For seven months I have been living with the medical possibility I might not be here this Thanksgiving. I’m happy to announce that I am here and had what Mr. Rogers described as “a wonderful day in the neighborhood.” It was just the two of us, Jo and me.

Showing up is the first order of business for just about anything. It felt good to show up, or more succinctly, to be able to show up.

We put together the most un-pilgrim like Thanksgiving imaginable. Our goal, since this Thanksgiving was so unique––I’d describe it as a ‘freebee’ ––- was to arrange the day so as to make for good eating but be as effortless as possible since none of the kids would be here to help. Cooking turkeys, albeit a hallowed rite of any American Thanksgiving, I think is a pain.

We bought two huge fillet mignons. We may have just as well put up our mortgage such was their cost, but this was an auspicious occasion. We had Graul’s prepared potatoes, string bean casserole and other typical Thanksgiving viands left over from the prior Sunday before Thanksgiving. Then, my son, Craig, and his wife, Brenda, had been with us for dinner. It was precious time.

On Thanksgiving Day, we grilled the fillets, reheated leftovers and we enjoyed an elegant and no hassle dinner. We wanted to be as available to each other and not tied to the kitchen. The fillets were so tender they became virtually soluble with only the slightest pressure from our forks.

It’s a risky business buying store-bought apple pie. A store-bought pie can be like purchasing a Rolex from a vendor on a city street corner. What you sees is not what you gets. The pie was displayed well in a clear plastic container, in the way jeweler’s present their choice diamonds in glass casings. I was amazed but the pie was “of the first water” as jewelers call their best diamonds. It tasted just fine, much cheaper than diamonds and far less than the fillets.

Popping a piece of pie in the microwave for forty seconds, then daubing either vanilla ice cream or whipped cream on top, the pie was awesomely delectable and when I had my first forkful I felt as if I had died and gone to heaven, not a metaphor I use lightly these days.

During the day we made and received calls from various kids and kin. We held a Zoom conversation with one of our families and told stories. Each year I tell a Thanksgiving favorite about my confrontation with two monstrous turkeys while walking in my driveway. “Five feet tall, no less, I tell them.” The grandchildren, of course know I’m full of it, but they think it’s a hoot to have Peepa, as I’m called, recite this challenging moment of my life. They shake their heads incredulously, check cell phones, and for a moment look as if they almost believe it but soon roll their eyes and groan as if in pain. They giggle, too.

Thanksgiving is the time of recollection when we celebrate the day but also recall significant moments of our past. The day often turns out to be a confluence of our past, present and future.

As I grew older, I gave up sailing, a lifelong love. It required too much of me. When I was first taken ill seven months ago, I had little energy to do other things I loved doing before. Fortunately writing was sedentary and I soon got back to it. Gradually my energy returned.

I’d been active in doing darkroom photography for most of my life. I loved everything about it, as I did writing. My energy suffered and I abandoned photography for a while. Then, on this last Thanksgiving Day, I decided it was time to return to the darkroom again and print photographs. I’d been thinking of one negative I was especially fond of. The printed photograph of it appears above in the essay.

I wondered why this particular one? I had hundreds of others I also liked.

My son, Craig, never enjoyed sailing much but preferred sports. When he was young didn’t sail with me, anxious that he might miss practices or games. I understood this but had always wished that he and I might share this particular love of mine. He surprised me one day and asked if I would take him and his friend for an overnight on the boat. I was thrilled. We planned the trip. I knew that bringing a friend sweetened the pot for him, and even though it might ‘dilute’ that special time I’d always wanted with him, I’d happily take what I could get.

We sailed from Middle River to Fairlee Creek here on the Shore and anchored for the night. We swam off the boat, cooked on the galley stove and slept under the stars. In the early morning while the mist was still suspended over the water, we weighed anchor to sail back to Middle River on a gentle southerly breeze. He obviously had fun as did his friend. I was ecstatic. I also knew this excursion would probably be the last. He was a passionate athlete, deeply invested in sports and was being pulled more and more in that direction.

I suspected there was some kind of a subtle resonance between how I felt on this the wonderfully satisfying Thanksgiving Jo and I were having, and the photograph I was printing that documented the adventure I once enjoyed with my son years ago. The sail with Craig was the last one we made together. Would this Thanksgiving also be the last for Jo and me?

For us, Thanksgiving Day had an undertone of melancholy which reflected a sense that we knew that our lives as we’d known them were being conditioned by a deadline.

