Table Talk: Contrasting Sorrows

Mixed media, acrylic washes and graphite, Phillip Hoyle

     In the years when I served churches as a minister, I visited in the homes of grieving families. I talked with them, held them, listened to stories of the deceased, and helped them plan funeral or memorial services. I led the services and often, as a part of my comments, encouraged people to recount their own recollections of the person who had died so together they could smile, laugh, and weep in telling and hearing them. I became used to death in congregational life--its occurrence, its ritualization, its attendant emotions and actions in the grieving.

     Of course, not all of the deaths were the same or had the same affect on the congregation or me. Some of the deceased were so distant from congregational life that they were barely known, if at all. Their deaths seemed to generate little feeling except within the family and friendships. Some deaths affected the congregation deeply because the deceased was so well-known and appreciated. Other deaths seemed tragic in that they came to younger people. By contrast, and because of old age or the nature of the disease involved, a few deaths seemed a great relief to the dying persons and their loved ones. Always there was grief, but usually it was not my own.

     In the past dozen years I have lost five very close friends and relatives, including my parents. If before experiencing these deaths, I was helping other people to mourn, since then I have become one of the grieving.

     Deaths of my clients from the AIDS clinic have deeply affected me. I was a bit surprised by this since I had been professionally related to death for so long. These deaths seem more like those of family and friends. I suspect the personal feelings arise from the fact that I have massaged these people. The direct physical contact creates an intense bond, at least for me. Perhaps I pour more of my energy into massaging them than I ever did into praying and visiting with parishioners. In trying to understand this phenomenon, I find helpful the Cartesian observation that emotions arise from the body. Whatever the contributing causes, the deaths of my massage clients seem more personal, very close to my life.

     Sometimes my massage-related grief brings with it a sense of responsibility. From our conversations during massage, I know that some of my clients appear to be living in great isolation. Following their death, I believe not many other people may be grieving for the deceased. One client had only one woman friend and no relationship with his family. I felt a tragic sense in his aloneness, perhaps more than he did himself. My former congregational connection had always provided a mourning community to remember the one who died, even if they didn’t know him or her well. Now I sometimes feel I mourn alone.

     That usually is what happens to me. I don’t hear of the death until weeks after its occurrence. I don’t attend a funeral or memorial service; I never visit a gravesite. I mourn by telling another volunteer massage therapist about the death, by remembering the few things I know about the deceased, and by writing my memories and feelings. I recall images of their bodies, a few details about their lives and illness, an interesting thing we talked about, and some of the emotions I experienced while working with them. These few, simple actions and memories do not seem like much, but they always seem intense because I have touched my clients and they me. I am sometimes moved to tears and sadness upon learning of their deaths and to even more emotions in recalling the few things I know about them. Am I now called to mourn? Is this a feature of some on-going ministerial vocation? I mourn. I thank God for the lives of these people, my new congregation, my current experience of the body of the living Christ. While I miss their skin and muscles under my fingers, I continue to cherish their memories.

Table Talk: Anointing

Collage of petroglyph rubbing on mat.

I sometimes wish I could ride to the rescue in my work as a massage therapist. I'd like to have a strong horse or group of horses to assist me in arriving at just the right time with just the perfect touch and just the proper measure of wisdom to share, but that rarely happens. I like this image of something--I think of a rider on a horse that is moving so fast as to appear to have many legs. 
I wish I could be so able.




     Michael died on Sunday. He wasn’t my first loss to HIV and AIDS, but this was different. I was present, and I loved this guy unlike any man I had ever loved. He was comatose when he died, had been for several hours. His RN sister and I gave him medications every fifteen minutes or so for pain control, and then he just stopped breathing. His heart quit beating. He died quietly.

     Over several months I had watched his body turn on itself, nourish itself with its own mass as the disease started overpowering the immune system. Michael lost his appetite. I observed his weight loss and saw him hike up his pants with ever-tighter belts. He became unsure on his feet, had little strength, and needed to sleep long hours each day.

     I studied his body after his last breath, its continuing losses of color, movement, and shape. The little bit of muscle and fat left seemed to deflate. His all-too-prominent skull became more pronounced. I observed his dog, Willie, regard Michael after the death. He, too, noticed the difference. Ozzie, his other dog, wouldn’t look at him, but through his nervous behavior, communicated his awareness that Michael was dead.

     I have lost a friend and lover in this death. Tears well up in my eyes and my throat clutches when I think or talk about Michael. I feel alone. While I have some of Michael’s friends as new friends of mine, I don’t have Michael to visit, to eat with, to lie next to, to laugh with, to hold close to me. I am sad at the loss of one I loved, one who loved me.

