Tag Archives: Jane Kenyon “In the Nursing Home”

“Trailing clouds of glory”–– Requiem for my Niece

Posted on by
9

Anise Stevens, 1969-2019 (Photo by Emilie Zeug)

Almost 50 years ago, the baptism of my niece, Anise Mouette Stevens, was one of my first sacramental acts. For the past seven years, she fought a brave battle against cancer. Today, with a heavy heart, I presided at her Requiem. 

Some of you were there when Anise entered this world.
Some of you were there when she left it.
Some of you grew up with her, or worked and played with her,
or were taught and mentored by her.
Some of you have known the intimacy of family with her,
or the close bonds of friendship.
Some of you have shared the journey of motherhood with her.
Some have shared her fierce struggle for wellness.
All of us have been touched by her, inspired by her.
All of us have felt, in our own special way, “the Anise effect.”

I can’t begin to describe my niece’s rich and amazing life in the few minutes I have here. There will be time for stories and memories later, but for now, let me offer a sampling of the many voices of love and gratitude posted by her “tribe” online at The Anise Effect Facebook page.

Brave, stylish, radiant, beautiful, kind, warm, caring, daring, sharp-witted, accessible, erudite, literary, Anise is one of a kind.

She had a way of being there without trying to fix you, minimizing your problems, judging you, or expecting any­thing back from you. She just was there.

She made excellence itself a norm in her classes, and that made us all want to work hard to be our best, not to please her, but because that was the standard she had created.

She gave me advice about life that I will follow for the rest of my life

She was the only LA art writer to walk into The California African American museum when I called for diverse coverage of the art scene—back when it wasn’t the hip place to be. 

I hope you know how much I have always looked up to you and your intelligence, grace, beauty, coolness, decisiveness, creativity, boldness, kindness, charm, energy, forward motion, vision, vulnerability, strength. You inspire me.

You truly were instrumental in showing me a new way to live.

Anise never once felt sorry for herself, but in her pain gave comfort to others.

You carried a million pounds on your shoulders, yet still kept a loving and generous nature.

She’s intelligent, caring, creative, loving, strong, and hilariously, bitingly (at times) witty. Those are all important characteristics, and Anise simply wouldn’t be Anise without them. Beyond all of that, however, Anise has a rare talent for bringing out the best in all who know her.

She listens to understand. 

Anise walks on water.

Such beautiful tributes. Blessed is she who has touched so many people.

I’ve been reading over her writings about the L.A. art scene.[i] She had an engaged, humane voice as a critic, always seeking connections between the artworks and the questions of who we are and how to live. And certain sentences jumped out at me as if they might be telling me not just about a particular artist, but about Anise herself, about her own sense and sensibility in the art of shaping a life. Listen to these three sentences, taken from three different reviews:

She not only sheds the unnecessary, but she articulates the primary essence of her materials. [ii] 

Accidents and mistakes aren’t simply recognized as failures, but instead as original, one-of-a-kind works. [iii]

Considering all that could go wrong when working with such unpredictable materials, [her] efforts glisten with an air of mystique.[iv]

Well, Anise certainly had an air of mystique, and so much more. But now, each of us feels the wound of her departure. Even though we know a lot about mortality, and the battle she fought, her absence still feels like a surprise. And so untimely. So unjust. How could someone so precious, so dear, so full of life, not live forever?

To live in this world, says Mary Oliver,
you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go. [v]

At Church of the Angels in Pasadena, California, everyone came forward to lay a flower on the altar with Anise’s ashes.

There’s an Irish song called “The Parting Glass.” They sing it in pubs at closing time. Its minor key and wistful words express the melancholy of ending the evening’s camaraderie as people go their separate ways into the night––a sorrow which feels like a rehearsal for the end of life itself:

Oh, all the comrades that e’er I had,
Are sorry for my going away.
And all the loved ones that e’er I had
Would wish me one more day to stay.
But since it falls unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not,
I’ll gently rise and softly call,
“Goodnight, and joy be with you all.

I love that last line. The singer doesn’t just say farewell and disappear. She pronounces a blessing upon those who remain: “Joy be with you all.” Yes, we honor our dead by the tears we shed. We honor them even more by embracing the joy they wish for us.

If I should die before the rest of you, said British comedienne Joyce Grenfell,
Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone.
Nor when I’m gone speak in a Sunday voice,
But be the usual selves that I have known.
Weep if you must,
Parting is hell,
But life goes on,
So sing as well. [vi]

Such a recovery of joy is not a matter of forgetting or leaving behind. The connection continues, but in a new way. When C.S. Lewis wrote about the grief process after the death of his wife, he said that as the acute sense of loss began to fade, he wondered whether he was starting to forget her by being happy again, or whether he might betray the rich complexity of her being by reducing her to a fixed set of memories.

