By Donald Schell

Like many Anglicans I’ve got the Windsor Report’s phrase, ‘Bonds of Affection’ rolling round in my head like a melody from the radio that won’t be dismissed. I think about affection and whether it makes relationship or just happens sometimes in it. What sense do we make of people who say affection is fleeting? Does good affection bind? That gets more wondering about choices and how we make them, and how bonds and choices live together. And that brings an old personal story to mind.

For eighteen months after she got her R.N. my wife Ellen worked nights caring for sleeping and sleepless patients at teaching hospital near our home. When she was on, I’d walk her over to the hospital, leaving our children sleeping for ten minutes. There had been some late night muggings in our neighborhood and I didn’t want her walking over alone. Ten minutes to eleven I’d steal a good-night kiss from my lovely nurse in uniform and walk home to sleep alone while she worked the shift that hospitals don’t call ‘graveyard.’ Next morning at 7:15 while I was making the kids’ breakfast, we’d listen for her key in the door and her weary "Good morning." Then it was breakfast together and, if it was a weekday, I’d deliver the children to school and child care while Ellen slept.

Regular weekdays I plunged into the priestly and missionary tasks I’d taken founding a new congregation from the ground up, leaving the house to Ellen as a temple of silence. With earplugs and a sleeping mask, she could sleep, more or less, and be ready to greet us in the late afternoon for tea and dinner together before my evening church meetings. Whenever Ellen had a week night off work, I’d take off the following day (with the children off at school) and we’d do something outdoors in the daylight (rain or shine) and enjoy lunch together.

On the weekends that Ellen worked, my task was to keep an intense three-year old son and our more contemplative seven-year old daughter happily occupied away from home so she could sleep. Wherever I took the children on Saturday, our company was divorced dads, men and their children haunting the hands-on Exploratorium, the zoo, the beach, the park. Ellen would make herself stay up for church if she’d worked Saturday night, so on Sundays, our outings were in the afternoon.

Night shift made Ellen’s weekends off important events to us. The Saturday I’m remembering we’d planned a hike and picnic to Tennessee Beach, in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area just north of San Francisco. It’s a beautiful place and the long gentle hike to Tennessee Beach was a favorite for us and the children.

I can’t remember how the morning went wrong except that something Ellen said as we were packing the picnic angered me. I made a tentative statement of what bugged me and why and quickly decided she wasn’t listening. So I decided to sit on my anger and say nothing about it. Of course, I was absolutely certain I was right, that Ellen was wrong, and furthermore that by not listening to me she essentially conceding that I was Right about The Very Important Point I Was Making. Happily casting myself as a righteous victim, I concluded that her evident wrong-headedness gave me no choice but to claim the intellectual and moral high ground and hold it in silence. I didn’t say, "Fine, have it your way," but I thought it.

However, not wanting to be a jerk, I decided to pity her for a long week of working nights, by doing my duty as a dad and father in every particular, being exquisitely nice and helpful as I did it. I agreed with absolutely everything she said, and I smiled a lot and kept busy. I felt Ellen picking up on my rage as we were walking from the ridge down to the beach where the Gold Rush era S.S. Tennessee was wrecked in 1853. My first indication was a look from her – angry, hurt, reproachful, and questioning all at once. The children seemed to be enjoying dad’s catering to them and had a great time. Since I wasn’t making conversation but only responding to Ellen’s or the children’s questions, I had some quiet time during the picnic to think about the early steamship whose wreck had given the beach its name.

Coming up from Panama finding the Golden Gate enshrouded in heavy fog, the Captain was counting on dead reckoning to establish his position. He knew there was land just to the north of him and thought he was entering into the Golden Gate to make anchor in San Francisco Bay, but the sound of waves breaking directly ahead told him his navigation calculations had been disastrously wrong. Through the mists a high cliff appeared, now directly astern. Turning the ship hard away from the cliff and driving the big steam-driven sidewheels full speed he struggled against waves and current and until he saw the other cliff that defined the little cove directly ahead. No way forward and no way back, each succeeding wave drove the ship closer to the beach until finally the sand caught it broadside. More than five hundred passengers and all the U.S. mail were successfully brought ashore. The Tennessee’s owners came out to find their ship beached, but still sound. Soon they had tugs and cables and workmen on the shore trying to re-float the ship, but a couple of days after the Tennessee was beached, a big storm blew in from the Pacific and fierce waves pounded it to pieces.

Three hours or so into my folly of forced niceness, fake smiles and cold helpfulness, I thought I was as trapped as the S.S. Tennessee had been, a nearly new ship, best technology of its era, now little left but rusty boilers buried beneath this beach. As the kids explored the quiet beach and played at the sea’s edge, Ellen asked what was going on. "Nothing," I insisted with all the warmth of an airline steward. Did I actually think I could fool her? Probably not. "Everything" was what I really meant, and she heard me.

We packed our picnic and hiked back to the car. I was impeccably helpful, showily available to the children, excruciatingly respectful and solicitous of my wife. And I knew as I did all this that I was trapped in my own folly and doing us serious damage. All the work of parenting had Ellen stranded too - baffled and frustrated with her incommunicative husband.

Finally, after a dinner at which I tried to channel Ward Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver, and then cheerily took dish duty while Ellen put the children to bed, she came back to the kitchen, stood looking at me for a fierce, loving moment and said, "We don’t do it this way. Tell me what’s wrong."

Words of a response lined up in my head, ‘Well, this is how we do it now!’ but I hated those words and knew I’d regret them for ever, so I left them unspoken. She had me. I was immediately embarrassed to recognize that I’d long since lost track of the fine points from our morning’s conflict, but knowing I was as trapped as the captain of the doomed steamship, I welcomed her direct appeal to unbreakable bonds of affection. I’d never heard us say it before, but she was stating an immediately evident fact – we had tried to shape the course of our life together from a steady intention to grow in love and truth. She was offering us what the S.S. Tennessee could not find, a way forward.

I told her what remained from our conversation that morning, how I’d felt unheard and not taken seriously. She replied describing the scene I’d actually witnessed that morning – her very steady focus on all it took to get the picnic made and us out the door and in the car.

What generated the strain of that day was real bonds of affection we’d forged in the eight years before. I felt the painful bind with which wisdom and the force of my loving her cramped my self-righteousness. Like St. Paul in Acts (26:14) I was straining against the constraints of love. Real bonds of affection are like the muscles and sinews of our bodies, and like those living bonds, practicing relationship makes the bonds more flexible and effective through the strain of use.

Taking ‘bonds of affection’ seriously gives the lie to the old, neat distinction between agape and eros—Christian love and erotic love. Ellen was calling on our established practice of disciplined affection. Letting her touch me with that reminder validated our history together, good memories, and hopes we’d shaped over some years. Her demand rested in the delight in each other’s presence and voice and yes, in the flesh she knew I treasured. She was asking me to use the blessed, powerful bond we’d forged together to break the bind I’d created that morning. We needed to talk. She appealed to what we knew but had never declared before. This new phrase, "How we do it," refused to accept that there were any disagreements we couldn’t talk about.

I am grateful for every liberal and every conservative in our Anglican Communion who is saying now, "That’s not how we do it." With cliffs behind ahead of our ship, there’s no way forward in the righteous certainty than "I’m right" or "She’s wrong." Genuine bonds of affection demand what forged them, the commitment to keep talking, graceful conversation, through whatever conflict we face.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is Creative Director of All Saints Company, working for community development in congregational life focusing on sharing leadership, welcoming creativity, building community through music, and making liturgical architecture a win/win for building and congregation. He wrote My Father, My Daughter: Pilgrims on the Road to Santiago.

