This is What Happens when a Former Hospice Chaplain has Children

Today I lay down with Zander for an hour and a half, drifting in and out of sleep, letting my body feel its own heaviness and exhaustion. I started to think about my own sense of eternity … how far away these daily struggles feel from that deep sense I’ve often had, and yet how sometimes I just get these flashes—while I’m holding Zander, watching him breathe … listening to Zoe ask her first deep questions … I flash on eternity. I see it all holding these tiny moments in the palm of its huge hand, swallowing them up. I see how quickly my life is going by, and how quickly my children are growing up.

Then I think of Suzuki Roshi, and his old adage, “The only freedom is to find our composure in the truth of impermanence.” I remember hearing this in my twenties and thinking I had some understanding of it. Now, with my two children, I see how far away I am from any sense of composure. I see that I, this limited human being, have given birth to two more limited, temporal beings. They will have to expire, just as I will. Even just the “suchness” of their childhoods is passing through my fingers like sand, day by day. I see them change by the hour, and I feel panges in my heart that are so huge I have to look and see if I have a physical bruise there.

I am not ready to let this life go, these children go.

I just let the love and its vast ache of loss wash over me, hoping that each time I do, I will create a little bit more room in my heart to be able to tolerate how ephemeral it all is.

And of course, in the midst of it, there are times when I am just tired, just fried, just stuck in the daily business, far too mired and triggered to notice that I’m still being held, like a small crumb, in the infinite palm of eternity. But even in those moments, I can at least remember that it is *possible* to hold that space—that I will feel the eternal again.

The once metaphysical, “fun” musings about how cool it is to be encapsulated in this mystery of being human, on this strange rock, spinning around a star in the middle of nowhere—they are not so fun anymore. They bring heartache, longing, and just a general sense that I want my children to be safe. I feel my humanness outweighing my metaphysical-ness more and more as I become a mother, and I can only pray that as I grow older, the wisdom will come as the two parts of me finally join together. Perhaps then I will have some composure in the truth of impermanence.

Even my attempts at writing just don’t get at it—like vultures trying to circle around something but never being able to get at it, because it’s not a corpse—it’s the most palpable, living thing there is. Now, and then now, and again now. That is all there is. Such a cliché, but just so damn true. Each moment, our awareness divorced from it, trying to envision some “better” now to be in later—and we will be on our deathbeds, still practicing that mindset of always leaning forward a bit, and we will realize that there was never any reason to lean forward at all—that we should have perfected the art of leaning in, not out, and we will be full of regret.

I think my line of work for those five years, as a hospice chaplain, was a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because I see all of this so clearly. A curse, because I see all of this so clearly.

Sigh. And on we go.