But once he just stopped worrying about it, he found that, as he put it, he “began to meet her everywhere.” It wasn’t a voice or an apparition, or even a big emotional experience. It was, he said, “a sort of unobstrusive but massive sense that she is, just as much as ever, a fact to be taken into account.” [vii]

The absence of a loved one in a bodily and temporal form is succeeded by new forms of presence. I once asked a group of high school students to write their own epitaph, and one seventeen-year-old girl proposed this for her imaginary tombstone:

You say goodbye,
I say hello.

The people who matter have a way of sticking around. Although death changes the relationship, it doesn’t end it. The dead continue to occupy our thoughts. They remain present to us in stories, memories, emotions, DNA (in some cases), and whatever else they left us with.

Our beloved Anise is no longer in one particular place. She is now in every place we remember her. She is present when her voice echoes in our ears, or in those places where we shared special times together. She is present whenever we think of her, or speak of her, or tell the stories that embody her time among us.

The great east window in this church makes the same point. The angel of resurrection is telling the sorrowing women, “The one you seek is not where you laid him. From now on, you need to be looking elsewhere.” Or as we heard earlier in Wendell Berry’s poem, “She is hidden among all that is, / And cannot be lost.” [viii]

As a person of faith, I believe that this continuing presence is not merely memory or imagination. Whether we live or die, we all belong to a larger wholeness, from which we can never be separated. This wholeness, for which there are many names, is the Love that binds us all together. This interconnection, this communion, cannot be broken, even by death.

The Lakota people have the expression “all my relatives” to describe the continuing bond between the living and the dead. Martin Brokenleg, a Lakota Episcopal priest has said that “Our experience shows us that death does not break our kinship bond. We turn to one another for help and support regardless of which side of death our relatives are on.”

Christian tradition calls this the communion of saints, described in the Bible as a great cloud of witnesses encouraging us from above. I especially love novelist George Eliot’s term for this fellowship of heaven: “the choir invisible whose music is the gladness of the world.” And I think that Anise’s tribe, all who have experienced her supportive and encouraging nature, would agree that her music was, and will continue to be, the gladness of the world.

T.S. Eliot said, “In my end is my beginning.” Anise died at 5:28 a.m. on New Year’s Day. That was the exact beginning of astronomical twilight, the very first minute of dawn on the first day of the year of her 50th birthday. Outside on the street, the Rose Parade was in its final stages of preparation.

Anise’s stepmother has posted a description of that morning:

We’re with Anise’s body that we washed and anointed as the Rose Parade unfurls just outside the window. Her apartment is on Orange Grove at the start of the parade. Bands are playing and the front lawn is filled with bleachers of cheering people. Anise has flowers tattooed on both shoulders. She painted flowers. We dressed her in a favorite dress with embroidered flowers. And now the entire street for miles around is filled with flower-strewn floats.

Life and death, singing in harmony.

Painting by Anise Stevens.

In her last weeks, Anise wondered about what lay ahead. That is the question. My sister Martha said to me the other day that her daughter is “on her way,” and then she cited Wordworth’s evocative image of the next life as our native home to which we shall return:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; / The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, / Hath had elsewhere its setting / And cometh from afar; / Not in entire forgetfulness, /And not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home: [ix]

We have no maps for our homeward journey. Still, we wonder.

When Henry David Thoreau lay dying at age 45, a family friend said to him, “You seem so near the brink of the dark river that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.” And Thoreau, who had spent his life carefully observing and describing what he saw in the fields and woods around Walden Pond, replied simply, “One world at a time.” [x]

However curious we may be about what it’s like across that dark river between the worlds, we can’t see it from here. But I would venture to say that heaven is not so much a place as it is a relationship. We live in God and God lives in us. And that is true on both sides of the river.

When the 14th-century English mystic, Julian of Norwich, was only 30 years old, she fell ill and came very close to death. As she lay on her sickbed, she had a vision of divine Love, who told spoke to her, telling her everything she needed to know about her ultimate future:

All shall be well, and all shall be well,
and all manner of thing shall be well.

 What else do we need to know?

Jane Kenyon was a poet who died at 49, the same age as Anise. She envisioned the process of dying to be “like a horse grazing / a hill pasture that someone makes / smaller by coming every night / to pull the fences in and in.” No more “running wide loops,” nor even “the tight circles.” But the body’s decline is not the only thing going on, according to the poet. Surrender is prelude to transformation, and Kenyon’s poem[xi] turns into a prayer:

Master, come with your light
halter. Come and bring her in.