By Richard Helmer

While gathering paperwork to get our son registered for kindergarten a few weeks ago, I came across the hospital record of his birth in San Francisco. Beneath his gender designation, length, and weight at birth was his racial designation in big-block capitals:

UNKNOWN.

It stopped me dead in my tracks. Our son, born in 2003, holds immediate claims to two heritages: American and Japanese. Had his mother been, say, French or Swedish, he would have easily been classified as White or Caucasian. Had his mother been African American, chances are he would have been classified as Black. But because his mother is Japanese, and I am of European – mostly English – ancestry, Daniel is a mystery, an unknown quantity in the slippery pseudo-science of race and identity.

Part of me rejoices that he defies standard classification. Part of me worries that his heritage falls into that nebulous, but ever-growing population of children born of marriages that transcend the boundaries of nation and race; children who get a second glance on the street as a rude question bounces around the conventional mind. It’s a question best summed up in the title of a work by author Pearl Fuyo Gaskins: What are you?

“UNKNOWN,” its big, black-on-white, block capitals seemed to also carry with it a mild insult. Marrying across racial boundaries and then having children continues to trip up the legal system in its categorizations, even in an avowedly liberal city like San Francisco. As I prepared Daniel’s kindergarten registration, I was reminded that we are still less than half a century beyond the day when anti-miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. And still only decades from an era when I might have been shipped off to an internment camp with my wife for simply living and loving in the wrong place at the wrong time, for being wed on the wrong side of the war.

In its infinite wisdom, the government now offers a new racial category to the list of choices, and I don’t mean that bland Other ____________. (Please fill in the blank.) It’s "Mixed," which brings to mind the ways Daniel can at times look white and at other times, Asian. Which stereo-typed feature shall we pick? The brown eyes and dark hair or the fair skin? The long fingers or the round face? Will he “pass” as a white person when he needs to, or is he Asian enough to go unnoticed in Japan? Or perhaps he simply fits into the relatively new classification of happa, a term that denotes someone born of one Asian and one non-Asian parent. But even happa says very little. Once considered derogatory, the word is derived from the Hawaiian hapa-haole, which simply means, “half white.” But no Solomon could ever determine which half of Daniel is which.

Mixed belies the deeper truth about our common heritage. Daniel might be mixed but he works: he’s healthy, happy, and behaves like most four-year-old boys do, taking over space in all the lives he meets with his boundless energy. Mixed at one time in the Judeo-Christian tradition implied something or someone impure, less than fully functional, whole, or worthy. The truth is, we are all Mixed if you dig back in our genetic history very far. Our wholeness is deeply rooted in our unity as people made in God’s image, and a shared genetic history that is only several tens of thousands of years old. Our racial categories are very late to arrive on the scene. We have in each of us the biological essence of what it is to be European, African, Asian, Latino, Aborigine, Indian, Native American. . .and the capacity to see the face of Christ in one another and the Body of Christ revealed in one another’s cultural heritage.

It’s also in this way that we are all Unknown.

Unknown like the first-born child of young woman and her carpenter husband two millennia ago. Unknown to the world, born in a stable in a backwater town far from the seats of power and empire. Unknown, yet Mixed, says our tradition – of divine and human origin, but not happa; rather 100% each in the theological math that never seems to add up. Instead, it plunges us into the mystery of a God who touches every piece of us, giving new meaning to that line from the Creed that reminds us that ours is the God of the “seen and unseen,” or in that line from the confession, the Redeemer of the “known and unknown.”

Unknown like every child is born – children who must be named and must receive a social identity from those who care for them. Unknown even then, as they must ultimately find themselves and grow into the gifts they have received. Gifts that came from the only One who truly knows each of us when the stardust comes together in a new way, the genes play mix and match, cells divide, and a new heart begins to beat.

So perhaps Unknown is a good category for a child who is a mystery as much as any of us. Our two-dimensional racial categories pretend to know a person, saddle us with an identity that may or may not fit, pigeon-hole us without regard to our unique natures as children of God. The racial categories, while they might remain useful to track our slow institutional progress in honoring the dignity of all, ultimately reveal the hand of human hubris at work in God’s Creation.

Maybe one day, Daniel will recognize Unknown not as a slap for those who fall in the arbitrary fault-lines of race and culture, but a true freedom to become who God made him to be.

All I can do is keep vigil, pray, and wonder, and reflect on my son’s Unknown-ness – that which has yet to be revealed.

The Rev. Richard E. Helmer, a priest, pianist, and writer, serves as rector of Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley, Calif. He has served in interfaith, ecumenical, diocesan, and national church organizations, including Episcopal Asiamerica Ministries. His sermons have been published at Sermons that Work, and he blogs regularly about spirituality, ministry, Anglicanism, and church politics at Caught by the Light.

By Melody Wilson Shobe

One of the highlights of my job as assistant rector is the work that I am privileged to do with our church day school. Each week I work together with the lay chaplain to conduct two chapel services, one for the Pre-K and Kindergarten students, and another for the 1st through 5th grade students. Chapel is always an adventure and a joy. With the older students, we follow the service of Morning Prayer from the Prayer Book. With the younger students, we follow the outline of Morning Prayer, but the words are greatly simplified so that small children can memorize them. In lieu of the entire Apostle’s Creed, we recite a children’s creed:

“I believe in God above.
I believe in Jesus’ love.
I believe the Spirit, too,
comes to teach me what to do.
I believe that I can be kind and loving,
Lord like Thee.”

We dance to funny songs, and we pray very heartfelt prayers. When I ask a question in my sermon, no matter what the question is, at least one child shouts out: “Jesus!” “What was the bread that God gave the Israelites in the desert called?” I ask. The answer comes back quickly and forcefully “Jesus!” Not quite what I was looking for, but a great answer all the same. I tell them about manna, but make a point to connect it to Jesus and the Eucharist as well. I find myself leaving school chapel each week with a smile on my face and a lighter heart; it is a truly uplifting experience.

Last week, I had a particularly meaningful “chapel moment.” At the end of the service I stood and turned to the children to offer the blessing. As I said the words and moved my hand in the familiar shape of the cross, something caught my eye. One of the first grade boys seated in the second row was moving his arm with mine. His face was scrunched in concentration, his little fingers shaped just as mine were, his arm also tracing the shape of the cross through the air. He was mimicking me. I’m not sure if he thought he was supposed to mimic my motions, like we do when we sing together, or if he was just being playful. Regardless of why he did so, as I was blessing him, he was blessing me.

In the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau, Jacob tricks his father into giving him his brother’s blessing, the blessing that is traditionally reserved for the first-born son. Now, the authors of the Bible want you to prefer Jacob to Esau. After all, Jacob is Israel, the one on whom the rest of the Hebrew Bible will be built. So Esau is described as unrefined, both in appearance and manners. And yet, when I read the story, it is Esau who I identify with, Esau who I am pulling for. Because his response when he hears of what Jacob has done is heartbreaking. “When Esau heard his father’s words, he burst into wild and bitter sobbing, and said to his father, ‘Bless me too, Father!’… ‘Have you not reserved a blessing for me?’(Genesis 27.34, 36b) Isaac tries to explain, but again Esau cries out, ‘Have you but one blessing, Father? Bless me too, Father!’ And Esau wept aloud.” (Genesis 27.38) When I read it, the exchange almost brings me to tears. You can hear the pain and confusion in Esau’s voice. He wants a blessing more than anything else in the world, and somehow there is not enough blessing to go around.

