Meet Your Grace

Here is a poem I wrote for the occasion of the uniting of our four provinces into the new Province of Saint Louise:

Meet Your Grace

God invites you:

Come to Me heedfully,

Listen, that you may have life!

Meet your Grace:

You are servants instructed in the Kingdom of Heaven.

You bring from your storeroom

both the old and the new.

Meet your Grace:

God renews with you

the everlasting covenant,

the benefits assured to Vincent and Louise.

Meet your Grace:

the hand of the Lord feeds you –

God answers all your needs.

Nothing will separate you

from that Love.

Meet your Grace:

She comes to you

with tickets to new lands.

She comes to you

with wine and milk.

She comes to you

with cloud by day,

Fire by night.

Some statistics about the new province:

The Daughters of Charity Province of St. Louise by the Numbers:

• Province of St. Louis includes 562 Daughters of Charity
• Province of St. Louise Sisters serve in 22 US States, Washington D.C., and Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• Daughters of Charity minister in 190 different works in the above locations
• Province of St. Louise Sisters serve in foreign missions on every continent except Antarctica
• Worldwide, there are more than 19,000 Daughters of Charity 

It was quite a gathering in Baltimore this past weekend.  About 400 of us were in attendance.  High volume of talking, to say the least!  My introverted self had to retreat to my room to recharge my batteries.

More on this event later.

Between Fine and Dead

Yesterday I listened to a podcast on the wonderful radio program called “On Being.”

This one was an interview with Jane Gross  who created the “New Old Age” blog in the New York Times about working with her aging mother, and who ultimately wrote a book about her experience.           .

This podcast was called  “The Far Shore of Aging”.            .

I was taken with this podcast, because it reflected so much of my own experience with caring for my parents up until each one died – my Dad, in the summer of 2007, and my Mom, in the autumn of 2010.

One of the lines that struck me was her observation that those of us who are middle-aged don’t think much about the space between “fine” and “dead” until we are in that space with our parents.  How true that is!   She also said that we never know how long that space will be, or what will be contained within it. 

It made me think that my parents were “fine” until they reached their late seventies. Then, my mother’s eyesight and memory began to go, but slowly. They were living in an apartment by then, still assuming that they were fine.  However, my father had started to do the cooking and the cleaning because of my mother’s macular degeneration.  The crisis came at Thanksgiving the year that  he was 83 and she was 82; I was at home visiting when it happened.He developed the symptoms of what was  prostate cancer and had to have a catheter until his surgery. He became depressed over this, and asked me to “get us into Emmitsburg.” This was the nursing home located in the large house where I live.  I told him that they weren’t sick enough to get in that nursing home – but asked him if I could look for an assisted living place for him and Mom.

Blessedly, he said yes.  Thus, he spared me the agony that some of my friends have endured – parents who refuse to leave their homes, no matter how disabled they become.

So, in the summer when he was 84 and she was 83, I moved them to Baltimore , into the assisted living part of the Little Sisters of the Poor’s home for the elderly.  They loved it there. It is a beautiful place with lots of big trees and gardens surrounding it, and is all on one floor with long corridors and wings, and smaller units thoughout. Though they had always been homebodies and fairly non-social, they both enjoyed the social activities and made friends with the other residents. 

This went on for almost two years, but they were both gradually declining. Especially my father,

Who developed Alzheimers. I won’t go into all the details, but he had a personality change, began to have trouble with tasks that used to be second nature for him ( like counted cross stitch)

And began to display distorted thinking. The crisis came when he went AWOL with their car

And was gone all day on a snowy February weekday.  The State Police found him up in West Chester, getting gas for the car, and cheerfully thinking nothing out of the ordinary had happened.  I had to get someone to drive me to West Chester, and then get him and the car and drive him back to Baltimore.  After that, the Little Sisters told me to take the car and not return it.  That was one of the worst times for me.

When she was 86 and he was 87, medical emergencies caused them to be moved into the skilled care part of the home.  The sisters and the nurses and aides could not have been more loving and skilled.  Then I began the horrible process of applying for Medicaid for them. That involved months of “spending down” their money, assembling the paperwork, filling out the applications, etc. The social worker at the home was very helpful, but the caseworker for the State of Maryland was so awful – cold, unsympathetic, and , to me, downright cruel. Eventually they both qualified, so that the home could get the funds they needed to pay for my parents’ care.