And in Kenyon’s “Notes from the Other Side,” she reports that “God, as promised, / proves to be mercy clothed in light.”[xii] Amen to that.

 And we do know one thing for a fact: at the end, Anise was smiling.

Anise Stevens, mid-1970s (Photo by Jim Friedrich)

Some of you may have seen on The Anise Effect a photograph I took over 40 years ago, capturing Anise as a little girl, running joyfully through a field on her Aunt Marilyn’s farm. She is kicking up the dust beneath her feet. The late afternoon sun is behind her, a radiant backlight, and the dust too is suffused with radiance, as if Anise were trailing clouds of glory. It may only be dust, but it is transformed by the sun into a glorious substance. And so shall we all be transformed.

We began the liturgy by singing an early American lyric:

My friends, I bid you all adieu;
I leave you in God’s care;
And if I here no more see you,
Go on––I’ll meet you there.

I believe that Anise is wishing us all well this very moment, so let me close with another lyric, from a song by Jane Voss, “To All My Friends in Far-Flung Places”:

To all of you who took me in
Who shared the thick and stretched the thin
Who gave me comfort on the run
Who saved my life, who made it fun
Wherever you may be tonight
I hope this finds your burdens light
Your purpose high, your spirit strong
I hope that you have got along
My song was lost and gone, if not for you

 

 

[i] You can find links to her critical writings here: http://www.anisestevens.com/clips.html

[ii] “Miya Ando,” Artillery Magazine, Nov. 8, 2016 (http://artillerymag.com/miya-ando/)

[iii] “The Analog Revolution: Shock of the Old,” Artillery Magazine, May 3, 2016 (http://artillerymag.com/the-analog-revolution/)

[iv] “Farrah Karapatian,” Artillery Magazine, Feb. 3, 2016 (http://artillerymag.com/farrah-karapetian-2/)

[v] Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods,” Mary Oliver: New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 178.

[vi] Quoted in All in the End is Harvest: An Anthology for Those Who Grieve (UK: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1989).

[vii] C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, q. in All in the End is Harvest, 105.

[viii] Wendell Berry, “Three Elegiac Poems.”

[ix] William Wordsworth, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Chiidhood.”

[x] Malcolm Clemens Young, The Spiritual Journal of Henry David Thoreau (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2009), 8.

[xi] Jane Kenyon, “In the Nursing Home,” Jane Kenyon: Collected Poems (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press. 2005), 282.

[xii] “Notes from the Other Side,” in Jane Kenyon: Collected Poems (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2005), 267

 

In Paradisum: On the Death of a Friend

Posted on by
13

Bill and Robyn Fisher (July 2005)

I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

–– W.S. Merwin, “Berryman”

In September of 2004 my friend Bill Fisher sent me Merwin’s poem, adding the comment, “It is as if he is saying, ‘If you have to be sure, don’t love,’ or perhaps, ‘don’t live.’”

Bill’s letter was in response to some crisis in my own life, one of those times when you wonder whether your story matters, whether you are being good enough or real enough or deep enough. Or as another poet, William Stafford, put the question: “Ask me whether what I have done is my life.”

In supplying thoughtful perspectives on my faltering attempts to do “my life,” Bill could be brutally honest about his own perilous quest for authenticity. He was well acquainted with the recurring dissonance between the voice within and the scripts thrust upon us by the outer world. And he was never afraid to share the painful parts of his own story if it could do some good for a friend.

“As I write these words to you,” he said in his letter, “I think of the last lines of a recent morning poem of mine: “To whom can I / still safely / confess my sins?” . . . I have to thank you for being one with whom I can still feel safe in my most radical vulnerability.”

Aelred of Rievaulx, a 12th-century English abbot, said much the same thing in his beautiful treatise on friendship:

“But how happy, how carefree, how joyful you are if you have a friend with whom you may talk as freely as with yourself, to whom you neither fear to confess any fault nor blush at revealing any spiritual progress, to whom you may entrust all the secrets of your heart and confide all your plans . . .  Speak then without anxiety. Share with your friend all your thoughts and cares, that you may have something either to learn or to teach, to give and to receive, to pour out and to drink in.”[i]

I could always speak without anxiety in Bill’s presence.
And I always learned something from him; I always received something.