This undercurrent went unspoken, but the sense of a finality was there. The pleasures of the day kept such dark musings sufficiently distant so I can say ––– and I know Jo would –– that it was a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

I know perfectly well that everything that ‘is,’ is impermanent. I cannot seem to get my heart on the same page as my head. Best to live Thanksgiving Day as just that, Thanksgiving Day. There is a time for everything under the sun including a time for just showing up and being thankful for having shown up.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

I’m out for blood.

The present treatment for my disease involves periodic blood transfusions. The regimen is simple and painless, involving primarily waiting for the transmission of blood to be complete. It takes a few hours.

Waiting is an experience in itself: there’s a quality to waiting, any kind of waiting. Each occasion has a tone and timbre and especially the velocity at which the time seems to travel. Sometimes time feels interminably stuck. These waits, whether in hospitals or physicians’ offices, or even waiting in a garage while having my ailing car serviced, can be lonely. Waiting has the potential to be a harbinger of unwanted news. A wait will surprise me at times; some become an adventure in awareness.

I received a blood transfusion just a week ago at the Infusion Center at the hospital in Easton. As I sat in the chair my eyes wandered aimlessly around the room and then upward where I saw the small clear plastic bag hanging. It looked like the ones I remember as a boy in which I’d bring my goldfish home from the pet store. Strange to think now how both these totally unrelated events, seventy years apart, made an statement about the reverence for life.

The bag hung just above me containing what looked like watered down cocktail sauce. I watched the bag as blood, drop by drop, worked its way down through a plastic line and into my veins. I thought to myself, this is an amazing thing: someone, somewhere, a person I’d never met and whom I never will, took time to have their blood drawn at a blood bank so that someone else who one day would require it, could receive it and live. Something about the thought was benignly provocative: it seemed so anonymous and yet so personal and intimate, deeply loving but also earthy, too, as if there is nothing more primal about life than blood. Because of the location where blood transfers take place, in clinical settings which are usually spare and antiseptic, the deeper significance implied in these acts may easily be lost.

Freud once quipped that a cigar is just a cigar. Blood transfusions are just blood transfusions, routine and perfunctory, performed in hospitals everywhere. But in that moment, as I waited and as my mind wandered and I watched the blood which had once flowed through someone else’s body, it become a part or my own body. I knew I was experiencing more than just a transfusion. My awareness of the procedure that moment assumed what I can only describe as mystical awareness, one of those peculiarly transcendental moments I have that just suddenly appear and the total of what goes on at those moments is always more than the sum of the parts.

I marvel when I consider how the blood that runs through the veins of every living being, becomes an equalizer of sorts, establishing our primal solidarity with one another. Without exception, we all have this in common and in the most fundamental way our lives are interconnected by a shared blood. St. Paul put it this way: God “hath made of one blood all nations of men (people) for to dwell on all the face of the earth.”

Blood types vary. Their essence remains the same. Blood is the quintessential sustainer and the universal symbol of our organic connection to one another. The sad story of our humanity has been how much of our energy has been wasted developing ways of shedding blood rather than ways of sharing it. I think this happens because while we may have vague notions about this organic bond we share, we have little if any concept of the spiritual fabric into which we’re woven together.

On several occasions, I’ve read accounts of people who, having received organ transplants, will claim to feel deep within them the spiritual presence of the donor whose organ was now incorporated into their own body. The sense of gratitude such people express, often with tears, is obviously profoundly felt.

The transfusion was completed, and the nurse and I bantered some as she disconnected the tubing, took vitals, and sent me on my way.

On my way out, at the door I thought someone was coming up behind me, so I turned to make sure I held the door for them. There was no one there. I knew I was not alone. Someone was there. I felt it. This was not an extrinsic presence out there somewhere; by their blood someone became integral to my whole being. In short, an anonymous gift of love wrapped in a plastic bag saved my life. One irony: the anonymous donor who’d given me the gift was leaving the hospital with me, perhaps to keep me aware that I now had a special blood brother or sister.

So that no one could see my face and I’d embarrass myself, while walking out and down the hall I turned my head downward slightly and murmured, ‘Thank you.’

N.B. Because of pandemic, Blood Banks both nationally and locally are experiencing fewer donors and in some areas critical shortages.  Please help. For donation sites contact: delmarvablood.org or call 1-888-blood8.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

Last week I celebrated my 87th birthday.

Six months ago, my doctor told me I might not be available for it. But I’m here, today, celebrating, in high spirits and feeling playful. I chose to head this column with a baby picture, a reminder of time’s inexorable transformations. Once I had a huge shock of hair, ‘cuddly, fat, cute,’ as Grandma Merrill would coo about me. Today I’m bald and as the saying goes, “used hard.” This baby has come a long way.

