Pondering Suicide

Here's what I was thinking about on my drive this afternoon.  It has nothing to do with the retreat I'm working on, except insofar as the completely unrelated dilemmas of others always raise questions about my own.

 

Most people who die of suicide suffer from a major mental illness, such as depression.

 

But most people who suffer from significant mental illness do not die of suicide.

 

It occurred to me that these statistics bear some relation to those pertaining to abuse.

 

Most people who abuse their spouses and/or children were at one time abused themselves.

 

But most people who suffered abuse at the hands of others do not themselves become perpetrators of abuse.

 

In other words, there are people who suffer serious damage, whether from mental illness or from various forms of abuse, who move forward into productive, successful, and contributory lives. 

 

And there are people who suffer similar trauma who are destroyed by despair and hopelessness, and who inflict devastation upon those they love the most.

 

So the questions are: How do we identify and distinguish these two groups, and

 

How do we help the latter become the former?

An Ignatian Lent

If you've wondered about the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, or perhaps made them in some form and seek a similar prayer experience for Lent, here's an opportunity from Loyola Press:

"Last year we launched An Ignatian Prayer Adventure, an eight-week online adaptation of the Spiritual Exercises. As we draw close to Lent 2013, I invite you to participate again or for the first time.

Guest bloggers Michelle Francl-Donnay and Greg Herrle will share their experiences with the retreat this year through posts here on dotMagis.
Michelle Francl-Donnay is the mother of two teenage boys, a professor of chemistry, and a regular contributor to Philadelphia Archdiocese’s  CatholicPhilly.com, where she writes about the joys and struggles of trying to live a contemplative life in the midst of everyday chaos. Michelle blogs about life, laundry, prayer, and God at Quantum Theology.
Look for Michelle’s posts on Tuesdays.
Greg Herrle we met here on this blog last summer, when he and his wife Ruth set out on the Camino Ignaciano and shared some of their story with us.
Greg’s posts will appear on Thursdays.

Here’s what one of last year’s participants, Patrick Nugent, said about the experience:

I had the most powerful, enjoyable, challenging, uplifting Lent of my life. I owe it to following your Lenten retreat, “An Ignatian Prayer Adventure.” I followed it more or less faithfully daily and to the letter. And as a consequence, I’ve had an equally joyful Easter.

The retreat begins on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, February 10, and concludes the week after Easter."

*****
 

I'm not familiar with Greg, but Michelle is a good friend, an elegant writer ~ and a contemplative chemist!  I am sure that the two of them will invite us into a deeply thoughtful Lenten journey.

Busy Person's Retreat

I'm at The College of Wooster this morning, where I'll spend a few hours for each of the next four days helping to direct a Busy Person's Retreat.  (That's last year's FB page, but you'll get the idea.)  We had our orientation last night, so at the moment I'm curled under my blankets at the lovely Black Squirrel Inn  ~ it's 12 degrees out there!

 

What a Busy Person's Retreat?  These opportunities got started about a decade ago, developed by  the Young Adult Ministries Council of the Cleveland Catholic Diocese and focused on a different theme each year.  They have expanded to include faculty and staff at the several colleges at which they're offered.  Although the orientation is a group event involving introductions and explanations and a delicious meal, the retreat itself is an individual affair.

 

Each retreatant is provided with a packet of material containing a number of prayer resources, including a sheet filled with quotes, questions, Scripture passages, and other suggestions for each day of the week.  And . . . here's where we come in: each retreatant also has an hour or so a day to meet one-on-one with a spiritual director, a time in which to explore and process the day's journey, undertaken in the midst of each person's busy life.

 

I've been able to do this a couple of times before, once for a Busy Student's Retreat on Discernment at Case Western Reserve, and once for a Busy Person's Lenten Retreat which a friend and I designed for our home church.  This week the topic is Stress, and I have three retreatants, a college senior and two college administration staffers.

 

Back at my church (about thirty minutes away), a usual week is underway, and lots of Lenten preparation lies ahead ~ but I am very much looking forward to these hours each day of helping others to savor their lives of prayer.

The Ignatian Tradition

 

 

In the spiritual direction program in which I trained, the academic year begins with a September week-end retreat: an introduction to the program for first-year students, an introduction to the internship year for second year students, and a launching into the world for those completing the program.

 

During the Sunday morning mass, the homily is replaced by words from the graduation class.  My class of September 2009, a cantankerous lot inclined to debate, could not agree on a speaker to represent us, and so we decided that we would all speak ~ limiting ourselves to two minutes each (there were fourteen of us.)

 

Yesterday, I found the sheet of lined paper on which I had scrawled what I had to say:

 

 

 

 

Tradition ~ my word.  We have become part of a remarkable tradition.

 

Imagination being a big part of Ignatian spirituality, what I imagine is Ignatius at his desk in Rome, putting the finishing touches on the Exercises and thinking, In 450 years, somewhere on the North American continent, which we Europeans have only just encountered, there will be a woman ~ a Protestant, a group which is only just emerging ~ who will have some questions and be making some decisions ~ and she'll be about as adept at decision-making as I was on that donkey ~ and will need some help, and so I will send forth my little volume, and somewhere it will find its way to her.

 

It was like sending a message in a bottle ~ and the Exercises did make their way, and continue to do so, from Ignatius, to his immediate followers, to theirs through the centuries, to the person who gave the Exercises to me ~ and now from me to those with whom I have the immense privilege of sharing them.

 

My director always uses Ignatius' own language and speaks in terms of giving, rather than directing, the Exercises.  I think that one of the reasons is that they are indeed a gift, the gift of the Holy Spirit through Ignatius to the whole church, the gift of one person being present to the journey of another, a tradition of gift passed down through the generations ~ a tradition in which we are all now embraced.