While I was going through this, I experienced huge amounts of anxiety and stress… which took its toll on my own health.  I was working full time while all this was going on as well -  but I still was more fortunate than many people who don’t have their parents in a care-giving facility, and who have to physically care for their parents and maintain their parents’ homes.

Again , I won’t go through the description of all the incremental losses. He died at age 93; and she died at age 95, both , very peacefully, and in a place where they were well cared for and well loved by everyone. 

That space between “fine” and “dead” lasted about fifteen years for them and for me.

As  Jane Gross said in the podcast, the adult children then look at their own lives and wonder how long that space will be for them, personally.  I know that physically I have already left “fine” but am in “mostly fine” with five medical crises behind me. I see some of my peers walking with canes, and am glad I still have limber limbs and bones and back.

It is thought provoking, though, to know so much life is behind me.

Visiting the Chapters of the MWA

Last evening , in the 100 degree heat, I travelled down Rt.15 South to Rt.70 East to Rt.32 into Columbia MD, to the Sunrise Senior Citizen Living Residence, where the Howard County Chapter of the MWA held its August meeting. I don't know exactly why, but I was expecting to be on a panel , presenting in a large room with an audience of senior citizens and MWA members, talking about the experience of having my poems published in the MWA's anthology Life in Me Like Grass on Fire, and comparing that experience to having books of my own poetry published. Not so.

The activity bulletin board at the center had no listing for our panel;turns out that the Chapter meets there , in a small multi-purpose room , rent free, courtesy of the center. Three of us on the panel:Vonnie Winslow Crist, Eric Goodman and I, were joined in a discussion by Danuta Hinc, and about six other members of the Howard County Chapter. I was initially disappointed, but it turned out to be a good and interesting discussion about a variety of aspects of publication, and I enjoyed meeting the other writers.

Now I'm going to check out their blogs and web pages!

In late May, I attended a reading from the anthology at the Carroll County Chapter, held at the Carroll County Arts Center in Westminster - much closer to Emmitsburg. A large room was filled with people, and it was quite a good gathering.

I'm hoping to attend another one of these in Anne Arundel County in August.

Heat Wave

It's coming from the center of the country; it's already here, and mounting. Humidity makes it worse. I hesitate to complain, since I have the privilege of living in air conditioning. Thinking about those who don't, especially the elderly.

I've been writing, working on the new manuscript. Here's one from it, written after I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks :

Henrietta Lacks, like Rose Red

kept her nails short, but painted them crimson.

Toes, too, so that even at the autopsy,

the assistant saw the chipped red on the dead toes

and knew this was a woman who loved beauty and color,

Who loved Clover, Virginia and its fragrant foliage,

Who loved to cook spaghetti for her hungry cousins,

Who loved to go dancing.

From what furnace of hell did that cancer come,

That viscous vicious virulent voracious purple grape

Called Adenocarcinoma?

Was it radiated by her husband’s philandering

Returned

Before the Hopkins radium tried to kill it?

Pearls of it studded her insides

By the time it blocked her bladder

and poisoned her with her own fluids.

Here's a draft of the poem that gives the title;

A Vexed Question

Said the witch,

Preferring a hexed one,

A vixen caught by the paw,

Chewing her foot off

To set herself free.

Vexed question

Vexing, missing, shifting

From why to how

Point of law

Often discussed or agitated,

Never determined or settled.

Difficult and troubling

What is not forgiveness?

What is not to forgive?

What’s the virtue in resentment?

Send again the sentiment?

The sediment?

Presentiment?

I know... they both need more work. Working on it.

Did I say that many of these poems come out of my experience of cancer/cancer treatment?

After two years, I am finally able to tackle this topic.

St.Joseph Provincial House

I belong to a Religious Congregation, the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. The community was founded in 1633 in Paris, but its US foundation came in 1809, right here in Emmitsburg Maryland, where I live.

It's a large apostolic community with about 80 provinces all over the world. The founding US province in Emmitsburg eventually became 5 US provinces, but this month we are going back to 2 provinces in the US, primarily due to fewer members. The Provincial House for this combined province will be in St. Louis MO, so very shortly, Saint Joseph Provincial House in Emmitsburg will no longer exist. The big building is morphing into "Saint Joseph Ministries" comprising the residence for our retired sisters as well as a skilled care facility for other people, and, hopefully, HUD-funded single apartments for the elderly.

I hope to continue living here and teaching over at the Mount. And writing and birding and gardening.