     I felt like Mary Magdalene when I massaged Michael, understanding that I was helping prepare him for his death. As I kept watch at his death I felt like her again, she who had stood at Jesus’ cross and watched him die. I helped lower the bed and re-arrange Michael’s body after death, as Mary helped receive Jesus’ body when it was removed from the cross. And like Mary, who rushed to Jesus’ grave after Sabbath in order to anoint him, I wanted to apply oil to Michael’s body.

     I stood in Michael’s bedroom remembering what a Greek Orthodox priest had told me: how a dead priest is anointed by other priests. I wanted to do something similar with Michael. But because I was afraid it might freak out his sister or the hospice nurse who came to the house quickly after his death, I contented myself with anointing his forehead. Searching the room, I found some lotion. I rubbed it on his face, following its contours and, finally, I made signs of a circle and a cross as a kind of prayer, a final touching. It was my own good-bye to Michael.

     Following the advice of a book I had been reading, I decided not to ask why, but rather, what now? What next? Two days later I went to my volunteer work at the AIDS clinic. My first client that day was even skinnier than Michael. I traced his ribs and sought ways to rub my hands comfortably over his bony shoulders. Tears fell from my eyes. I worked to channel all the love I had for Michael into my client’s body. By contrast, my last client of the day had a well-developed and ample body. I told him how pleased I was to massage a body that appeared so healthy. Still I cried and touched and loved. My work has aided me with my grief process, providing me reminders rather than rejection of loss. At the same time, it keeps me focused on a future of staying connected to a community where I encounter others’ needs and an opportunity to care for them.

     In a world where many people live with AIDS, I can expect to encounter many losses of friends and acquaintances. I want to mourn them properly and lovingly. I am prepared to help them live with the comfort of massage right up to the time of their deaths. I feel sure I will be able to offer my services to them as a living memorial to Michael.

Table Talk: Power

Colorado Cave Bear painting by Phillip Hoyle

     As I entered Alfredo’s massage office, my attention was drawn to a Navajo saddle blanket woven of wool yarn in several shades of brown. Though clearly the centerpiece of the room, the blanket was in sorry shape. Someone had tried to repair its fraying edges to keep it useful or, at least, intact. But the design itself had not been damaged. Its saw-toothed mountain pattern dominated the space, creating a sense of movement. I liked the design, but the blanket’s greatest appeal for me was knowing that it had been used for many years. I ran my hands over its surface, surprised and pleased by the softness of the wool. Touching it, I got goose bumps on my neck and head.

     “What do you feel from it?” Alfredo asked. I had recalled the red monoliths of Monument Valley, and imagined horses resting after a day of riding across mesas and mountains. I could almost smell burning piñon from an evening campfire where an old-timer told Navajo tales of sheep, snakes, and sex on the Rez. I pictured stacks of weavings in a trading post, but none of them were quite so attractive as this beat up blanket. But I explained to Alfredo only about having the goose bumps. They continued for about a minute, reaching down my backbone to its base.

     “When I felt it,” Alfredo continued, “I had images of a shaman. I think he used the blanket in healing ceremonies. It’s a very strong feeling. There’s lots of energy there.” My friend was sure that the blanket still had in it power for healing.

     Alfredo discovered the blanket in a pawn shop along with a bear skin. He purchased both: this healer’s blanket and the skin of an animal widely regarded for its healing properties and, in spirit form, for its aid in healing ceremonies. The blanket hangs on the wall over his massage table. I suspect the bear skin may be in the room as well, although I didn’t see it. Perhaps he placed it beneath the pad on his massage table.

     My friend reminds me of the Navajo bear priest in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony. The old man was called to help save a child from the bear people into whose territory the youngster had wandered. In one scene, the priest runs towards the bear canyon, strapping onto his wrists sprigs of spruce, readying himself for the ceremony that would call the boy away from the beasts. I picture Alfredo bedecking his massage table’s legs with spruce branches in anticipation of the arrival of a client he wants to help. Certainly Alfredo is a kind of priest, a healer.

     I once helped organize a seminar that sought to create a New Mexico definition of health. The event brought together medics, lawyers, judges, philosophers, theologians, social workers, psychologists, Hispanic curanderas, and Native healers. We talked. We laughed. We prayed. Together. We created a statement that we hoped would assist the New Mexico legislature as it tried to create health laws to benefit all the citizens of the state.

     Green-eyed, Mexican-American Alfredo manifests a similar inter-cultural, multi-lingual, broad-perspective definition of health. While he gives Swedish massage, he is always alert to his intuition, informed by the traditions of the curandera. He uses Native symbols and techniques in his work. My buddy believes in his intuitive insight, finding it both meaningful and helpful.

     If Alfredo hadn’t asked me what I felt when I touched the blanket, I believe I would not have noticed my goose bumps, or if I had, I would have registered them as only a response to touching the very soft and worn wool. Still, my mind was working in response to the touch. Did I, too, sense a lingering energy in the rug? While I was pleased to have seen and touched it, my rationalist education regarding common and holy things stood in the way of my perceiving the item as being imbued with power.

