered.

Daddy was dead, but like always, he was watching out for us, his children.

Well, of course he was.

After all, what would make more sense?

You don't have to be a genius to grasp such a simple truth, however complicated your metaphysics may be.

An Akathist for Jesus Christ, and my Dad

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition and practice, those mourning a departed loved one often pray the "Akathist to Jesus Christ for a Loved One Who has Fallen Asleep."

A long title, and a long prayer, too, begun on the day of death and continued through 40 days. It is intended as comfort for the departed, but it is also that for those mourning, as I am learning.

And, it is beautiful; its imagery poetic, its words both emotionally and spiritually direct as its intentions are simple. It embraces the bitter and the sweet with arms of compassion, and hope.
Being Orthodox for less than two years, this is all new to me. But I'm trying to fulfill this for my father, who passed away on Thursday last . . . and for myself, at 65 still an infant in this ancient, predenominational Christian faith.

There are many phrases, petitions and praises within the Akathist that are moving and beautiful. But this following portion continues to stand out as I say it, watching candles flicker and incense drift past the crucifix on my wall and out a window:

"When earthly sojourning is ended, how graceful is the passing to the world of the Spirit; what contemplation of new things, unknown to the earthly world, and of heavenly beauties. The soul returns to its fatherland, where the bright sun, the righteousness of God, enlightens those who sing: Alleluia!"

Certainly, there are many such prayers for the dead in our various faiths. Years ago, I joined in the Mourner's Kaddish in support of a Jewish friend who had lost her father. And as a reporter many years ago, I participated in a Ute sweat lodge ceremony in which a native friend blessed his ancestors.

People in every culture seem to have the innate desire to seek comfort from a compassionate, loving realm of the holy.

It is not for me to judge the effectiveness of anyone's acts of faith, nor need I accept, even if I respect, the cosmos-view behind them. I have, and firmly hold my own; I trust in God's love and compassion to judge me, and them, by what Truth we have and honor.

Love, and our common humanity, should mean something precious to all of us -- no matter how convinced we are of our particular path.

The rest of it is a mystery, and if we say we believe in God, then that should come with the humility of admitting we do not know it all when it comes to such things as eternity, infinity, and immortality -- not even a crumb of it.

The true arena of faith, then, is in our hearts. We each struggle with our own shortcomings and pray/strive to improve and grow, or we surrender and excuse our flaws in self-delusion.
So, if faith rules within, it is expressed without.

My Dad showed me much, by example, in how to do that -- without judging the recipients of God's grace and ours, and in trying to love without conditions.

Now that he has passed, it seems little enough to pray for him. How it plays out "there," I don't know.

But at the very least, I am comforted that the ancient words of an ancient faith we shared are another way to say again, "I love you. I miss you. I will see you again."

"End of Life" decisions? Ultimately, we decide nothing. Thank God.

I learned Wednesday that by this time next week, if all continues to go as hoped, my 91-year-old father will be able to return to his assisted living facility, rejoining my mother.

I learned this in a late-afternoon conference call with his medical staff at a skilled nursing facility, where he has been for the past two weeks after nearly a month in and out of the ER with internal bleeding issues.

At one point during this sojourn, I had a call from his doctor asking about how far we wanted him to go with care, should he stop breathing, or have heart failure. We spoke about DNRs ("do not resuscitate") orders, should Dad's Living Will kick in at some point.

We came to a general threshold for letting go: severe brain damage, to the point of losing sentience. We hung up, and I have spent the next few weeks wondering “when?” . . . .

In those tender, plaintive and grittiest of conversations with Dad of late, he wondered himself about longevity vs. quality of life. And, considering my mother's progressive Alzheimer's, he would occasionally confess, in his rasping voice, that living with his frail health and failing eyesight (macular degeneration), and watching Mom drift away, neuron-by-neuron, was not the promise of the so-called "golden years."