I’m getting along reasonably well. I have energy. Today I don’t suffer significant physical discomforts. On occasions when I do, I’ll have scary thoughts and feel vulnerable. Vulnerability is as much the stuff of human experience as is breathing but I rarely give either a thought. However, when something compromises my breathing, that’s all I can think about. When I don’t feel well, I feel vulnerable, and the discomfort demands my attention as it had that day six months ago when I almost died.

Since then, the heightened awareness of my vulnerability has simultaneously revealed unknown facets of my heart in remarkable ways, characteristics that, when I’d feel secure, I had hardly been aware of. Over the years, the reassurances of safety had inured me to these other aspects of my personality. As rattling as an experience of impending mortality can be, in my case, feeling its intensity has acutely sharpened a capacity to discern my heart’s messages – particularly the ways it speaks of love and transforms my spirit. 

I’ve become conscious recently of how much I am able to love others while discovering how all along others have actually known who I am, and loved and treasured me for it. 

Before my present circumstances, I was too unsure of who I was to be receptive to and grateful for being loved. I wasn’t sure I deserved it. Any affectionate gestures extended toward me might make me self-conscious and uneasy. This new heightened consciousness I am living into today has become an occasion for moments of gratitude that I can simply say has been unprecedented in my 87 years. Late bloomers take a long time to get it. 

I allow this may be a clunky analogy, but experiencing this love I’m reaching to describe looks something like this: it’s as though someone takes his or her only bottle of Rothschild’s 1910 Cabernet from the cupboard. They insist I share it with them. What makes this gesture so profound is not that it’s their last bottle, or even that it’s a priceless commodity in the marketplace, but because someone cares enough for me to want to offer me some of what they treasure. The wine is pricey, the gesture, priceless.

I believe the subtle language of the heart speaks to matters like this. 

Love is difficult to put in words. Mystics, poets and musicians, through their art, help us get the sense of love, its texture, it’s timbre, by artistically shaping some of its joy, serenity,  pain as well as the aching bittersweet longing. Loving is a mixed bag.

 Jo gave me a present today. When I opened it, I totally dissolved. It was, of all things, a 2022 calendar.

I hate electronics, iPhones, iPads, with all their trendy apps and programs. Because I depend on the computer for writing I have forged an uneasy alliance with my Mac, and when it misbehaves I’ll turn it off and wait a few minutes. Few things can infuriate me more, or make me feel as bumbling and helpless as my abortive attempts to negotiate electronic instruments. Most everyone I know, including my wife, who happens to be a consummate techy, love electronics. She’ll play with an iPad as if it were a puppy. She creates some unique visual constructs. 

Several years ago, as a rescue mission, she began making me yearly picture calendars to write in my appointments and important dates, effectively snatching me from the jaws of electronic devices. To make it personal, she formatted some of my salon photographs to highlight each month. On the flap below the photograph appears the usual days of the month, with notations of family birthdays inscribed, and open space for any notations or appointments I’d need to remember. After crafting all this, she’d send a template to Shutterfly for printing. Few things have ever helped me to stay sane and keep my life manageable as much as these personal, yearly calendars have.

This calendar’s cover image did not show the calendar year as previous ones had. Instead my name appears in a soft but prominent print and is surrounded by over 200 diminutive words and short phrases, looking like a smoky sweep of blackbirds on the wing; ‘word clouds’ as techies call the app. The assemblage of these idiosyncratic buzzwords, short phrases and catchwords were drawn from some of the intimate shorthand that we as a couple accrued during our lives together. They are symbols, mine, hers, ours, sketched like haikus, brief flips of the wrist that tell whole stories that only we know. Instead of my exhibit photographs accompanying each month, she used snapshots of significant times, places, family and friends that have been important to our lives. 

I could see the gift had obviously taken her months to put together. It was deliberately conceived and painstakingly executed, suggesting that I had been on her mind for a considerable period of time. The year 2022, a year that I’d associated with vulnerability, was transformed by someone who loved me.

Who knows about 2022, anyway? It’s a tenuous thing, uncertain for anyone. 

This 2022 calendar and what it meant to me was  something my heart comprehended. It was not, as calendars usually are, about time as convenience, appointments, anniversaries, duration but about time as transformation, mine and hers. It was a gesture celebrating the mystery of love’s power to dramatically reframe circumstances, to gain, as one commentator of mine once put it, that redemptive ‘longer look.’ 

“Perfect love casteth out fear,” writes the author of John’s first Epistle. I can’t say I’ve known perfect love (close at times,) and I’ve certainly never practiced it. I can’t speak authoritatively to its claims. In the last six months, I’ve had moments when I’ve been scared to death as never before. This much I can say with certainty:

When I become aware of being held gentle on someone’s mind, I’m not as scared.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

I’m being invaded by an armada of 2022 calendars. They unsettle me.