Attached is a nine minute slide show video of some of the faces of our sisters, and some scenes of the building, that I took over the last 15 years:



St.Joseph Provincial House

July already

Where have these weeks gone? I feel guilty for not adding to this blog. I've been out of school... no excuse.
One week spent at Cape May
Four days spent in Cincinnati
Two weekends spent working with the incoming freshmen at the Mount.
Many days spent catching up on dentist, doctors, etc.

I have been writing... new manuscript, which I was calling Incremental Losses, but which I am now calling Vexed Questions. I heard my colleague Sarah Scott use that term to refer to still unsolved questions regarding Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar."

According to the dictionary, it is a legal term which means "Point of law,often discussed or agitated,never determined or settled...difficult and troubling..."


The term fascinated me, and I've set up the manuscript in sections headed by some of my own vexed questions.

Actually, I have many vexed questions. More later.

Spring Rain Continues

Obviously, these were not taken in the rain --- but we did have a week of wonderful blue sky days before the rain resumed.
Not much to say today. Gearing up for a drive to Washington in the rain, and hoping for some poetry soon.

Happy Easter!

My favorite Easter hymn:

Now the green blade rises
from the buried grain,
wheat that in dark earth
many days has lain;
love lives again,
that with the dead has been:
Love is come again like wheat that springs up green.

In the grave they laid him,
Love whom hate had slain,
thinking that never
he would wake again,
laid in the earth
like grain that sleeps unseen:
Love is come again like wheat that springs up green.

Forth he came in quiet,
like the risen grain,
he that for three days
in the grave had lain,
quick from the dead
the risen Christ is seen:
Love is come again like wheat that springs up green.

When our hearts are wintry,
grieving, or in pain,
Christ's touch can call us
back to life again,
fields of our hearts
that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again like wheat that springs up green.

Words: John Macleod Campbell Crum (20thC)
Music: Noel nouvelet, medieval French carol

more NaPoWriMo

( these are still shabby, and definitely first drafts, but here they are)

9

Available

Birdseed is, on my windowsill.

A car is, in the parking lot.

My dream of the bullying Sister Cromwell is,

Returning night after night

To tell me I must dispose of all my books.

Travail prevails

I avail myself of a veil

The vale of tears

The veil that rain makes on her loom of light.

Travail makes

Travelling trials and tempest.

Bridal veil,

Bush denuded by my cousin and I

Who scattered white blossoms over the green lawn

Like snow

Like torn up paper

Like litter glitters on green.

10

My parents' wedding day-

April 10 -

Cold and blustery in 1944

Outside the rectory of Saint Agnes Parish

In the brittle afternoon sun.

My mother holding her hat on her head,

Shivering in her new suit.

No wedding gown for the non-Catholic ceremony

Of thirtysomethings in the rectory.

My father dapper happy in a new dark suit

So glad she said yes.

11

The inner life of a paper clip.

To what does it long

To be attached?

What is its memory

Of being twisted into shape?

Does it resent not being

A staple?

Garden Update

Virginia Bluebells,
Tulips,
Violets,
Lilies of the Valley coming up...

more NaPoWriMo

#8

Phoebe , nestmaking


Slatey grey on the tilted head,
brown dark shiney eye thoughtful
facing camera
absorbed expression on her face
fiber filament of last summer bindweed
clutched in beak
ready to add to cushion
the mudspattered floor
on the edge of the ceiling.

NaPoWriMo

stands for National Poetry Writing Month... I'm still trying to catch up. Should have 9 poems by now, but this is only the 7th, and it's a revision of one I started several years ago, about the grounds at our Provincial House in Los Altos Hills California:

What the Angel Saw

God planted a garden in the high hills west,

and there placed the black tailed deer

in the cool of morning to stroll by the lake,

arch their necks in the breeze

where the fountain shines a spray of water

on their fine fur.

Out of the coyote ground

grew trees for a throne,

their months each one twelve

fruit produces,

grapefruit, apricot, lemon, orange,

leaves for medicine,

eucalyptus oil to light

my lamps.

Underground hoses rise to quench the garden

with crystal clear as water.

Beyond there, the brown hills divide

and become the abode of millionaires.

There shall curse a deserving nothing.

The middle of dawn flowed,

light growing

down the steepness,

giving life to the river in me,

thanks to the Angel who opened the blinds.