As a priest, I am more used to doing the blessing than I am to being blessed. I haven’t been doing this that long, but already I have all but forgotten what it feels like to have the beautiful words of blessing spoken over me rather than by me. I think that sometimes, without meaning to, I feel like Esau felt in Genesis. I want a blessing more than anything else in the world; I yearn for it. But somehow I just miss the blessing. I don’t feel it. So when that little boy in chapel raised his hand and, without even fully knowing what he was doing, made the sign of the cross, I felt blessed perhaps more powerfully than ever before. What I had forgotten was that the act of blessing is not something I do, with my rehearsed motions and scripted words. It is something that God does to and through me.

Blessing doesn’t come in limited quantities, as Jacob and Esau thought. Nor is there just one blessing to be given and one person who blesses. What I learned from that little boy in chapel is that blessing is a two-way street. I can bless someone in God’s name, and I can receive a blessing at the very same time. When I, like Esau, cry out, “Have you but one blessing, Father?” God’s answer is clear: “No.” When I ask, with all my heart, “Bless me too, Father!” The blessing will come. Maybe in an unexpected way from an unexpected person. But it will be a blessing all the same.

The Rev. Melody Wilson Shobe is Assistant Rector at a church in the Diocese of Texas. She is a graduate of Virginia Theological Seminary and is married to fellow priest The Rev. Casey Shobe.

By Heidi Shott

Yesterday the ironing crisis in our house reached a critical point. The piles of shirts, skirts, and slacks balanced on a maple rocking chair in my bedroom attained such historic proportions that I could no longer ignore them. At least three dozen articles of clothing – most of them mine because long ago my husband Scott learned to send out his shirts – required the attention of a hot, steamy iron. That doesn’t count the 30 or so linen napkins that graced our table at various dinners from Thanksgiving to New Years, which were washed and then relegated to the realm of forgotten textiles.

This is embarrassing and I am loath to reveal it in such a public, Oprah-esque way except that I can’t think of a better way to tell this story.

Scott gave the rocking chair to me 20 years ago on my birthday. I’m fond of it but haven’t sat in it for years because, well, because it’s always covered in wrinkled clothing. But in the late fall of 1993, in a different house six miles inland, I moved the rocker from my bedroom to the room across the hall that, with its new dormer and fresh carpet and built-in cupboards, would serve as a nursery for our imminent twins. I bought some lovely watercolory fabric for the curtains with enough left over for a seat and back cushion for the rocker. I figured I’d be spending a lot of time rocking over the next year and I was right. The seamstress I hired did a beautiful job fashioning both the cushions and the curtains, immeasurably better than I could have dreamed of doing myself.

Over the next few months the cushions stayed perfect. Then the babies arrived and before long the cushions weren’t so pristine anymore: baby spit-up, stray squirts of breast milk, later juice and gummy cheerios, still later crayon marks and smears of play dough. Though the cushions turned dingy, I never thought of more than spot cleaning them because I assumed that the cushions had been permanently sewn into the covers.

Ten years ago, when our sons turned four, we sold that house and moved closer to town. I left the curtains for the new owners, but the cushions and the rocker made their way to our new home. The smart thing to do would have been to chuck the cushions, but I felt the need to keep some remnant of that fabric close at hand. It spoke to me of hundreds of dimly-lighted midnights with a baby or two in my arms, the sweetness of rocking and singing or the desperate whisperings of please please please, darling boy, go back to sleep. In a corner of our new bedroom, the chair began to take on clothes faster than a leaky boat takes on water. Until yesterday, I hadn’t had a visual on those cushions in years.

When I removed the ironing for triage, out of the corner of my eye I noticed something I had never seen before: an overlap of fabric indicating a zipper. Fourteen and a half years since I tied them onto the rocker, I realized the covers were removable.

“No way.” I said, shaking my head, and in a moment both the back and seat covers were in the machine for a long-delayed bath. The mechanism to keep them clean and fresh had been there all along but my lack of curiosity and the fuss and busyness of daily life had not given me eyes to see.

Why is it so easy to get used to the familiar, grimy things in our lives that they become virtually invisible? How many hidden zippers are lurking under our piles of ironing or among our daily comings and goings? What else waits 14 years to be discovered, ripped off and scrubbed clean? Eastertide isn’t a bad time to look for the zippers in our lives – for that quiet moment or that seemingly random encounter that causes you to see something clearly.

For many years now I’ve been writing personal essays that start with simple moments of daily modern life and then eventually wend their way to matters of faith. And what a hypocrite I’ve felt each time I’ve written about reconciliation or doing hard things or choosing to act in a Christ-like way. And here’s why: Since 2000, with the exception of one phone conversation when she had by-pass surgery, I haven’t seen or spoken to my sister nor have I made an effort to do so.

However, the events of recent months have served as a Gordian knot to reverse this estrangement. I’ll call my sister “Peg” because her story is complicated and not mine to tell. Peg has lived in the Midwest for years, but agreed to come to upstate New York to care 24/7 for our mother in December when Mom was essentially kicked out of a nursing home for refusing to do physical and occupation therapy.

In advance of Peg’s arrival, we spoke on the phone several times. The conversations were focused on train fares and arrival times and our mother’s condition. While initially strained because of our long lack of communication, they became remarkably natural and cordial as long as we stayed within the confines of the current situation. Arriving at my mother’s apartment the night before we were to spring her from the nursing home, I felt anxious about seeing Peg after so long. She is 16 years older than I am, and, as the oldest of the four children, she often took care of me, the youngest by many years. Her older son and I grew up more like siblings. Still we never had the close sisterly relationship that I often envy my friends for sharing with their sisters and a sad set of family circumstances led to our years of mutual silence.

But there I was at the front door with my bag and my laptop. The gap of eight years, since she last came to New York to make peace with our father who was dying of lung cancer, had pushed her into her sixties and me into my forties and we both stood at the doorway gulping back the shock.

Because it was snowing hard, I had called her when I turned off the Utica exit on the Thruway. She had put the tea kettle on. After I dropped my things, we sat at our mother’s kitchen table and drank tea and talked. And talked and talked and talked.

Gently and instinctively, we didn’t talk about the past or any hurtful, sorrowful, regretful things. We talked about our families, and our brothers, and what the heck to do about our mother. We talked about today and tomorrow.

Here’s the hard truth: On my best day as a Christian, I could not have picked up the phone to call her in the Midwest to start that conversation. My mother’s health crisis became an opportunity, a suddenly revealed zipper that allowed us to whip off the veil that separated us…not completely perhaps...but enough for healing to start.

Last week my sister returned to the Midwest. My mother is on her own in a new apartment with meals on wheels and Lifeline. We don’t know how long this equilibrium of our extended and far-flung family life will last but for today, this day, all is well.

In the midst of my ironing marathon, my sister called and I happily picked up the phone. We talked about her trip home, her grandchildren, my sons, our mother and how the hard it will be to get through the next four weeks without the TV show Lost.

Despite how well this has turned out, I’m frightened to think what other sorrows and difficulties in my life could be redeemed if I choose. What possibilities are there for forging new relationships and challenging old fears and casting aside old stumbling blocks. As one who knows I am lavishly beloved of God, I should be able to open my eyes to see how easy it is to do such things. But without the miraculous grace of the previously unseen zipper and the knowledge of how to work it, I’m not so sure how to start.

As I walked back into my bedroom and the pile of clothing on the floor, my eye caught the empty rocking chair. Instead of returning to the ironing, I sat in the chair and turned my face to the familiar cushion: stained, faded but so so so sweet.