Every year they show up in the mailbox around this time like crickets do in my house. I’m seeing more this year. 2022 calendars arrive in various sizes with bigger and bigger formats. My mailbox is already cluttered with those humongous postcards –– postcards on steroids –– the newer ones’ advertising goods and services which in prior years, were pitched on discreetly sized cards.

Arriving every few days, these large calendars are impossible to ignore. They make me nervous, a reminder that I probably won’t be here in 2022.

Before electronics, I would place appointment times down for the new year in a small pocket calendar. Ironically, the first entrances would be medical appointments. Then I’d jot down family birthdates, special events and various commitments to be kept. Looking back, I see how I held as an unerring certainty –– but always outside of my conscious awareness –– that there’d always be tomorrow. Theoretically, I knew, as much as youth and vitality would permit me, that all I had was the moment I was living. However, that never intruded on my timetable. It was too remote.

Mostly I dealt with plans made day to day, week to week, month to month, but always in the background was the abiding certainty that I would continue this practice in perpetuity. Shakespeare once wrote somewhat dismissively, “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps on that petty pace from day to day.” I must say in my present circumstances, petty, or not, I’ll take as many as I can get.

Of the many stories about mortality I’ve heard in my career, one of the top aversions to dying is the feeling that mortality robs us of the time we need to finish what we are doing. The feeling of not being ready to go is a remarkably universal sentiment. It’s like college kids at exam time; panic as the deadline nears and hoping for an extension.

I know that feeling. I’d really like more time. However deceptive, to imagine that time is a renewable resource is comforting. But just what is it I need more time for?

A related question has haunted me as I’ve grown older and more introspective: Why am I here? Why are any of us here?

The same thought always comes to mind. Although it’s gone through several iterations, it’s something like this: I am here for someone else. I am here for others. But who is it, who are they? Will I ever know?

Pondering our lives’ purposes one morning, led Jo and me to considering angel myths since angels are said to be sent by God to help others. Popularly, we call “angels” anyone who extends us kindnesses. I’ve always had trouble thinking of God sending angels to help like Uber dispatches drivers. I can’t imagine God micromanaging like that. With an entire universe to look after, he’s delegated the task to you and me.

I was a boy when I first saw angels. They were in my parish church; one, a statue, the other a painting. The statue, wooden and life-sized, stood in front of the church by the sanctuary. Over her head she held the lectern where the Bible rested and the lessons were read during services. Her sculpted garments fell to the floor like oversized drapes. In the parish house, a classical painting of angels hung, angels on the wing. Portrayed were cherubs, elite angels. They looked fat, like overly fed babies and had wings, wildly curly hair and were buck naked, oddly so, I thought, that they’d be that underdressed in a church. These were definitely not she-angels. What were they doing, I wondered? They appeared to hover over a saint like drones. I guessed they were looking out for him.

But like any myth, angel myths point beyond their romantic legends to some fundamental truth. I suspect it’s something like this.

Our first obligation to one another is to love. This appears again and again in most all the teachings of the world’s religions. Jesus sums it up: “This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you.”

This commandment is short and simple, but so is the formula E=mc2. “Love one another” is as difficult to live into as E=mc2 is to comprehend. We know this much: both unleash invisible forces that contain astonishing power: the one can obliterate entire landscapes, the other is able to pierce the hardest of hearts.

It makes sense to me that those who earnestly try living out the commandment would be called angels. They could be anyone. I’ll bet everyone knows at least one. I don’t believe these people are just following orders but instead, because the commandment deeply moved them, they’re committed to living it out –– not by showcasing their goodness, but almost surreptitiously, by simply loving and being kind wherever they are. They go about their business, touching the lives of others as they normally would in their capacity as friends, neighbors, colleagues, family, merchants, and citizens doing what they do. And indeed, whatever it is they happen to be doing, anywhere or at any time, it always contains measures of grace. “Helpers” was how Fred Rogers of ‘Mr. Rogers Neighborhood’ once called them.

I believe this is the underlying truth of angel myths. If so, I say we dump the stereotypes –– pluck the wings, nix the wild hair, clothe them (for proprieties sake) and recognize how, in real life, their boots are not treading on top of clouds as they’ve been portrayed, but are planted firmly on the ground somewhere near us in our own neighborhoods.

Both Jo and I, in the last few months, continue to discover people we never suspected had been looking out for us.