     An old woolen rug. Is it more than a common object? The designs worked into it do have some kind of religious meaning. I can easily accept that the weaving does have symbolic power such as theologian Paul Tillich described--the existential power of true symbols. Perhaps the blanket does “partake” of the power to which it points. I wonder, though, at the notion that the rug itself may contain some of the strength of mountains or the capacity to heal. I feel I cannot begin to answer my questions, but I do connect the rug with the bear skin and see their potent symbolism for healing.

     My own experience alerts me to some possibilities. Perhaps my goose bumps relate only to my imagination of Native American life, but such images may provide actual connections with a past and a present reality. They could communicate an invitation for me to accept and use healing energy. I do not want to project an image of myself as some kind of psychic or magical healer. But while I usually want to limit myself to ordinary experience, at the same time, I would like to open myself to any potentials that may reside within me. My thoughts want to be more than thoughts, definitions more than words for someone else’s use, scenes from books more than simply literature. Perhaps the power of blankets and bear skins can become as plain and ordinary a power for me as they are for Alfredo.

Table Talk: Acquainted with Grief

     I lost another client last week, a man to whom I had given massages occasionally for two years. Samuel was a gentle person who loved flowers and looked after the needs of his aging parents. He died from AIDS complications.

     In the course of the time I knew him, he had almost disappeared. Each time we met, there seemed to be a little less of him--less fat, less muscle, less energy. The skin draped loosely over the bony structure of this skinny, skinny man. I used very flat hands when massaging him since there was so little depth to the tissue, and I didn’t want to hurt him. I felt like I was massaging bones. I remember holding his head in my hands one of the last times I massaged him. The prominent vein on the forehead and the deeply sunken eyes and cheeks reminded me of others who had died. Quiet tears rolled down my face while I worked. I realized I was beginning to grieve for yet another client, this man who didn’t appear to have much time to live.

     The ancient Etruscans believed that once grief started it never ended and so advised that there was no point in grieving one hour earlier than one must. I failed to heed this advice with Samuel and started grieving him several months before he died. But it wasn’t just him. I had lost two friends and two other clients to this disease. My mourning for him seemed an extension of other griefs. While I have not honored the advice of the ancients, I do believe in the first part of the saying. Grief seems never to end.

     Life-change theory asserts that the grief cycle takes about two years to complete. Issues of loss change within the time period and usually encompass aloneness, readjustment, acceptance, and a need to get on with one’s life. Typically, the emotions related to grief relax significantly by the end of the time even though one may continue to experience occasional episodes of feeling bereft. Armed with this information, in my mid-thirties, I started thinking in two-year increments about my own emotions related to loss. Feeling hurt or confused, I’d figure if I were still within the two-year allotment of time for the grief cycle. The realization sometimes brought a small relief, a kind of calendared comfort, when pain persisted. But after age forty, I noticed that before one cycle could complete, I was starting another one. It felt like a stacking up of caskets in a temporary, winter-time mausoleum waiting for burial after the spring thaw. The bunching up continues. For me, grief seems here to stay.

     Two deaths have contributed most to the early onset of grief. The first, Ted’s, was preceded by his phone call telling me that his doctor said it was a matter of weeks or months before he would die. I was pondering that information when, a few weeks later, another friend, James, called to tell me he had just found out he was HIV+. These two phone calls plunged me into a grief I fought hard to resist. Certainly, I was confusing concepts of terminal disease and chronic disease. (Terminally ill, Ted died four months later; years later, James is still alive.) But I grieved several months before Ted died. In the second death, Michael’s, there were no phone calls. I was face to face with the disease as I watched him die. For months, on an almost daily basis, I observed his tiny losses of life, including changes of emotion, giving up beloved activities, decreases in energy, increases in pain, growth of lymph nodes, and more. Perhaps, empathetically, I was joining Michael in his dying process. Together we recognized and mourned loss after loss. Grief entered the picture long before he actually quit breathing.

     Michael had not been dead many days when I realized my client Samuel was becoming deeply ill. My tears for Samuel that day as I held his head were also tears for Michael. Two months later, Samuel missed an appointment without canceling. It didn’t seem like him simply to miss, and he had been so frail the last time I had worked with him. The case manager contacted his family and discovered that he had died.

     I now am living with grief, and I imagine it will follow me throughout the rest of my life, both as an ordinary occurrence and as an occupational given. Surely the Etruscans were right; once grief starts it never ends. I wonder whether I will learn not to begin grieving before I must. Perhaps I can ritualize my grief, turn it into a duty, and assign it predictable parameters for beginning and ending. If only life were that simple. Overlapping griefs have come to color my life and work in a significant way. I will try to recognize grief’s power and live into its significance.

Exultation, acrylic on paper, by Phillip Hoyle