Heidi Shott has served as press officer to Bishop Chilton Knudsen of Maine since 1998. She is communications director of the Genesis Fund, a revolving loan fund that provides expertise and low-interest loans to nonprofits engaged in community development. Heidi's essays about trying to live a life of faith may be found at Heidoville.

By Margaret M. Treadwell

Uncle Buddy, our McDonnell family patriarch at 94, recently began taking guitar lessons. The last remaining brother of seven with no sisters, his favorite song is Amazing Grace, which he practices often on the guitar and daily in his life.

“How did you manage to live so long and so well?” his nieces and nephews wonder, seeing their own fathers in him. Buddy says, “It's because God has something left for me to do.”

During World War II, Buddy served as ball gunner on a B-24 Liberator and was also on the B-17, known as the Flying Fortress. He flew 50 missions over Europe and received the Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Service medals. The faded newspaper article with accompanying handsome picture cites his “courage, coolness and exceptional skill” which contributed to the success of these missions.

“Uncle Sam” trained Buddy to be an aircraft mechanic, which he parlayed into a post war job at Brookley Field in Mobile, his hometown. He retired in 1978, and after his beloved wife of 44 years died, Buddy lived by himself in Belle Fountain, Ala., tending his pecan orchard while pursuing his hobbies – bird watching, fishing, eating out, attending church and enjoying friends. Then, Hurricane Katrina hit and changed his life.

Enter my cousin Jean-Marie McDonnell of Daphne, Ala., an artist whose mother recently died. She says, “I had wonderful help in place. I needed to figure out a way to maintain my lifestyle. Buddy needed a place where he would not be alone. I believe family members should not be institutionalized if other alternatives are available. It's working.”

She thinks three characteristics lend themselves to Buddy's good quality of life and therefore his longevity:

* Positive Attitude. Although he has a bad knee, terrible hearing and needs a few pills for health issues, Buddy looks forward to what each day might bring, whether it be hummingbirds, church, a trip to the barbershop, grocery shopping, or sitting, his feet up in a recliner, to watch a football game with a potential Alabama win. He posts aphorisms around his room and the one he first sees in capital letters upon awaking is THINK POSITIVE SMILE.

* Love of All Things. Buddy loves people and always looks for the good in them. He keeps a box of the cards and letters he's received and says, “I save my cards because they have so many beautiful thoughts from friends of mine that I love.” His care extends to plants – his pecan trees, the amaryllis as it blossoms – and to all animals, especially the little dog that jumps into his lap when he positions the recliner just right for her flying leap.

* Control Over his Own Life. Buddy's decision to move in with Jean-Marie was his choice, as was giving up driving voluntarily after a small accident. He has created a routine to keep himself healthy and on course, such as carefully taking his medications with supervision, setting up the coffeepot for the next day, hanging up his clothes, praying a nightly rosary, dressing himself – including putting on his knee brace – doing exercises in his room, practicing the guitar and attending a weekly lesson, enjoying church in a caring community, and eating out twice a week with Jean-Marie.

Buddy wrote about the high points of his life for us cousins, his surrogate children. His chapters were: My Family: Boyhood Days at Point Clear (the most vivid with tales of all our fathers); Sailing and the Lipton Regatta (where he made the team several times, sailed in many regattas all over the country, and once won a race on Lake Ponchartrain in New Orleans); Wonderful Life with Mary Louise, 44 Years; Baseball; Friends; WWII Air Force; and The McDonnell Reunions (he eagerly awaits the next one in July).

He writes simply and clearly about his life and it is a testament to his 94 years lived with "Amazing Grace."

Margaret M. “Peggy” Treadwell, LICSW, is a family, individual and couples therapist and teacher in private practice. She can be contacted at PeggyMcDT@aol.com.

By Jean Fitzpatrick

We were supposed to get a storm of Antarctic proportions, and the radio announced a long list of school closings, but it's only a light snowfall. For an instant, I stop to look: as the wind rises through the trees, showers of huge lollipop flakes, like the ones in a child's drawing, fall to the ground, and the pure winter light reflected off the snow pours in our windows and bathes the whole house. But then it's business as usual: I return a few phone calls, exchange emails with colleagues about an upcoming meeting. My neighbor calls and we congratulate ourselves on the fact that with the snow on our driveways already melted, we won't need to call the plow.

As I put down the kitchen phone, I remember with a pang how, when my kids were small, they would greet a day like this with great whoops of joy, running outside to sled down the lawn and make snow angels. Once they were back indoors -- noses runny, mittens caked with snow, hair electrified from their knit hats -- we'd spread their wet clothes over the radiators and it would be time for hot chocolate. They'd spend the long afternoon rummaging through old clothes for costumes, getting lost in a storybook, watching Gilligan's Island reruns.

I don't let myself do that very often. Don't look back, I tell myself. Banish the self-pity. You have two healthy, grown kids. They're moving forward, they're happy and caring, they stay in touch. You have a full life, people and work you love. You're safe in a warm house. To be anything but thankful would be a disgrace.

Right. I turn away from the window. Back in my office, sinking into the swivel chair at my desk, I click on the online reservation that will, in a few weeks, whisk me away from winter. Tropical sunsets, blue water and pineapple daiquiris: just the ticket.

Now, hold on a minute, something inside me says. What are you running away from?

I take a deep breath and check in with myself. Actually, I'm surprised to notice, I feel no sadness, no pain, nothing. Zero. How did it happen so quickly that the most frozen place of all is inside my own heart?

I go back to the kitchen, fix a cup of orange tea, and gaze out the window. This time I let myself picture my children trudging across the meadow beyond the trees, calling out to each other, putting out their tongues to catch falling flakes. Ice glistens along the birch branches. A cardinal lights on the feeder and flies off. This time, instead of flinging off the sadness, I'm letting it rest with me, but lightly. Before long, as I slow down to take in the beauty of the silent, snowy woods, I'm deep in the present moment, with all its fullness.

There's no substitute for letting ourselves be human. At certain times in our lives, other people -- those we love, those we reach out to help, those with a gift for prayer or preaching -- help us see the world in an intense, new way. In doing so, they open our eyes to a larger reality, mediate the divine for us. When those times pass, no two ways about it: we're bound to grieve. It's true there's no point in looking back, like Lot's wife. But if we insulate ourselves completely against those inner waves of loss, we end up walling off the grace that is always offered to us. We lose touch with joy.

The sky is a milky white. I'm pretty sure it's going to snow again.

Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick, L.P., a New York-licensed psychoanalyst and a member of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors, is the author of numerous books and articles on the spirituality of relationships, including Something More: Nurturing Your Child's Spiritual Growth. She has a website at www.pastoralcounseling.net.

By Heidi Shott

Last August my sons and I made our way downeast to Mount Desert Island for our annual camping trip to Acadia National Park. Our stated goal – my stated goal – is to hike every named peak by the time the boys graduate from high school in 2012. Each year we update a master map of the park by circling the peaks we’ve knocked off. Last year we hiked Sargent and Dorr Mountains and were joined by my non-camping husband on the final morning for a hike up Pemetic.

By real mountain standards the peaks of Acadia are only biggish hills, but on clear days the views of the glacial lakes and the outline of the piney islands off the Atlantic coast still take my breath away. This annual trip at the end of summer is a touchstone for our family, a final time together before the new school year to pick the last wild blueberries along the trail, to walk around Bar Harbor with ice cream, and to savor the hot popovers with butter and strawberry jam at the park’s venerable Jordan Pond House.