I understand better how my fretting over calendars misses the point. Calendars are pieces of paper printed with months, days, and numbers –– abstractions, basically. There is nothing in any calendar that says there’s no time to complete my life’s task. My task, looking out for others, is like E=mc2 –– deceptively simple to read but with profound consequences. I can practice being a helper and bring grace into people’s lives wherever I can. I’ll not only feel satisfied doing what I’m supposed to but I’ll always be on schedule.

Looking at it that way, I have all the time there is.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

 

I spend my life as a writer staring at blank pages. How to fill them? What is my heart yearning to say?  Most of the time I’ll figure it out. I find the words. With this essay, I’m not sure just what I’m wanting to say. Maybe by writing, I’ll find out. 

In these last few weeks, my writing’s been exploring my interior spiritual and psychological life following a medical diagnosis that rocked me. I felt a strong urge to write about what I thought and felt. Most of the time I was certain of what I wanted to say. I kept close to the particulars of what I was experiencing, the emotional tones and the particular thoughts that were raised. However, in my attempts to write this essay I fumbled as never before: I wrote and rewrote several drafts. I kept feeling I was going in circles. I wasn’t speaking my heart. So, what’s going on, I wondered?

Although physically I function well right now, the circumference of my life frankly feels constrained. The leukemia keeps my outings largely confined to clinic visits, having blood drawn and tested and then, depending on results, having the treatment adjusted accordingly. I’m experiencing no significant discomfort in any of this and there’s no particular stress involved; at the clinic, the nurses are consistently cordial and pleasant. Generally speaking, I feel okay. 

The most recent tests reveal that for the last few weeks my numbers look good. What I can’t fathom is why, in this essentially positive development that should be lifting my spirits, I feel flat. Unlike the weeks before, when the whole scenario was more dicey and closer to the edge, I was more certain what I wanted to write. 

I feel little incentive to explore and write about my situation of the last couple of weeks. Ironically, it’s been the least problematic in months. I dearly hope I am not one of those driven types who need crises in order to feel energized.

I keep thinking to myself, ‘Isn’t what’s come about recently just what I would want?’  The treatment appears to be working, slowing down the disease process so I can live longer and enjoy a decent quality of life. 

 I’ve listened to stories of people who found themselves in all kinds of dire straits, the kind that seem to point to only one end which will be tragic one way or another. Then, for no apparent reasons, the unexpected happens and the situation starts turning around.  Initial reactions are not, as you might first expect, to feel elated but instead to be confused, even suspicious. Five months ago, I was sure I’d be dead by now. This is not an accurate forecast, at least as I write this. But then what am I to expect? Another week; six months; what?

This is embarrassing to consider and for me even to think it. But, to be candid, I’m wondering, could it be that I am so addicted to being in control, that as horrifying as the initial prognosis was, at least I had the assurance that I knew what was going to happen next? Outcome was even accompanied with well, a deadline.

What complicates the matter for me and brings in another possibility to my odd reaction this week, is the peculiarity of my personality. In my family and among some friends, I’ve earned a reputation over the years for being pessimistic, ‘real heavy,’ a human Eeyore, if you will. Eeyore, you might remember from the Winnie the Pooh series, is characterized as a pessimistic, gloomy, depressed, anhedonic (for me, watching sports is a drag), an old, grey, stuffed donkey. Eeyore’s frequent and favorite expletive is “Oh, bother!” Mine is shorter and less benign.

Like Eeyore, I am also old and grey and have some of his negative propensities. I’m aware of this liability. I try to resist it as best I can. I can’t always put on a happy face. It’s hard for me especially when I meet with flaming optimists –– whose ebullient extraversion and terminally chirpy dispositions insist on placing the sunniest spin on the darkest situations. They irritate me.  “Just look for the silver lining” and with a pat on the shoulder and a stiff upper lip dismiss me –– this does not do it for me. I like people who will listen to my dark and meandering perseverations, who seem to have neither the need to cheer me up nor the desire to assure me that indeed “ain’t it awful.”  I like people who will listen to what I happen to feel, even though it’s often messy, and about things that may not quite hang together, which,  is often the case.

Truth be told, for years I’ve had a thing for the children’s classic, Winnie the Pooh and especially for Eeyore. My wife, who is painfully aware of my temperament and needs to make an annual statement about it, gives me a stuffed Eeyore every birthday. I have one that even speaks, and says, “Oh, bother” when I press his hoof.

Eeyore often lost his tail. It was poorly secured and often fell off. I am sympathetic to Eeyore’s moods. I am, as Eeyore was, also surrounded by a forest filled with friends who, if not able to find for me what I’m looking for, will always provide me with support in my search. My life involves a tale of a very different sort. Eeyore’s tail was secured by a nail, my tale hangs by a thread. I will eventually lose my whole tale and when I think about how that goes, I can get stuck, and keep ruminating to myself, “Oh, bother.” Eeyore puts the matter front and center: “I get so upset I forget to be happy,” he says. The human tale that follows us for our lifetime grows even dearer as its fragility becomes more apparent. I want to hang on to it.