 

 

 

Image: Ignatius the Pilgrim, Wernersville (PA) Jesuit Retreat Center

Aging - II

I wondered why no one was interested in this post.  Then I discovered I'd not posted it!

**********

This morning I woke up early ~ a little after 6:00 ~ in the dark ~ after a restless night ~ stretched out in the bed my husband had already vacated ~ registered that yes, this is still my life and Josh is still gone ~ and rolled over to wonder about the process of aging.

To imagine myself twenty years from now, nearly 80.Who will I be, where will I live, and by whom will I be surrounded?

I have my ideal, of course: I will be creakier, but not much, and living in a small cottage by a large body of water.  My husband is likely to be living as well, given the longevity of the men in his family and his own remarkably good health.  In this ideal world of mine, our children will live nearby and their own children will be sunny adolescents who adore their grandma.  Whatever future sorrows lurk in the next two decades will have manifested themselves.  I can only hope for the resilience, dignity and wit of the Countess Dowager.

Dream on, girl.

What if I am, in fact, enduring a multitude of limitations of every kind? What if, God help me, like my own grandmother, I lose most of my ability to see and hear, to follow a conversation and to respond with the appropriate degree of dryness?  What if I can neither read nor listen to books?  What if I am confined to a small room with a linoleum floor, a curtain between my bed and my neighbor's as my sole remnant of privacy, and nothing but a small common garden to serve as a reminder of the great and wild outdoors?

I am pondering all these questions in large part because I spend so much time with older people.  Yesterday's post was but a list; each item thereon frames at least a dozen stories. 

I am pondering all these questions because others are, too;  Diane Roth and Vinita Wright, in particular.

I am pondering all these questions because a friend and her siblings have just had to move their 90-year-old mother to nursing care ~ a most difficult experience all around ~ and because I am trying to convince my father, a decade younger, to make some decisions now about the future.

More on all of the above coming up.

Meanwhile, a story:

I stop by a nursing home to visit an elderly gentleman at the request of his neighbor, one of my parishoners.  He is delightful.  He is from Cleveland and his name, and this is the truth, is Ignatius ~ Iggy.  I ask whether he went to St. Ignatius High School ~ he might have been in the same class with my spiritual director emeritus.  He tells me no; that he went to Benedictine.  "I guess I'll forgive you!" I laugh.

I visit him a few more times. He is longing to get home; although his house seems terribly empty since the death of his wife a few years ago, he wants desperately to see his magnolia tree in bloom.  The spring weather is unseasonably hot and the magnolias are already out; I don't think he's going to make it.

I see him for a last time in the ICU.  He has gone downhill fast and is being moved north, to the Clinic.  I give my number to his son; my church and Iggy's most recent residences are far from my home, but the Clinic is only a few minutes away.

I don't hear from them.  When I return to my church a few days later, I learn that he died in Cleveland.  He will be buried by a priest I never met.

I don't have sentimental ideas about the next life.  I'm not sure that I have any ideas at all.

But I am hoping for a cascade of magnolia blossoms for Iggy.

BC Reminders

A friend just asked a group of us for recovery gift ideas for someone who's had a double mastectomy.

A couple of weeks ago, I needed to do some three-hole punching of a stack of papers.  I'm right-handed, so I slid the whole stack in with my right hand and pushed down with my left. 

OMG.  It was as if I had been electrocuted under my left arm.  (I'm so glad no one else was around to see me pacing the office, clutching my chest.)

After about three days the pain wore off and . .  you guessed it, some more papers to be punched.

This time I slid only a couple of sheets into the puncher so I could push down very gently.  Same result.

I have now learned that I can accomplish this task awkwardly by reaching around with my right arm.  (I simply do not have the kinetic acuity to do it upside down and backward.)

It's been nearly a year since my last surgery.

I presume this means that one side effect of a double mastectomy is no more hole-punching, ever.

 

 

 

As far as the gifts were concerned, I came late to the conversation, after the meal deliveries and jammies had been suggested.  So here were my ideas:

 

Gift cards to Target and/or whatever else is near. There are lots of little expenses during recovery.  An Amazon gift card; a Kindle if she doesn't have one. 

 

A beautiful pair of earrings.  (NOT a necklace!) 

 

A yoga session for someone who will come to her house.

 

A telephone call every few days.  Let her tell you how brave and on top of it all she is.  Let her tell you how chickenshit and sad she is.  Let her tell you, "They're only breasts; I'm fine."  Let her tell you, "I can't bear to look at myself; I want to die."  Listen to her, and listen some more. The best gift of all.

 

 

 

 

Aging - I

I'm titling this post "Aging - I" because I have a feeling that there will be some sequels . . .

I spend a lot of time with elderly people.  The ones I call "my" people because they are members of  my church, or friends of my members.

In the past year or so, they have welcomed me into:

a somewhat worn and basic, albeit clean and friendly, nursing home

a much more attractive nursing home

assisted living apartments and their associated nursing and dementia and rehab units

the local hospice facility in the country

the hospice facility on Lake Erie with its spectacular views

intensive care units in three cities

emergency and pre-op rooms

hospital rooms in four cities

a mental health ward in another city

homes all over the place in which people are recovering from all of the above (except hospice, of course).

Two of my people died while I was with them; three others within a couple of days of my last visit.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit a new baby and her mom and their four cats.  They're all beautiful and the mom is SO excited about her baby and her family's new life.  I could see that she is already a GREAT mom.

All connected.  More on another day.