Another touchstone has been reading aloud. From the time they were four or five until last summer when we finished the last Harry Potter book after a six hour marathon ending at 2:30 a.m., we’ve always had a read-aloud going. However, last summer the boys announced that after Harry Potter, we should call it quits. “It’s been fun, Mom, but we prefer to read alone from now on. No offence, okay?”

With a hard swallow, I accepted this rare example of twin solidarity. Their tastes are, after all, diverging: Colin reads history and historical novels; Martin prefers contemporary fiction and poetry. And already, at 13, they are commending many hard and wonderful books that I’ve never gotten around to reading.

So in August, shoehorned into our tent at the remotest, raccoon-infested corner of Southwest Harbor’s Smugglers Den Campground, the three of us were each to our own book. Martin was sailing around the tent alone with the poetry of Billy Collins, I was halfway through Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex, and Colin was reading an anthology of P.G. Wodehouse. (He dressed up as Bertie Wooster for Halloween and was disappointed when our neighbors mistook him for a croquet player). For me, it was sweet – each boy kept interrupting to read lines thereby annoying his brother – but not the same as reading together, immersed in the same book. I missed the plaintive cries of “One more chapter, please, or at least read to an asterisk!” After much phony reluctance, I always gave in.

In late November when it came time for Martin’s eighth grade conference, he shared with us the following poem he wrote early in the school year.

“Daily Gift”
“Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your walking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.”
- Billy Collins, “Days”

--
The first thing I hear
are the birds.

I am lying in a snug sleeping bag,
eyes closed,
absorbing the whistles
and tweets.

The second sound is the tap
of raindrops on a nylon tent
as they trickle from soggy trees.

The final noise
in my semi-asleep state
is the kettle reaching its boiling point.

Now I am awake.

I rise,
a zombie of the campground,
hair untamed,
and glare through trash-bag eyes:

a nocturnal adolescent
sore from hiking.

I clamber out of my cave
and utter the first word
of a fresh day:

“Coffee.”

Who knows what this day,
this gift,
will bring.

I only know one way
to find out.

- Martin Shott

How I wish I had Martin’s trash-bag eyes to see each new day as it is delivered to my bedside. In this new year, how I wish that we Episcopalians could focus on the gifts so freely and lavishly given to each of us by God: our capacity to love and our freedom to commit ourselves to whomever we choose; the thousands of opportunities available to serve those without a voice in our society and in the wider world. These gifts are already ours, no matter where General Convention stands on the matter at any given time or whether some among us have chosen to leave the Church altogether.

Years ago, my college’s chapter of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship invited a Presbyterian minister from Charlottesville to preside at an evening called, “Hard Questions.” It was meant to be a particularly intriguing and evangelical night, drawing students who wouldn’t ordinarily attend one of our weekly meetings. We were hopeful this Presbyterian dude would be good on the stump. (Our local Episcopal priest who faithfully attended our meetings was a genial, laid back guy and glad to escape the hot seat.) While I recall we drew a good crowd including a couple of lively agnostics, I can only remember two sure things about the evening: one is that the Presbyterian guy had a beard and the other is his response to question, “How can you explain terrible things that happen in the world?”

I had just read the Grand Inquisitor chapter of The Brothers Karamozov and was interested to see where he would go with the answer. I was also interested because my comfort level with my friends’ confidence in a fairly rigid Evangelical view of faith was beginning to shift. At the same time I was terrified of being left as a castaway to grapple alone with an increasing number of questions and an emerging vision of what it could mean to be a Christian. So I listened to the Presbyterian intently.

He said something close to this: A countless number of horrible things happen to people that we can’t explain, no one disputes that. But the Bible gives us a clue by fully explaining that God the Creator loved humankind deeply enough to redeem us by the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God. All the details are there, all the explanation is there. It’s the most complex and most horrifying deal in all of history, but God has seen fit to reveal it to us fully. A god who will explain an event of such magnitude…one that demonstrates such abounding love for creation… is a god who can be trusted with millions of things – the tragedies and the mysteries – we can’t explain in the world.

While I was disappointed with the answer at the time, I’ve found that I’ve remembered it for almost 25 years. The gifts are there. The child is born, and we know the how and why. While I miss the gift of reading to my sons, the closeness and the sweetness of it, their sharing of the books they read alone takes us new places and bestows its own gifts. I need to learn to let old gifts go and new gifts emerge, but it’s not easy.

Hark, friends, and listen closely in this New Year. Each day as you wake remember what you know is true; remember you are well-loved. Remember it is worth the struggle to climb out of your cozy tent and into the new day to accept whatever’s out there.

Just ask Martin, he’ll tell you.

Heidi Shott has served as press officer to Bishop Chilton Knudsen of Maine since 1998. Her essays about trying to live a life of faith may be found at Heidoville.

By Jean Fitzpatrick

Leafing through this week's classifieds in New York magazine, I came across the following ad in the real estate section:

WE NEED HELP BUYING AN APT on the UWS (editor's note: that's Upper West Side), 3bd2bath. YOU are a philanthropic, wealthy person who would not miss a million bucks and would be interested in donating (or even investing) in a highly targeted manner: to my family. WE are a wonderful, hard working middle class family who contributes to our UWS community, is entrenched, happy and desperately wants to remain on the UWS (lest the city lose yet another wonderful family to the burbs). We can afford 600-700k, so you see the predicament. Can you help us??

Well, I thought, here are some grown-ups who believe in Santa Claus. So this is what Manhattan real estate prices have come to, that people who can afford to pay more than half a million for an apartment are looking for handouts. There's an absurd Little Match Girl tone to the whole ad: urban Mom, Dad, and kids standing on the sidewalk outside the Upper West Side's elegant prewar buildings, filled with longing, fingers numb in the cold. In a borough where many pay exorbitant sums to live in apartments not much bigger than a sectional sofa, the ad's Manhattan real estate envy is familiar to most of us, writ large. Now, there's something to be said for the idea that not every condo and coop in the city should end up owned by Wall Street people or international real estate investors. And with the richest two percent of people on earth owning more than half of the household wealth, maybe it's inevitable these days that middle-class people will feel poor. Maybe soon we'll be seeing similar requests from people asking for a Sub Zero kitchen ("WE are fabulous cooks!") or a Bose stereo ("WE only listen to classical music played on authentic period instruments!") or a $4,000 Capresso cappuccino maker ("WE only brew coffee with whole, fair-trade beans!").

I couldn't help noticing the theology here. In explaining their "predicament," the ad's writers appeal to the good old Protestant work ethic: they are a "wonderful, hard working middle class family who contributes to our UWS community." It's the word "wonderful" that got to me. Here's a chance, during this Advent season, to consider the difference between Santa Claus and Jesus. We are brought up to believe that if we're good boys and girls, we'll get everything on our Christmas list. Most of us recognize, by the time we reach adulthood, that life just doesn't add up that way. "Wonderful" people, we discover, experience suffering, disappointment, and loss. There are "wonderful" people living in cities and suburbs -- in New York and all over the world -- who who go to bed hungry, lack basic health care, and have no roof at all over their heads, let alone a home with two bathrooms. Talk about predicaments.

No wonder the story of a holy child born in a filthy manger touches us so deeply. We are invited to imagine, in the midst of so much hardship, the presence of joy. We're reminded that we can avoid experiencing a kind of envy that is not only unappealing, but painful, if we turn our gaze to people who have less than we do and focus on reaching out with prayers and help. And in doing so we feel blessed -- no matter where we live.

Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick, L.P., a New York-licensed psychoanalyst, is a member of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors. A layreader in the Diocese of New York, she is the author of numerous books and articles on the spirituality of relationships, including Something More: Nurturing Your Child's Spiritual Growth and has a website at www.pastoralcounseling.net.

By Margaret M. Treadwell

Your responses to two questions in my previous column about preparing for death, were inspirational and helpful. Here is a sampling, and to all of you who wrote in – thank you!

I asked: “What do you wish you’d asked your parent before he or she died?”

Readers responded:

I’d ask my mother:
* How she learned to survive with my father all those years?
* To tell me more about her faith in God, which sustained her and held Dad up.
* If she would write a letter to my sister and me? (She died when we were teenagers.)
* How did you show such fortitude and calm during your last illness?

I’d ask my father:
* What he thought about his relationship with Mom – only duty and interdependence?
* About family heirlooms disconnected from meaning discovered after his death?
* About the other women in his life and how many half siblings I have?
* About his childhood after his mother died and his stepmother treated him cruelly?

I’d ask each parent:
* What they believed about life after death?
* About my grandparents and all relatives whose history is lost with their deaths?
* What was your life like when you were young?
* What were your favorites things to do? The disappointments, roads not taken?

I asked: “Did you leave anything undone that you wish you’d done?”

And this reader’s words beautifully summarize many responses: “I wish I had done more to reinforce with my mother her value to the family and to me with words and more hugs and anything else that would have helped reassure her of her own worth. She often thanked me for the help I was extending to her and my response was that I was doing it because I loved her. Then, we simply went on with whatever it was we were doing. That would have been the perfect time, however, to talk more about her value from a whole variety of perspectives. I think I was somewhat lazy in not thinking of this until after her death.”

Another reader wrote a testimony to peace: “One thing I learned from my mother’s death is how to be when my own children gather round (I hope!) to see me off. Let them know I’m not disappointed or fearful or needing anything more than their presence...going with grace. Mother was a clear writer, but I never read anything more perfectly worded from her than this final letter she had left on her desk…the clear intention being to free us from worry and regret:

To my family, my physician, my clergyman, my lawyer – If the time comes when I can no longer take part in decisions for my own future, let this statement stand as the testament of my wishes: If there is no very good expectation of my making an excellent recovery from physical or mental disability, I demand that I be allowed to die and not be kept alive by artificial means or heroic measures. I do not fear death as much as I fear the indignity of deterioration, dependence and hopeless pain. I ask that drugs be mercifully administered to me for terminal suffering, even if they hasten the moment of death. You who care for me will, I hope, feel morally bound to follow this mandate. I recognize that it places a heavy burden of responsibility upon you, and it is with the intention of sharing that responsibility and of mitigating any feelings of guilt that this statement is made. In case of cardiac arrest which is instantly detected, I permit two minutes maximum attempts to resuscitate me."

And if you do have regrets? Many people have found it helpful to write letters to deceased loved ones, then to write another letter from that person back to themselves. This process can be freeing, like the following words from Canon Henry Scott Holland (1847-1918):

“Death is nothing at all: I have only slipped away into the next room: I am I and you are you: whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by my old familiar name; speak to me in the easy way, which you always used…. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.”

Margaret M. (Peggy) Treadwell, LICSW, is a family, individual and couples therapist and teacher in private practice. She writes a monthly column for Washington Window
and teaches a course, "Congregational Leadership: Family Systems Theory for Clergy" at Virginia Theological Seminary's Center for Lifetime Theological Education.

By Heidi Shott

My mom, Audrey, is 84 years old and lives alone in my tiny hometown in upstate New York. For about five years, she’s used a walker because she needs a hip replacement. She can’t have a hip replacement because she refuses to have a heart valve replaced and no orthopedist will touch her unless she does. Last Wednesday morning she was scheduled for surgery to stop intestinal bleeding. But then suddenly she wasn’t.

In the midst of getting ready to go to work and rustling my sons off to school, I called my brother, Brad, to remind him that I’d placed her living will in her purse before I returned home to Maine a few days before. “Well, it doesn’t matter, Heid,” he said with a huff. “She’s refusing to have the operation. She’s afraid she’ll die.”

“You’re kidding me,” I hissed. This is the woman who 18 hours before said over the phone that she had the peace that passeth all understanding.

It had been a long few weeks for both of us – for Brad because he lives next door and is the “first responder” – her go-to guy – and me because I’d come out to New York – a seven hour drive – to take care of her when she arrived home after eight inconclusive days in the hospital. We had a nice couple of hours sitting and talking, my mother reminiscing fondly (now that he’s dead) about her long and bumpy life with my dad and telling me tidbits about neighbors and family members that she forgets to mention when we talk on the phone. Then suddenly, things went wrong. You’ll have to trust me on this, because anything more gets into the realm of too-much-information.

After an initial, highly alarming crisis and a call to her doctor, we tried to settle down to sleep. She called to me in the night and I thought it was my son, Colin, calling. I thought I was at home in Maine…not in the spare room in what we call the “front apartment.”

After shaking off the confusion, I tended to her in the night, twice, three times, and in the morning we tried to leave for the hospital but she was too weak and dizzy to make it the last 25 feet to my car. “Do you want me to call for an ambulance?” I asked. It was a dumb question. She leaned deeply over her walker and I thought, “Shit, this is it.” I called 911 and returned to her, rubbing circles on her back while we waited.

“That feels good,” she said. “It feels good when you rub my back like that.”

I remember my mother rubbing my back when I was small and afraid to go to sleep or when I was sick. “I’ll pull out my old nursing tactics,” she’d say brightly. My mother, an army nurse during World War II, nursed many of the men who survived the Bataan death march when they returned to the states at the end of the war. She told stories of how they would rally for their families and girlfriends who came across the country to see them and then die shortly after the jubilant visitors departed. She told of how she painted all of their toenails bright red while they slept to cheer them up and then had to fess up when a general visited the ward the next morning. “Who did this?” the general bellowed, the story goes. “I timidly said, ‘I did,’ and the General roared with laughter.” And my mother always laughs at that sweet memory. But here she was at 84, dizzy and weak and waiting for the ambulance in the dingy garage of the front apartment. I rubbed her back.

My mother is a Southern Baptist, and we don’t talk much about religion anymore. She thinks I’m nuts and I think she’s nuts and we generally get along fine.

The previous evening, having been away from the piano for more than a week while she was in the hospital, she sat down to play. Between the ages of 11 and 14, when I started hitching rides to a more liturgical church and several years before I found myself at the door of an Episcopal church as a college freshman, I learned a whole lot of Baptist hymns and Gospel songs. Downstairs my mother started to play a song from the 1970s, Because He Lives by Bill Gaither. I know the chorus by heart; it goes like this:

Because He lives I can face tomorrow Because He lives All fear is gone. Because I know-oh-oh, He holds the future And life is worth the living Just because He lives.

Frankly, I’ve spent the last 27 years trying to forget that song and others like it. It’s not that I don’t believe that Jesus lives or that knowing Jesus doesn’t make life worth living, but because…

And that’s the problem, I thought as I stood in the upstairs hall listening to her play, suddenly I don’t know why I hate that simplistic, unnuanced, goofy music, because, whatever else it is, it is a balm to her in this frightening time of illness and worry. It’s her centering prayer, her compline, her Taize, her Eucharist.