In the last few weeks, a rainbow appeared on my horizon. It surprised me. Seems I’m doing okay right now after several months of some dark clouds. 

 Eeyore is reported to have said when seeing a red balloon, to which he uncharacteristically took an immediate liking: “Sure is a cheerful color. Guess I’ll have to get used to it.”

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

“What would you like me to say about you when I preach at your funeral?” my pastor asked me recently. He was dead serious. This is a once in a lifetime offer.

I can say honestly, I had no idea what to say but my heart was warmed. His request left me feeling cared for, if not a little off balance.

What can I say about my life, any life for that matter? They get all jumbled up. I’ve lived my life like the old movie films were shown; one frame at a time. I never noticed how much each frame differed from the one following or preceding it because the frames flew by so quickly.

I know this: I’m never the same man for long. I have changed so much over the years. In one instance, in just over a ten year period, I changed dramatically. At sixteen, Arty, Jigger and I broke into an auto accessory store to get parts to keep Jigger’s old junk running. At twenty- six I knelt piously before the Bishop of New York at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, as he laid hands on my head, ordaining me to perform to perform the holy rites of the church. And then too, as time goes by, even the changes themselves will morph character traits in ways I would never have expected in myself. By the way this is not all bad. Actually, I grew more patient as I got older. Too bad it took so long.

Eulogies or sermons at funerals are profiles in how people wish others to see how they lived. Certain kind of rites tend to emphasize the deceased’s personal achievements and his or her contributions to society. They’re a sort of commentary on personal and civic virtue. Other rites highlight the quality of the relationships the deceased enjoyed with friends and family – like having been a loving wife or husband, devoted son, or caring daughter. Such emphases are necessarily sum totals of a life, broad generalities, running all the frames by us quickly enough that we see only broad sweeps with little detail.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must say that when Craig first asked me the question, my instinctive reaction was to do a little psychological posturing; rummaging through some of the old frames of my life to see which ones might show better. As picking frames became increasingly selective, I could see how I was only trying to look good –– so much so that even I could see the narcissism in what I was doing. I decided it was in everyone’s interest to have Greg to say whatever he wanted with no holds barred.

I believe that people are far more disposed to feel endeared to the deceased when they hear unvarnished stories of him or her having been caught in the act of being themselves. When our unpolished humanity is revealed, those kinds of no-pretense moments that just happen, they can change the mood of a funeral remarkably. One vignette that I recall, portrayed the deceased having worn different colored socks to a formal dinner where he was booked as the speaker. I remember another where a deceased mom, a bride’s mother, with a thousand things on her mind, once placed all the newly printed wedding invitations on top of the car while fetching her keys. She forgets them, and in the rear view mirror drives off and watches the invitations scatter like fall leaves

I have observed, both as an officiant at a funeral or sitting among mourners in a church, how the congregation will often fidget with service bulletins or shift in their seats as the deceased is lavished with praise for his or her virtues – which may have been justly deserved.

In recent years, it’s more common in churches and memorial services to have family members “say a few words” about loved ones as part of the ritual. Provided they don’t go on too long, it’s remarkable to see the energy among mourners increase as a relative is fondly roasted. It’s the messy human traits with which mourners immediately identify. Just being human will endear mourners to the deceased in ways that recitations of accomplishments, status or even good works, won’t. You can see how mourners, during these recitations, were respectfully attentive but emotionally absent. As the deceased is presented as a person, ears pick up.

A pinch of salt adds real zip to even the finest cuisine.

My closest friends have no illusions about my quirks and shortcomings. It frees me to be at ease with my foibles enough not to feel driven to pretend otherwise. My great aunt was prickly on this score and dismissed her neighbor this way. “Mrs. O’Doran puts on airs,” she would snort, throwing her nose in the air, defiantly.

As we’ve talked together over the years, our pastor, Greg, Jo and I have shared many intimacies. We have similar views on many spiritual matters but especially one: that telling our stories is the royal route by which we facilitate the healing of many kinds of wounds, especially our losses. Storytelling is a way we make our way across that devastating void the death of a loved one leaves.

Remember the bedtime rituals of your childhood? I do. I was told it was time for bed. I didn’t want to go, I hadn’t finished all the things I wanted to. The declaration of bedtime was never the right time but regardless of my feelings, it was to be that way.