National Poetry Month

I should have written six poems by now; however, the first five days were so busy that I couldn't . Now I am fighting inertia.

So I will post five poems "from before" and add a sixth one, hot off the press:

#1

Typo

One slip of the finger and

Divine becomes Diving

Deep in my dream to the floor of the flooded cellar

Through a window to the green sheen

Of chlorine depths of the swimming pool

At Lenape Park

Where I opened my eyes to stinging wonder

Of watching my white wrinkled feet

Flutter like flippers

And back to Harry Potter somersaulting into

The lake and down to the lair of the grindylow

And back to myself,

Sprinting off a cliff into Crater Lake,

Turquoise and freezing

Gritty grey crumbled lava clouding my eyes

As I plunge further, further,

To the center of breath.

#2

The Stone Dog

My father and I

Wander the Protestant cemetery

Oaklands

Examining the tombstones

And a flat stone

With a life size stone dog

A Labrador

Keeping watch

Over the bones of his owner.

I’m small enough to ride him,

And I do, while the brown leaves flag me

While my father smokes and waits.

#3

Peripheral Vision

My mother can see me this way

Seam ripper stole her center

Partly curly hair weather

Perennial Thyme

Capricious Apocrypha,

burning aura of clementines.

#4

Saving Stamps

candy for later

the cerulean warbler

money

my soul

#5

The Meaning of Radiance

Radiation still cooking my colon

Years after the machine

Delivered its killing light

Waves in defenseless air

Through the tissue in the wrong place

At the wrong time.

Light of sun distilled, forced

Through tunnels into funnels

Glowing the teeth of the smile of the

Child in Hiroshima.

The Meaning of Radiance

#6

Corot Blue

puckered with clouds,
Damask wards off rain
Father Hopkins, lick ink into my pen
shake blue over paper.

Advising Conference

My students are signing up for next semester's courses. I try to give them good advice about prerequisites, major requirements, and the importance of choosing alternate courses before they sit in front of the computer screen for the online registration. Most of them are very organized and come with a plan. Each year, one or two come with no clue. I wonder how their lives will unfold.

In the garden, the flowers are coming on a bit later than last year. We continue to live in a cold snap. I wonder where that expression, "cold snap" came from. Sounds like a poem.

Life in Me Like Grass on Fire

The Maryland Writer's Association has published an anthology of poems about love, and three of my poems are included in it!

I love the title, Life in Me Like Grass on Fire - and the cover art.

Garden Report, part one

The waking garden lifts my spirits

The Emperor of All Maladies

I'm reading this book right now; am about a third of the way through it. It is gripping; the story of cancer and the evolution of cancer treatment. The author, an oncologist, is an excellent writer, and he tells his story in a way that is not only understandable to a non-scientist like me, but tremendously interesting.
I don't think it's interesting to me just because of my own experience with cancer. However, I must say that I have learned more about my own struggles with anemia in this book that anywhere else.
I keep reflecting on how little my doctors told me. They told me what they assumed I could understand, but I was capable of understanding so much more. However, I did not even know what questions to ask!

More on this another day.

My Amish Family

I didn't know about my grandfather, David Kauffman, until I was 22. On the way to a family gathering that summer, my mother mentioned ( by the way) that he had been Amish. He was raised Amish, but did not join the Amish religion when he reached adulthood. Instead, he met and married my Mennonite grandmother, Fannie Denlinger. So I assume he joined the Mennonite religion. I discovered in 2006, that they attended the Kinzers Mennonite Church, and were buried in that cemetary. My grandparents died within two years of each other when my mother and her brothers were children. That, I knew. It was the Amish part, or the fact that I have a small army of Amish cousins, I did not know. I am still gradually learning more about this side of my family,
through the gracious friendship of my Mennonite first cousin Glenford. It is quite a story.
Here is a photo of my Uncle Harold Kauffman ( Mennonite) when he was teaching in an Amish school. The other photo is the back of my second cousin twice removed, Rachel Stoltzfus. The third photo is one my cousin Glenford took recently of some girls going into an Amish wedding in Perry County, PA.

Giving Talks

I've been asked to give three different talks in February, March, and April. I gave the first one this past Friday at the Survivors' Reception at the Relay for Life, which was held at the university where I teach. Relay for Life is a wonderful event held by communities all over the nation and all through the year; it's a fundraiser for Cancer research. Our students raised about $39,000 this year. Last Friday their efforts culminated in an event which involved about 200 students walking around the indoor track in our Field House from 7PM to 7AM... in relays, with lots of other activities going on at the same time. I walked with about 30 other survivors, and then spoke at their reception.

