“I Shall Die, but That Is All I Shall Do for Death”: The Sequel
- Dr. Tom Wagner
- 2 days ago
- 12 min read
(Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1934)
Could years of small surrender prepare you for the hardest letting go? This reflection explores Mary’s story of illness, recovery, contemplative prayer, and the kind of peace that does not arrive by accident.
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“I Shall Die, but That Is All I Shall Do for Death": The Sequel
Summarizing Last Week’s Episode of Sunday Morning Café
Batman, the 1960s TV series starring Adam West, came in two weekly episodes separated by 48 agonizing hours. The first installment always concluded with the masked crusader’s life balanced on a knife’s edge. Viewers had to wait an excruciating two days to find out the hero’s fate! Reminiscent of that series, the last episode of SMC left our main character, Mary, poised to have her skull drilled open for an endoscopic Roto-Rooter surgery to fix a clogged drain in her brain ventricles.
According to her neurosurgeon, this exceedingly rare procedure could have had any one of four outcomes:
death;
a serious insult to her brain (possibly requiring the remainder of her life in a nursing home);
no change in her steady decline into dementia, incontinence, and loss of walking;
and finally, recovery of some portion of her capacities.
On the eve of her surgery, she met with her adult sons and husband to tell them, “in no uncertain terms,” that she was “at peace” with any of the outcomes that could occur, including disability, including even death. “I didn’t say that to make them feel better,” she insisted. “I really was at peace!” When I heard that last part, the resilience-researcher-geek in me immediately stuffed two legal pads into my backpack, cued up several ballpoint pens, and cleared out my schedule to learn where a person goes to get that kind of Grade-A, blue-ribbon, major-league, gold-medal brand of resilience and equanimity.
And so, Bat-friends, here at the beginning of the second episode, let’s pick up the story post-surgery. “How did it go?” In a nutshell, Mary’s neurosurgeon and health care team were gobsmacked by her Grade-A, blue-ribbon, major-league, gold-medal recovery! While still in the hospital just after the surgery, Mary, a physical therapist of 40 years, was ready and raring to go when the PTs would show up for her practice in walking! In April, after her January surgery, she removed her incontinence diaper! The week of the interview, two years later, she planned and hosted a four-hour baby shower. At one point in our interview, a warm recognition broke over her face as she said, “Here I am having a normal conversation in my home, with you, rather than a nursing home!”
Researchers like Bruce Feiler have noted that listening to and learning from resilience stories has a way of enhancing the listener’s own fund of resilience. After sifting through four hours of interviews, here is a distillation of those essential ingredients that assisted Mary in her resilience relative to diminishment, possible death, and recovery. Every effort will be made to hew as closely as possible to Mary’s self-understanding.
An Important Suggestion on How to Read this “Chapter”
Normally, SMC articles involve just enough copy to last through a morning cup of coffee. This week’s submission reads more like a chapter of a book on resilience. If I play my cards right, that will be its ultimate destination. In the meantime, if you only have a limited period of time to read, then I think Mary would want you to skip to the last section. Look for “The Soul of Mary’s Resilience.” It represents an essential ingredient in Mary’s steely ability to not only survive, but thrive through existential difficulty.
Resilience Resources in the Face of Diminishment and Death
In summary form, here is the scaffolding upon which Mary’s resilience stood:
a well-developed spiritual life grounded in long-standing/rock-solid contemplative practices;
a support network that is both wide and deep;
an innate optimism that can appreciate and celebrate even small kindnesses, victories, or improvements;
and a well-developed step-by-step methodological approach to life.
This article will proceed by examining these items inversely, in ascending order of importance.
Methodological Approach
Everything about Mary expressed a kind of ordered, methodological approach to living. Everywhere I cast my glance in her home, there was beauty, order, and elegance. In anticipation of our interview, she had prepared a step-by-step outline. It is hard to imagine a better skill set for rehabilitation after neurosurgery than a combination of noticing small victories (aka gratitude practice) with a step-by-step, methodological approach to recovery.
Her intentional plan to recover speech included making sure to have conversations with people, even when fatigued. This methodology was aimed at feeding two birds with one crumb. Mary knew that regular repartee would bring back her linguistic skills, as well as her cognitive capabilities.
As part of her recovery, Mary was determined to answer every single card or letter of a well-wisher with a handwritten card of her own. Besides scratching her gratitude itch, she was attempting to “win back” her handwriting skills, as well as the cognitive skills that go with letter writing. As if she were back in my first-grade class with Sister Maureen Michelle, she would repetitively practice writing each word of a note multiple times before including it in her card (e.g., “Dear”… “Dear”… “Dear”… “Tom”… “Tom”… “Tom”… and so on…). When the sadness or anxiety of winning back skills that she had first mastered many decades ago would threaten to overwhelm her, she would utilize breathing exercises to soothe herself. When her brain required rest or rejuvenation, Mary, the choral singer, would cue up a favorite Bach number or some other favorite.
“Optimism”
What Mary referred to as “optimism” frequently goes by the name “positivity” in resilience research, and always appears prominently in the lineup of characteristics that mark the truly resilient. According to Mary, she has always enjoyed an optimistic outlook. When I asked if there was any way that she had intentionally set out to develop this quality, she gently chided, “Well, think of what I did for a living for forty years?” “In Physical Therapy, you look for and celebrate small successes, and build on those successes.” It is easy to imagine how such an approach would aid in the physical therapy and speech therapy Mary would attend and self-administer. While I was interviewing her, Mary’s positivity was directed back at me: “Oh, that’s a good question,” or a little later, “You’re a good listener.”