The ritual was always the same: go upstairs, brush my teeth, go to the bathroom, put on PJ’s and get into bed. One of my parents promised they’d soon be up be up to read me a story. This always sweetened the pot.

When Greg left, I imagined my funeral in a similar way, a little like the bedtime of my childhood I resisted bedtime, like I resist the implications of my funeral: it’s not the right time; I have more to do. When the end of the day arrives, the knowledge that people who know and love me will tell stories about me –– and on me, too –– I find comforting.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

As we have for over 30 years, my wife, Jo, and I are sitting on the porch this morning having breakfast. The grass in the yard is more verdant this summer then I remember it before. The flowers show radiantly, helped along by intermittent rains. The spinners are whirring happily in a southerly breeze.

Weather permitting, our breakfast ritual has remained the same except for a couple of things. Since we’ve recently grown aware of time’s limits, we have developed an increasing sense of the ‘now,’ a heightened awareness of each other and of those in our lives we have grown to love.

An odd thing to say, but as we begin to come to terms with having less, we are finding more.

Breakfast discussions have always been a pivotal time in our daily routine. We are typically more together then than we are any other time. Most all issues get on the table. We talk them over. The ritual, while staying pretty much the same, has assumed a different tenor of late. We speak less of circumstantial and household matters; we’ve become, well, contemplative. To say it differently, we speak of and listen more to the language of the heart than the scripts of the head which so much of daily management usually requires.

Since last April our conversations have grown intimate but with an intimacy very different from the intimacy I had once thought of.

To say we have entered a time of more truth-telling doesn’t quite describe it. I once thought of intimacy as the inner freedom we discover when we reveal a darker side of our personality to someone else and still feel safe and accepted –– and indeed that may be. But there’s another side to intimacy that our breakfast conversation revealed on that August 1st morning.

The intimacy was more like small vignettes of our interior lives appearing to us that had not been explicitly expressed before. The vignettes remain buried only because we have not taken them all that seriously or an occasion to have unearthed them has not arisen. These vignettes are not sensational at all, there’s nothing dramatic about them. They are simple thoughts and feelings about the fundamentals of our world that we have quietly entertained but never expressed. The vignettes are not the kind we have kept secret out of shame or for the fear of seeming childish and naive; They are thoughts and feelings we have always harbored (and I believe many people have) but never considered them sufficiently consequential that anyone would really care about them one way or the other. We usually blow them off thinking, “This is just me; I know it doesn’t make sense.” One such vignette rose casually the other morning at breakfast.

As you might expect we have talked occasionally about life after death over the years. In the past, I would describe those conversations more as scripts originating in the head, like the religious or political opinions which anyone may espouse in casual conversation but not necessarily feel they need to embrace it. This morning was different.

That morning I mentioned casually to Jo that this was my mother’s birthday. We began a mathematical calculation how old our mothers would be today. We started running numbers and came up with something like one hundred five to a hundred fifteen. We sat silently.

I recalled how often I’d wished that my mother and Jo could have known each other. She died years before Jo and I were married. I was sure they would have become good friends. I expressed this thought to Jo. Jo replied that was happy in the thought that I would finally meet her father.

We turned to face each other and it took us a minute to fully realize what we were saying. We grew teary. We were considering each other’s loved ones in a way we’d never expressed before, at least openly. We were clearly speaking of them as if they would be waiting to greet us.

Somehow the pith of what this conversation was unearthing had traveled beyond the scripts of the head to the language of the heart and each of us was surprised by how profoundly moved we were by what had just happened. What the heart was saying was that a typical head discussion of “Do you believe in a life after death?” would never have gotten anywhere near.

I confess that I did go into my head later that morning trying to interpret the event with the normal scripts of reason. I tried to be as scrupulous as possible in respecting that what I was exploring was something the heart revealed and not something my head had fabricated. In writing this, I’m trying to remain faithful to what my heart revealed.

I have always been impressed with how, whether expressed at funerals, or appearing in obituaries, or hearing children process the loss of loved ones –– even their pets ––that death bears the sting of a loss. There’s also an assumed and often unspoken thought accompanying it –– one deeply felt –– and running parallel: that these losses are a part of a universal process that ultimately occasions a rendezvous.

‘Going home’ is the popular way the sense of this understanding finds expression in common parlance. Even for me, a clergyman, I’ve often dodged the matter, fearing that it might be only a romantic inclination or a fanciful wish. The simple profundity of my own buried belief unnerved me because it did not fit easily into the tidy world in which my head feels safe and in control. But there it was.

Feelings of deep intimacy happen like that, even with people who are already close: they just pop up and when you hear them being articulated so casually, they seem surprising at first even though you know they are not.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

When I’m not feeling well, everything looks bleak. I’ll start accentuating the negative, like, I must look awful, no one would want to be around me; I’m no good for anything.