We first met––60 years ago this month––in the 8th grade at Harvard School, a leafy Episcopal boys’ prep nestled against the Hollywood Hills. The peculiar atmosphere of the place bonded us like veterans of some ancient war, incomprehensible to anyone who hadn’t been there. Bill’s lifelong passion for teaching and writing might be traced to the bracing theatrics of our English instructor “swearing and throwing chalk and shaking a book in mid-air and shaming us, trying to open perhaps the smallest crack in our magnificent ignorance.”[ii]

Bill Fisher, Harvard School senior photo (1962)

We were classmates through high school and college, and remained close friends through all the changes and chances that followed. He was the best man at my wedding. As romantic idealists, we both found the Sixties a perfect time to come of age, and never quite got over it. Neither of us would ever be fully at ease in the kingdoms of complacency and compromise.

In a letter about the Occupy Movement in 2011, he said such manifestations of just and compassionate community had a value quite independent of any immediately tangible results. He recalled his first taste of utopian communitas at the Monterey Pop Festival in the Summer of Love (1967): “It was inebriating, and begged a simple question: Why can’t it be possible for us to interact in such a loving way––on the streets, in our commerce, among friends and supposed enemies?”[iii] The experience itself doesn’t have to last for the vision––and the questions it poses––to be enduring.

Addressing high school graduates in 2006, Bill offered his personal understanding of the Kingdom of God. “Or if you’re uncomfortable with the biblical term,” he told them, “you can call it ‘the morphic field of love.’” What he described to those students was something he himself had not always found, but had never stopped desiring: an environment where people “could reveal all of who and what they are, could explore themselves and their lives openly, without fear of being ridiculed, with every expectation of growing and realizing what they want and what they are, in their own lives and in their relationships with others.”[iv]

Born five days apart a few weeks after D-Day, Bill and I celebrated many birthdays together. The most memorable was our 30th, when we gathered at his family beach house with two other prep school classmates, also born in July 1944, for a weekend celebration with friends and lovers. For three days we shared fond memories and exuberant hopes. Turning 30 seemed a happy marker between youth’s giddy promise and the emerging fruitfulness of our adult lives. As “Hey Jude” came on the stereo, we toasted our futures by candlelight and vowed to gather again at 40.

But before our 31st year was done, one of our July fraternity of four died by his own hand. After his funeral in our prep school chapel, we who remained vowed to look out for one another, reject despair, and make the most of whatever time we were given. In the four decades since, Bill kept faith with that vow. I could not have had a better and more inspiring friend.

A few years ago, Bill began to show symptoms of Lewy Body Dementia. He went into physical decline, and suffered gradual diminishment of cognitive capacities, although we could still, until very recently, manage rich conversations about our favorite topics––music, movies, literature, art, politics, religion, relationships, and all the arcane trivia of a sixty-year friendship.

Bill was immensely blessed by the tireless support of his beloved wife Robyn, who took leave from her high school teaching position to be his caregiver. It was an immense journey for both of them, unimaginably daunting and at the same time full of grace. Her regular updates on the Caring Bridge website were moving, honest and often funny. That journey is her story to tell, but I am so grateful to know how much my friend was loved, and how not even the ravages of disease could rob him of his sweetness.

“If I’ve just lost the ability to be who I am,” he told her in July, “You remind me of who I am.”

The 17th-century Anglican poet/priest George Herbert, well acquainted with debilitating illness, warned the healthy to respect the dignity of the sick, and not “to judge calamities / By outward form. . . tremblings may / as well show inward warblings, as decay.”[v] In his final years, Bill was as alive as ever, but in a different way. His weakness was not, in one sense, a diminution of life, but a concentration of it into a reduced but saturated form.

The will to take on the physical and mental challenges of each day with courage, humor, and a high degree of curiosity exhibited more life, not less. Climbing the stairs, when he still had the strength for it, or just getting out of bed, after his legs had finally failed him, became more of a hero’s journey than the 93-mile trek he once made around Rainier’s Wonderland Trail. Piercing the fog of confusion with simple words of affection and delight displayed as much eloquence as any of his masterful writings.

The poet Jane Kenyon poignantly described the shrinking physical world of a woman in a nursing home, who is “like a horse grazing / a hill pasture that someone makes / smaller by coming every night / to pull the fences in and in.” No more “running wide loops,” nor even “the tight circles.” But the body’s decline is not the only thing going on. Surrender is prelude to transformation, and Kenyon’s poem turns into a prayer:

Master, come with your light
halter. Come and bring her in.[vi]

On Holy Cross Day, September 14, Bill suffered some kind of cardiac event, leaving him unable to speak or swallow. Just hours before slipping into permanent silence, he had told Robyn, “Thank you for being willing to treat life as a crazy adventure with me.”