Before long, we were stationed in an acute bay in the emergency room at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Utica. Nurses milled about asking questions. “She was just discharged yesterday,” I said from a chair in the corner. “Shouldn’t you have all that information?” They glared at me. I’m not used to this in a hospital. My husband is an administrator at a small, community hospital on the Maine coast where we know everybody. We’re used to big-hearted people but here my mom was just an 84 year-old female patient who presented with thus and so.

The nurses shifted her in her bed. “My mom’s a nurse,” I gambled. They perked up and looked at her. “You are!” Suddenly Mrs. Stukey was a person.

In the afternoon with my mother finally settled after hours in the ER, I drove back to her place and embarked on some industrial strength cleaning. Old ladies with walkers and bad eyesight who are too proud to pay someone to clean for them are prone to harboring crumbs in their toasters and all manner of splorches on their kitchen linoleum. I also had promised to find her living will, health care proxy, and power of attorney. After cleaning the kitchen, I was rummaging around in the curious mix of junk in her desk…ancient family photos, a TV Guide from last winter, never sent Christmas cards from 1964, and this month’s phone bill…when Brad walked in.

Here’s the truth: my brother Brad and I have spoken more in the last three weeks than we have in the entire time since he left home to learn to fly helicopters in 1973. We never felt we had much in common. We were busy with our own lives and work and families. He lived in Alaska for many years near our older brother. I’ve lived in Maine for most of my adult life. Like most families, ours is complicated in its own Tolstoyian way – the inner workings of which are of little interest to anyone outside the circle. But here’s another truth: I really like him. He sat on the sofa while I went through the desk. I chucked papers and photos at him to look at. We found controversial documents about our dead aunt’s estate and rehashed the drama.

“Come on, let’s go down to the VFW for a beer,” he said when I’d found the papers I was looking for and stashed the rest back in the drawers.

“No,” I said, smiling. “I promised Mom I’d come back over to St. E’s tonight.”

“Come on, Heid,” he cajoled.

“Really, no, there’s a certain type of bar I won’t go to,” I said. “When I was little, Dad dragged me to bars all over the place.” I named a number of them.

“Dad took you into LBJ’s?” he said, eyes wide. “What a dive, I wouldn’t go in that place.”

“Didn’t he take you to bars, too?” I asked. I always assumed my older siblings were dragged to bars as well.

“No,” he shook his head, still stunned at the differences in our childhoods. “No, he never did.”

“C’mon, I’ll walk you back to your house,” I said, and swung my arm through his, so deeply tanned and strong.

A week later Brad and I were on the phone after Mom’s refusal to have surgery. “I’ll come right out,” I said. “I’ll talk some sense into her.” So after making arrangements for kids’ activities and work, with a Michael Chabon novel to listen to on CD, back to New York I went.

With surgery declined, St. Elizabeth’s discharged my mother to one of three fates: eat food and bleed; drink fluids and grow weak; have surgery and return to health. When I arrived at the front apartment, she was obviously happy to be home. Her choice was to drink fluids until she got her nerve up to have the surgery. She had a permanent IV line dangling from her black and blue arm.

Still mad at her for refusing to have surgery, I couldn’t refrain from a snide remark, “What happened to the peace that passeth all understanding, Mom?” I was standing over her. She had lost about 15 pounds in three weeks. She was small and wrinkled in her easy chair, and I instantly felt like a supercreep for jabbing at her faith.

“I was so scared. An anesthesiologist came in last night and said, ‘Wow, you’re a serious heart risk,’ and walked out. It scared the pants off me. I couldn’t sleep and when Brad got there this morning, I told him I couldn’t go through with it.”

Sighing, I sat down on the arm of the sofa. Even if Jesus lives, even if life is worth the living, it can still be scary. And the fact is that right now, life is scary for my mother. Maybe what she needs to be brave is to see the face of Jesus in her children, no matter how imperfect they are. Being cynical about her simple, abiding faith shouldn’t be a part of how I live out my faith…so exquisite at times with its shades of gray and intriguing dappled colors.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” and bent down to kiss her hair before taking my bag upstairs to the spare room where as a little girl I had often slept when my sister – married so young – lived here in the late sixties. Downstairs I heard Mom move her walker over to the piano. She was playing “At Calvary,” and the fourth verse popped into my head:

O, the love that drew salvation’s plan O, the grace that brought it down to man O, the mighty gulf that God did span, At Calvary.

Mercy there was great and grace was free.
Pardon there was multiplied to me.
There my burdened soul found liberty
At Calvary.

“Preach it, Mom,” I whispered.

Heidi Shott has served as press officer to Bishop Chilton Knudsen of Maine since 1998. She is also communications director of the Genesis Fund, a revolving loan fund that provides expertise and low-interest loans to nonprofits engaged in community development. Heidi's essays about trying to live a life of faith may be found at Heidoville.

By Margaret Treadwell

My mother regularly tells me she is ready to die. She says, “Ninety-seven is too old to live when physically you don’t feel like doing anything! I know I could stop eating but I enjoy my food too much. Maybe I could stop being curious about my family and friends?” But that’s just not who I am.” I tell her I’ll support her decision no matter what, and we talk about her faith in reuniting with loved ones in Heaven. We usually end this conversation with the words of her beloved caretaker who tells her, “Mrs. McDonnell, I don’t think when you die is up to you.”

“Maybe all of us have more say about our death than we know,” I muse. I tell her about a colleague whose family members appear to draw a very thin line between life and death. One uncle returned all his library books, checked no more out and died the next week. Another wanted only to spend Christmas with his sister and died sitting in her comfortable living room chair.

“How do you think our family has handled death in previous generations?” I ask. Mother says, “No one ever talked about it. Mamaw (her mother) lived to 94 and we all thought she’d live forever. Daddy was sick so long with Parkinson’s pain that he was frustrated and difficult at the end. I’m beginning to understand him better these days!” So much for that.

But a few days later, Mother calls to tell me about a vivid dream: “Mamaw and my sister Beth (both deceased) came to invite me on a trip to Europe. I told them I wasn’t feeling well with a stomachache and would stay home to take care of Daddy. After they left, I found the front door of his house locked so I couldn’t get in to help.”

Knowing that many people unconsciously preparing for death have dreams about going on journeys, I ask, “What do you make of it?” After a thoughtful pause, Mother says, “I think I made a mistake. I should have gone with Mamaw and Beth.” Taking a deep breath to ground myself in being her daughter rather than a therapist, I say, “I love you, Mom. Remember more dreams and tell me.”

Mother was just as eager to die eleven years ago. “I have no reason to live,” she told me after my father died of the Alzheimer’s disease she had faithfully nursed him through. Without thinking I shouted, “Don’t do that to me, Mother! I don’t have any siblings!” A few days later, I amended my outburst to the phrase I’ve been repeating ever since: “Mom, I support you in any decision you make until you won’t or can’t make a good decision for yourself. Then, I’ll do what’s best for me.”

So far this agreement has translated into my attempts to be emotionally present while physically distant as Mother chooses to remain in her own home where I grew up in Sheffield, Ala. When the going gets rough with health setbacks, Mom pulls through with one certainty: “I do NOT want to move to Washington, D.C.”

Except for weekly visits to Gay’s Hair Salon and doctors unable to relieve her arthritic and other pains, she is thoroughly homebound surrounded by caretakers and hospice workers with whom I keep in touch. Younger neighbors, friends and clergy from her cherished Episcopal church often visit, and she is endlessly interested and invested in their lives. I call her home ministry “Flo’s salon.”