There was a period not long ago when I hadn’t been well and I was heavily involved with medical treatment. I was cared for by more nurses than I had known in my entire life – except for my sister, a nurse, whom I don’t include in these tender reflections as our relationship was characterized more by conflict than concord. When I was a kid, I don’t think she cared for me, much.

I’ve been thinking about caring; the caring I’ve offered others in my lifetime and received, myself.

In providing care to others, I can’t say I leave a sterling track record. Even the normal caring involved in being a young dad I often found tedious: night feedings, diaper changes, the constant vigilance required to keep children from harm and the relentless demands of maintaining a home often made me feel put upon. I guess I’d have to say I did not bring the level of positive energy to these tasks as I wish now that I had. I can confidently say that I’ve gotten better, but I’m amazed at how long it’s taken. I believe caring is a virtue people can learn but there are others who are blessed enough to come by it naturally. Nurses are ‘naturals.’

Of the nurses who dealt with me, most were women and, with one exception, all of them were caring. I don’t mean caring in the perfunctory sense that they performed their duties efficiently and responsibly. I mean caring in the subtle, attitudinal sense of the word. With them, my experience led me to believe that each one took personal satisfaction in bringing comfort to me and to all those they ministered to. Their presence made me feel valued.

To be effective, a measure of genuine concern has to be in the caring somewhere. If the transaction has none, the interactions become lackluster and brittle.

At Johns Hopkins Hospital, I began noticing the significance that touching played in the interactions between a nurse and patient. While engaging in medical interventions or even small talk, a nurse’s touch communicated to me a powerful sense of being cared for at times when my illness and its treatment left me feeling disconnected, vulnerable and useless. I still marvel at how something apparently as small and inconsequential as a touch can have such a powerful effect on the emotional life of a human being. It remains for me one of the great mysteries of spirituality.

Touch is a powerful agent in the human experience. At the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo immortalized touch when he artistically rendered “The Creation of Adam.” In this portrayal, Adam is given life, not from the breath of God as written in Genesis, but from the touch of God’s finger. Something about a touch as a life-giving force seized the popular imagination even more than breath.

The touch I am speaking of is a very different sort from the erotic kind. Unfortunately, in today’s troubled world, the word ‘touch’ has become a forbidden word. It evokes predatory images, heartbreaking pictures of exploitation and broken trust. With erotic touching, there’s a compulsion to dominate and to make emotional claims on another.

The touch I’m discussing makes no claims. It occasions no arousal or titillation. I can best describe my reaction to the nurses’ touch as a feeling of being incredibly grounded, belonging, an integral part of a dynamic process greater which although unseen, is palpable. It’s a little like feeling loved but without any of the possessive claims that are so often associated with the word ‘love.’

For me, nurse Jean represented the restorative power of a touch. A birdlike young woman, thin as a willow’s limb, Jean walked soundlessly in and out of my room at a pace just short of sprinting. She was frequently assigned to my care. Jean was emotive and demonstrative. She had a hint of an accent, Puerto Rican maybe. Jean wore the protective mask which only emphasized her eyes that flashed intermittently as she emphasized something about which she felt strongly. The energy in the room seemed to increase with her presence.

Jean loved to talk.

When Jean would finish some medical intervention, she’d place a finger on my arm or shoulder and just chat for a minute. In fact she talked all the time. Her finger pressure increased or decreased depending on the level of enthusiasm her story invoked for her. Her soliloquies always seemed more like free association than inspired by some particular topic. I recall little of what she said, but I know I felt better even though my discomforts may have remained. I did not feel alone. It was not her words, but the music I heard in her voice and in the touch that I felt. They mobilized a form of healing that doesn’t’ necessarily heal but definitely transforms. I feel the climate changing, as I do with shifts in the weather.

The night before I was to leave Hopkins, I tossed and turned, fearful of the days coming next. The door opened and Jean entered silently, taking her characteristically long strides. She drew close to the bed, saw I was awake, and placed her hand on my arm. She chatted briefly. She told me she’d be leaving on vacation to see family, and she knew I’d be gone when she returned. Jean wished me well and said she wanted to leave this note. She chatted some and left.

The note read;

“Mr. Merrill,

I didn’t want to wake you up but I’m off for the next 7 days and I hope that you’re outta here by then. Thank you for being such a nice patient.

Don’t come back too soon ––even though I know you will miss us too much!!! I hope you get well soon and say “Hi” to Ms. Jo for me.!!! Take care always!!!
Jean ☺”

It was a nice touch, I thought.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.