I drove down to administer Last Rites as family and friends stood round Bill’s bed. His eyes were closed, his breathing gentle. We all laid hands of blessing on him, each thanking him for the gifts he had given us. There was no way to tell whether he could hear our words, but so much spoken gratitude surely bathed him with love, and the sense of communication felt very deep. I anointed Bill with oil and spoke the priestly words:

Depart, O Christian soul, out of this world. . .
May your rest be this day in peace,
and your dwelling place in the Paradise of God.

Later we got out the guitars and made music for Bill, who had been a dedicated folkie since high school. We sang “Angel Band” (“I’ve brushed the dew on Jordan’s banks, the crossing must be near”); “Thanksgiving Eve” (“What can you do with each moment of your life, but love till you’ve loved it away”); “Language of the Heart” (“You will always be, even though time would disown you, / For you have set us free, those among us who have known you”); and many others.

The next day I entered his room alone to sing him one more song, “Waterloo Sunset.” We had both loved the quirky music of Ray Davies, and the song’s image of crossing over the river “to feel safe and sound” seemed so fitting.

And I won’t feel afraid
As long as I gaze on Waterloo Sunset
I am in paradise

Bill’s eyes never opened, but he seemed to stir, as if he wanted to harmonize one more time, the way we had done so often over the years. I gave him a final blessing and a kiss of peace, then left to make the long drive home. I knew it was our last goodbye.

Three days later, Robyn texted that it was now only a matter of hours. In my little oratory, I lit a tea light before a Byzantine icon of Madonna and Child, and kept vigil with prayers and songs. An hour before sunset, the flame expired, releasing the briefest wisp of ascending smoke.

The match dies, the flame is born.
The flame dies, the smoke is born.[vii]

Twenty minutes later the text came: Bill is gone.

The next night I went to hear the Seattle Symphony. I had bought my ticket long before, but the program now seemed more than happy chance––Mahler’s Second, whose theme is Resurrection! This massive 90-minute work gathers up the joys and sorrows of mortal life, pitting its affirming energies against the looming specter of negation. In the fourth movement, a mezzo-soprano pleads for relief:

Man lies in greatest need.
Man lies in greatest pain…
I am from God and shall return to God.
The loving God will grant me a little light…

In the stupendous finale, a hundred-voice chorus joins the soloists to protest the fate of human perishing:

O believe, my heart, believe:
Nothing to you is lost…
You were not born for nothing…

With wings which I have won
In love’s fierce striving,
I shall soar upwards
To the light which no eye has penetrated.

Soaring upward into the light was exactly the image I needed to sing my friend home. Bill got his PhD in medieval literature, and had taught Dante to high school students. I like to think that his close reading of the Commedia prepared him for the beatific vision at the end of the long and winding road:

thus did a living light shine all around me,
leaving me so swathed in the veil of its effulgence
that I saw nothing else. (Par. xxx.49-51)[viii]

 

Bill and Robyn in the high country (July 2005)

But Mahler allowed me little time for such digressions. The music insisted that I pay attention, not miss a note, as if my life depended on it. It was all here: life and death, tears and laughter, darkness and dawn. And in the end, every wound healed, every pain redeemed.

Rise! Yes, rise
My heart, in an instant!
That for which you have suffered
Shall carry you to God!

This heartfelt cry is answered by an explosion of orchestral sound, which Mahler himself described as a gift from beyond: “The soaring development and upward wave is here so immense, so unprecedented, that, afterwards, I did not know myself how I could have arrived at it. The whole thing sounds as though it came to us from some other world. And – I think there is no one who can resist it. – One is battered to the ground and then raised on angels’ wings to the highest heights.”[ix]

In speaking so directly to my own grief, the music offered a consoling vision of apotheosis, as if the tombs had been emptied and all creation gathered into glory. Was this the grace and truth of revelation, or just a passing feeling, a trick of language and the senses?

If you have to be sure, don’t live.

 

 

 

[i] Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship, tr. Lawrence C. Braceland, S.J., ed. Marsh L. Dutton (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2010), 2.11, 1.4.

[ii] Bill Fisher, personal email (September 27, 2003).

[iii] Ibid. (November 19, 2011)

[iv] Bill Fisher, Commencement address at Tara Performing Arts High School, Boulder, Colorado, June 2006.

[v] George Herbert, “A Paradox: that the sicke are in a better case, then the Whole,” The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 29.

[vi] Jane Kenyon, “In the Nursing Home,” Collected Poems (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press. 2005), 282.

[vii] I learned this when I filmed Ken Feit, I.F. (Itinerant Fool), who recited it as he lit and then blew out a match.

[viii] Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, tr. Robert and Jean Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 733.

[ix] Anthony Monti, A Natural History of the Arts: Imprint of the Spirit (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2003), 162.