Degrees of Separation

I usually start at the beginning, but this time I think I'll start HERE and NOW, at the end. Or at least near the end.

It's 4am in the morning and I'm at the Bay Crest Care Center in Torrance (south Los Angeles). And I'm watching a life come to an end.

For the second night in a row I've been up all night, keeping vigil over Carol*, watching her rasping breaths and frail body as she struggles to stay alive. If she stops breathing, I am supposed to make a call to her 87-year-old mother who is sleeping in a nearby motel. Instead, I think I will go over to the motel myself and give her the sad news in person. Despite her age, she still has an amazing amount of pluck and a great sense of humor. But there's still no getting around the fact that she will be devastated. She's still hoping that some miracle will save her daughter. I can't think of anything more tragic than a mother watching her child die.

Things have changed so much in just a few short weeks. And yet it feels like ages ago that I was meditating and cleaning and chessing and sleeping on these glorious Southern California beaches.

It all started with an email message from some Alaskan friends of mine. It contained a forwarded message from a friend of theirs regarding a friend of his who needed some assistance in Los Angeles while she was receiving cancer treatment. A friend of a friend of a friend, so I guess that's three degrees of separation.

Carol came to Los Angeles from Alaska at the end of February to undergo radiation and hyperthermia treatments. A few friends came down at different times to support her, but she became weaker due to the advanced state of her cancer and the side effects of the treatments themselves, and so she needed full time help. She knew no one down here in L.A., so when I received the forwarded email from her friend, I offered to lend a hand.

One of the most challenging aspects of her condition is that so many things cause her intense pain. She gets frequent chest and stomach pain spasms, and her body is so fragile that even slight movements can cause her to scream out in agony. Often she will wake up in the middle of the night screaming in pain. Just shifting her sleeping position could take up to an hour of slow, painful, infinitesimal adjustments. Her wound cleaning regimen can take hours. She reminds me of the painfully hyper-sensitive sister in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher".

The external portion of the tumor itself is like nothing I ever could have imagined. I won't even try to describe it, but it is so overwhelming that I've seen nurses gasp, and one actually had to leave the room when she uncovered it. The smell can be quite overpowering too, especially in conjunction with Carol's colostomy bag. It wasn't until a week and a half after I'd been helping her that one of the doctors told me that the cancer had already metastasized through other parts of her body and that her condition was terminal. They considered her treatment to be purely palliative.

But Carol has been battling this cancer for five years now---longer than she was originally predicted to survive---and she has been focused on curing herself. Indeed, the external tumor has been shrinking and dying over the weeks, discharging pus and blood and some liquids I don't even recognize.

When I first came on the scene, Carol was still quite functional and she also had a friend helping out, so I simply pushed her in her wheelchair to her treatments at the clinic about a block away from the apartment she was temporarily renting. As time went by, her friend left and she became much weaker, so I began to take on more tasks. Besides helping her with direct care such as cleaning her wounds, changing her colostomy bag, and moving her, I helped with logistics like arranging flights and coordinating other caregivers. I slept on the floor of her room so that I could help her out whenever she woke up screaming or needed something in the middle of the night.

Carol's mother arrived a few weeks ago. For an 87-year-old she is incredibly healthy and functional, but she still needs a lot of help with all sorts of things. Plus, she's constantly misplacing things and needs to be escorted everywhere.

I haven't been getting enough sleep because there's always so much that needs to be done. These past four weeks have flown by in an overwhelming and exhausting blur of body fluids, pungent smells, and screams. If I looked haggard before, I look wrecked now.

Carol is (was?) a very intelligent and vivacious woman with a keen wit too. She could also be quite demanding and critical. It was an interesting dynamic for me: here I was volunteering my help, yet often feeling on the defensive about what I was doing, especially if I ever disagreed with her. But like I mentioned in a previous entry ("Openings and Closings"), when my buttons are getting pushed, I try to remember that it's a great opportunity to try to free myself from those very buttons, to liberate myself from the power I give people over me. And, like before, I fail pretty much every time.

When a criticism or insult is flung in my direction, I would love to be able to smile, reflect on the merit of the comment, and then let it pass right through me without ruffling my ego. That would be emotional tai-chi. But for the most part, the barbs still poke and scratch, and sometimes I bleed. This monk is still too sensitive to what others think of me. Oh well, like everything else, it's a blessing and a curse. Us over-sensitive people tend to be quite aware of what others are feeling, but it comes at quite a cost.

Sometimes when I'm ministering to Carol's needs, I try to remember Mother Teresa's inspiring words. She said she tries to see Christ in every person she takes care of. When she washed a dying man's feet, she was washing Christ's feet. Religious mystics of other traditions might say that they are washing the feet of God, for God is everywhere. Other Eastern philosophies might say that we are washing our own feet, for others are ourselves. Some teachings (especially Advaita Vedanta) emphasize that the belief that we are separate from others is the greatest delusion of all.

After all, we are the Uni-verse-----literally, "One Poem", "One Song". And while I might intellectually understand this, the mystic's practice is to move from Understanding into Belief, and then, if I practice hard enough and am lucky enough, I just might move into Experience.

Zero degrees of separation.



"They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies."
---Shane, a supportive Quaker fellow, reading a quote by William Penn after a session of silent worship with us at Carol's bedside

"You are only allowed to say positive things. You are only allowed to tell me that I am getting stronger."
---Carol, after I said that I thought she was getting weaker because she was not eating enough

"I don't want to die in Los Angeles."
---Carol

"Is she your mother?"
---a nurse speaking to Carol's mother (mistaking the gaunt, emaciated daughter for the mother)

"I've never seen anything like that."
---a nurse, regarding Carol's tumor

"I told her if she dies, then I will follow soon after."
---Carol's mother

"Do you know any more monks?"
---Art (a friend of Carol's), seeking more caretakers


* Note: I've changed her name to protect her privacy.