That talk wasn't too difficult to compose. I told my cancer story, which I have told in this blog back in 2009. I tailored it to them. Here are a few excerpts:

...Talking to survivors, you know and I know that cancer is not pretty. Much of the details of what cancer does to the body, and what the treatment for cancer does to the body, involves messy details. But when you are going through cancer treatment, you live with those realities every day...

...Procrastination didn’t kill me. By the time I went to the doctor and was diagnosed, the cancer had spread, so they couldn’t operate. However, I was very fortunate that the cancer had not spread to the lymph nodes. So I began the journey through cancer treatment that all of you have been through. The details are different for each of us, because we had different kinds and stages of cancer, requiring different kinds of treatment. But in many ways, the experience is the same.
My cancer doctors prescribed a treatment plan in which radiation was the main weapon. I had chemo, too, but the radiation was the main weapon...

...You all know that the main side effect of all radiation is fatigue. I had that, but also the radiation gave me such out of control diarrhea that, three weeks in, I had to stop teaching for the semester.
I also didn’t realize how dehydrated I was getting until I woke up one morning with impaired vision. My vision was so blurred that I couldn’t read. I went to the eye doctor, who told me there was nothing wrong with my eyes… it was my brain, suffering from the dehydration.
I ended up in our infirmary from Feb.6 to April 8… continuing to go for treatment each day, but also getting IV fluids, and being monitored by the nurses. The doctors all told me that my vision would eventually clear up, and it finally did, in May. But up until then, I thought I would never read again, or drive again, or teach again. It was a very hard time for me.
However, the treatment killed the cancer. I’ve been cancer free, with clear PET scans, ever since...

...Something no one told me when I was going through treatment was about the radiation damage, the long term damage. I found out about this, when the damage began to show up, and then, when I read the cancer boards and blogs on the Internet. So many other persons have the same kind of damage...

...that most of us as survivors are just glad to be alive and to be functioning. To go back to living a normal, ordinary life again is what we really want, and we treasure those ordinary, undramatic days that we have been given...

Then I read them three poems, two of which were posted earlier. The third one, "Henrietta Lacks as Rose Red," is still really unfinished. I told them her story and read them two stanzas of the poem. It is a hard poem to read:

Henrietta Lacks as Rose Red

She kept her nails short, but she painted them crimson.
Toes, too, so that even at the autopsy, the assistant saw the chipped red on the dead toes and knew this was a woman who loved beauty and color,
Who loved Clover, Virginia and its fragrant foliage,
Who loved to cook spaghetti for her hungry cousins,
Who loved to go dancing.

From what furnace of hell did that cancer come,
That viscious vicious virulent voracious purple grape
Called Adenocarcinoma?
Was it radiated by her husband’s philandering
Returned
Before the Hopkins radium tried to kill it?

So that was the first talk.

The second talk is coming up on March 23. I'm talking to a parish group about poetry about Jesus' passion and death. I've given this talk before, so I am just revising and refining it, perhaps finding some better poems.

The third talk is April 3, at the Theology Honor Society Induction at the Mount. I have not yet settled on a topic. I know that the subject will be something about poetry and spirituality, but I am not yet sure what. Today I was toying with the idea of talking about the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, but I really don't know enough about his poetry to do justice to it in a talk. I am also toying with the idea of giving a dramatic reading of my friend Kate Daniels' long dramatic poem "In the Marvelous Dimension" but haven't really decided yet.

In the meantime, I need to return to paper grading and journal reading, and to my own writing.

I am ashamed at how little I have written in these months.

We had five inches of snow last night; just when we thought Spring was imminent. The daffodils are up about two inches in my garden, but now they are covered with snow again.

Snowing

We've been "passed over" by the snowstorms that crippled the Northeast over Christmas and through most of January, but the latest storm hit us.

Only eight inches... not so bad.

Heavy, wet snow - very beautiful.

I think of the first two stanzas of an old poem I learned as a child:

The First Snowfall

by James Russell Lowell

The snow had begun in the gloaming,
And busily all the night
Had been heaping field and highway
With a silence deep and white.

Every pine and fir and hemlock
Wore ermine too dear for an earl,
And the poorest twig on the elm-tree
Was ridged inch deep with pearl.