Increasingly helpless in her ongoing fragility to help her have a reason for living, I listen. I try to live in the moment of each long distance phone call to appreciate the gift of being a non-anxious presence with her now. After listening, I ask one question per conversation about her extended family in Mobile, a favorite topic. How did they show love? How did she spend time with her grandparents? How did they play? What about meals together? How did they grieve? Any more family secrets you haven’t told me?

I travel as often as possible to my hometown that is harder to reach than Europe. Recently I celebrated Mom there with my family – husband, son, daughter, their spouses and her three great grandchildren. We had a blast and she let us know when enough was ENOUGH, like the time she turned on the evening news to invite Brian Williams (NBC News anchor) into our midst. He immediately broke up the party!

On our good days, Mom and I are doing great. But I always wonder what more I can be and do. So many of us are pioneering similar situations with our elderly parents that I’m asking you my readers a favor: What questions do you wish you’d asked your parent before he or she died? Did you leave anything undone that you wish you’d done? If you’ll email me , I’ll gather and include your questions and thoughts in a future column, which will be useful to others and me.

Margaret M. (Peggy) Treadwell, LICSW, is a family, individual and couples therapist and teacher in private practice. She writes regularly for Washington Window.

By Sara McGinley

Have you ever noticed how baby poo has an uncanny ability to expand and multiply and how that capability is exponentially truer when you’re wearing nice clothing or the child is wearing nice clothing or a lot of people are watching you?

I wasn’t aware of that law of nature until almost exactly 3 years ago when I took my then infant son to church for the first time.

He was the first clergy baby in that church in a very long time and his first visit to church was a highly anticipated event.

That day just as communion was about to start I noticed a little wetness on my arm. When I looked down to investigate I noticed that my wrist and Eliot’s side were covered in some, I’ll call it, stuff.

I raced out of church with my huge, new mommy over-stuffed diaper bag, changed him out of his cute little red outfit I’d spent hours deciding on for his first trip to church and put him in the runner up outfit (a little baseball uniform which included a hat which I didn’t put on my poor pooping baby). I raced back to church and was able to run up to the altar to be the very last person to get communion.

I felt pretty cool.

He was just a few weeks old and I’d managed to get about 15 gallons of poop off of me and him and get his clothes off of him and him back in a new diaper and new clothes and have communion.

On my way back to my seat in the 7th or 8th row of the church three people noticed that Eliot was wearing a different outfit.

Before that day I’d felt like I was living in a fish bowl.

Until that day I didn’t know the full extent of it.

I realized that I was living in a fish bowl where costume changes are noticed.

I can’t say that I thrive in the fish bowl. I mean, truly, there is a reason there are signs on the fish tanks at the pediatricians office. “Please don’t tap the glass I will make the fish sick.”

My husband and kids and I took a whole entire 2 week vacation recently.

On that vacation we were just anonymous humans fishing the lake, just another organism walking through the woods, just another tourist eating the over-priced kids hot-dog on the patio.

We were nobodies.

We were nothing of great interest to anyone.

I didn’t fully realize I was on a break from being noticed until one evening when I took my now 3 year old son out for dinner without a diaper bag or even a diaper stuck in my pocket.

During dinner he filled his pants in one of those amazing multiplying ways.

I decided we could just go in the bathroom, remove the stuff, wipe the stuff and return his pants to his little boy bottom and head back home without much trouble.

I anonymously walked off the full patio at the restaurant. Anonymously walked through the bar and anonymously walked into the bathroom.

Once in the bathroom Eliot wanted to look at stuff.

I wanted to get his pants and shoes and diaper off without laying him down on the insanely wet (yuck) public bathroom floor.

He wanted to run away during the wiping part.

I wanted to get it over with.

At one exasperating moment he ran, I grabbed and slipped everything was just enough stressed and pulled in just the right way that I ripped. Yes. Ripped. The entire front end of my pants wide open.

Don’t imagine that rip as a small tear.

It was a rip. A foot-long tear across the front of my pants.

It ran from near my waste band to pretty close to my knee.

So I was stuck with a stinky, dirty three year old without a diaper and the very front of my pants completely hanging in the breeze.

I couldn’t stay where I was. It was a one-seater with someone knocking on the door behind me.

So I just put things back together as well as I could and walked out of the bathroom and back through the patio to my husband and daughter pretending there was nothing at all smelly or exposed about us.

And no one noticed us at all. We were just another mom and her son. Just another pair with their pants on all wrong.

Sara McGinley, irreverent priest's wife and mother of two, writes the blog subtly named, Sara McGinley. She is a lay person from Minnesota who thinks the term 'lay person' is unnecessarily suggestive.

By Jean G. Fitzpatrick

Labor Day weekend: our collective crash-landing to the "real world." The prospect is enough to make many young parents shudder. "Summer's been so relaxed," they tell me. "The kids swim all day or go to camp. No school projects or practices or after-school programs to drive to. We eat outside, go for walks together. We have so much more time."

We don't have more or less time, of course. We just use it differently. But in the rush to accomplish everything we think is important, it's easy to forget that. I know I do. This summer a colleague and I talked about taking a poetry workshop that sounded intriguing. "I don't have time for distractions," I said, feeling torn. "I should be working on my book."

"What you do in the workshop could help you with the book," my colleague said. "It's a chance to play with words."

"Yes!" I wanted to tell him. "That's just what I'm longing to do." But the stern grown-up inside my head was warning that play like that would be a detour from what I was really supposed to be doing. "I need to focus," I said firmly. "I'm not going to live forever."

My colleague smiled. "Time is your friend," he said.

For the rest of the day I repeated his words to myself. Time is your friend. What could that possibly mean, I wondered.

To this middle-aged mortal, time feels more like a prankster getting ready to yank the rug out from under my feet. No, time and I are not friends. We're rivals in a game I can never win. These days I find myself racing against time, fighting the clock, striving to accomplish the things that matter to me. I'm not so different, you see, from the frantic young parents who cram too many activities into their family life. Nothing wrong with the things we want to do, but sometimes we get so determined that we undercut our own efforts, take the joy out.

"Time is your friend." I pondered the phrase all the way to summer's end on Cape Cod, a week of relaxation with my husband and grown kids. As I loosened my grip on each passing day, the words started making sense to me. Burrowing my toes in the sand at Nauset Light beach, steaming little-necks for dinner, square dancing on the Wellfleet pier, it dawned on me that my colleague and I had been talking about different kinds of time. I'd had in mind the fleeting minutes and hours of the chronological day, the appointments I schedule on my Treo. My colleague had been talking about God's time.

We all catch glimpses of God's time now and then, when we pause long enough to welcome it as a gift. Enjoying the natural world, playing with a young child, dancing to music, making love, praying: moments like these can transport us to a richer experience of time, to something like eternity. Short of moving to a monastery, I don't know how to live in God's time all day, and yet it is always present to us, always within reach. If we create space for it in the midst of all our busyness, we can stay grounded in it, its fullness enveloping us, informing every moment of our day. Paradoxical though this may sound, that usually means scheduling it. Finding a balance between chronological time and God's time demands attention and a certain kind of discipline, and when we neglect those we end up feeling frantic.

The work and practices and projects and lessons are the stuff of life, and often joyful ones. When they turn into burdens, we've probably squeezed God's time out of our busy day. Caught up in fighting the clock, we've forgotten that time is our friend.

Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick, L.P., a New York-licensed psychoanalyst is a layreader in the Diocese of New York, and the author of numerous books and articles on the spirituality of relationships, including Something More: Nurturing Your Child's Spiritual Growth. Visit her at www.pastoralcounseling.net.