Our miraculous medical technology has been wonderful for prolonging life, when intellect and wonder are still intact. But what happens when life implodes into a world of pain, constant hospitalization and increasing helplessness?

Worse, perhaps, what happens when our bodies become earthly tents, sewn shut by artificial longevity as the mind dies inside?

Our ability to extend physical life beyond the spiritual, or for the skeptics among us mortal "sentience," poses moral and ethical paradoxes seemingly unique to our generation. Life is more than machinery, more that mere heart beats and another breath, we are learning.

I am convinced that no thing, and no one is ever "lost." The former is a case of science, in that neither matter nor energy ends; the latter a conviction of faith, perhaps extrapolated into the metaphysical realm from the physical.

My mother seldom recognizes me anymore, has lost so many memories . . . here. But I firmly believe that someday, when the machinery finally fails, what is left of her here will be reunited with what has already passed on, There.

So, all these musings and internal, and ultimately external, debates about What is Life, and End of Life decisions, seem to pale in those undiscovered countries of being.

Ultimately, we “decide” nothing. We may delay the inevitable, but our clocks began ticking toward the great Transition from the moment of conception. And, at the beginning -- and the end -- it indeed comes down to a matter of the heart.

Physically, and metaphorically.

As I heard the medical staff conclude that Dad could be returned to assisted living, and my mother, within a week, something else drowned out the words.

It was my father, in the background, weeping, stuttering out how the news was "wonderful," how he missed my mother, was worried that she would finally forget him, too, and that he always saw "her sweet face" in his mind.

So, “When?”

Not yet, Dad. Not yet.

It's NOT my 60th birthday . . . I'm just 39, for the 21st time

Sixty years old. 

Sounds old. So, I'll express it this way: I'm marking my 39th birthday . . . for the 21st time.

Honestly, a few years ago I did not expect to make it this far. Except for, IMHO, miraculous intervention and skilled docs (they do work together, you know), I would not have done. Since age 55, really, I've felt I was on borrowed time, and I became convinced of it a little more than a year ago when an aortic valve replacement helped me avoid what the cardiologist said was imminent death.

It's been a strange journey. My profession has made me an observer. My faith has made me an uncomfortable participant, as belief has wrestled with that human feeling (certainty?) of cosmic incompetence.

You do your best. You depend on faith to bridge the gap between comfort and conviction, insecurity and aspiration, fear and courage, mediocrity and the dream.

You don't want to leave anything important undone.

I think of Hemingway's character, "Harry," in the short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," who awaits death from a gangrenous leg wound on a cot in an African hunting camp. He laments having waited to write things, thinking he had to wait for accumulated experience before he could do those things justice. Now, those things would go unwritten.

Now, that he had weighed his life, seen what was truly real, judged himself, punished himself. He faces the end, dissatisfied with his spiritual sloth, and yet, as he drifts toward the end, acceptance and peace and perhaps self-forgiveness come.

That was Hemingway's hope, for Harry and himself. The horror, the truth is that the realization of dreams unsought due to personal cowardice, insecurity and procrastination are too often the last thoughts before the end.

There's a hyena that skulks around the camp at night, coming closer each night. Like Harry's leg, is smells. In the story, the foul odor and death personified become one.

One passage I like a lot from the final moments of Harry's life is part of a prolonged conversation with his wife. I find it particularly poignant:

"Do you feel anything strange?" he asked her.

"No. Just a little sleepy."

"I do," he said.

He had just felt death come by again.

"You know the only thing I've never lost is curiosity," he said to her.

I wake up, every day, curious. Curious about what life will bring to me and my loved ones that day. Curious about how news events I will witness, report on and read about and see that day will affect the Story of Humanity.

That's the baseline, the purely human part of me, I suspect. Add to that a sense of awe, adoration of God and his creations, the rare wonder of life in all its varieties, and regardless of the really minor irritations that we perceive as mountains, it's worth getting up and walking into the dawn.