In listening to Mary, it appeared that a robust, long-standing practice of gratitude may account for a large portion of her optimism. To celebrate a year’s worth of recovery, she posted twelve consecutive days’ worth of 12 articles expressing her gratitude. In them, she noticed the “kindnesses, the love, the expertise, and blessings” visited upon her throughout her challenging journey. Listening to her, it was easy to discern a bone-deep habit of appreciating even the smallest things right in the midst of difficulties. I surmised that this habit of gratitude, or appreciation, was the organic material that transformed the manure of her situation into a rich compost composed of resilience-enhancing optimism.
Sports psychologists, along with some brands of cognitive psychotherapy, recommend an intentional focus on power statements aimed at what the Marines call “a positive mental attitude.” For example, “I’m walking bravely into my future” was a phrase Mary employed that provided a kind of cognitive North Star for her when facing potential diminishment and death. She rehearsed this phrase as she boldly stepped toward a risky surgery. By this researcher’s reckoning, the family’s mission statement through this journey was also a brand of power statement that revealed a kind of steely, intentional optimism that carried an action plan with it: “Team Openlander pulls in the same direction.”
Wide and Deep Social Support
Jeopardy Question: What was the most robust finding of the longest psychological study of adult development ever conducted (eighty-plus years, nearly 2,000 subjects all told)? What is: The heart of resilience, is… “relationships.” Mary is nowhere near old enough to have been recruited into that study, but on the basis of my interview with her, the findings of that study, initiated in 1938, are confirmed by this study of Mary’s story. A lifetime of tending to marital, familial, filial, collegial, spiritual, and communal relationships has borne the fruit of a wide and deep network of supportive relationships that buoyed Mary up through her illness and recovery.
To describe the breadth of her supportive relationships succinctly, let me just observe that Mary’s anniversary project of twelve days, of twelve gratitude articles, was sent to a network of over one hundred people. Those individuals were the subjects of her gratitude for a variety of reasons, but suffice to say, that to greater and lesser degrees, they were an extension of “Team Openlander.”
A succinct summary statement of the depth of her caring relationships is contained in the phrase, “Team Openlander pulls in the same direction.” Keep in mind that just before her own illness, Mary shouldered a great deal of the care for her mom as she slowly, slowly made her way through diminishment and death. Those several years of experience gave Mary eyes to see. As she began to receive the kind of care she had given her mom, coming back her way, there was zero chance that Mary would breeze past it with a lack of appreciation. “I give my family a lot of credit for not saying, ‘There is no hope,” Mary observed. “In retrospect, it was a huge gamble.” One wonders if part of Team Openlander’s care was providing Mary the space to take the lead in setting the direction for the team, despite her progressive dementia.
Full disclosure: Pat, Mary’s husband, is a psychologist/psychotherapist who mentored me in my early career. He’s always been on my Mount Rushmore of psychotherapists. After hearing this next part, my estimation of him grew to gargantuan proportions. In listening to Mary describe her husband’s care during this ordeal, something deeper than appreciation appeared to be in play. There is a kind of “taking for granted” with couples like this, that is not really so much a “taking for granted,” as a total confidence…like knowing that gravity will do what gravity has always done before…so you can bet on it with no doubt. Pat and Mary have this kind of rock-solid “taking for granted” going for them. Mary clearly appreciates it. She described months of recovery in which Pat helped her with showering, getting dressed, feeding her, and setting her up before leaving for work, only to come home and provide the same level of care at the end of the day. The son, who lived in town, would pitch in as needed, and the out-of-town son would show up to help when he could. Everything about Mary communicated that she understood that a seamless web of relationships was at the heart of her resilience and recovery. It is time now to turn to another vitally important relationship that cuts to the heart of this story.
The Soul of Mary’s Resilience
Depending upon how one punctuates time, the deepest foundations for Mary’s hardiness began to be laid one layer at a time, twenty-five years ago. It was then that she attended a workshop to learn a thing called “Centering Prayer.” Centering Prayer, according to Mary, was developed by Thomas Keating, OSB, consistent with the traditions of Christian mysticism as found in the ancient writings and monastic practices of spiritual masters through the millennia. Keating, along with his Trappist colleagues, took that tradition and crafted a practice framed in a more contemporary language accessible to modern, psychology-minded practitioners.
Adoption of this methodology set Mary on a course of practice that looks, on the outside, very much like other forms of meditation. Twice a day, once in the morning, and once in the evening, she: “shows up,” “sits in a chair,” “sets a timer,” and provides a twenty-minute to half-an-hour space where her eyes are closed and she is quiet. So far, that sounds a lot like meditation. But Mary is quick to draw distinctions. Her goal is “contemplation,” rather than meditation. “Contemplation is not repeating a mantra.” “Contemplation is not a focus on a mandala.” “Contemplation is God praying in us,” she insists. In Augustine of Hippo’s words, in contemplation one discovers a “God who is closer to me than I am to myself” (City of God).
Ten years ago, Mary underwent training and received certification as an instructor with the Contemplative Outreach, Ltd. Not just any training would do (including fifteen years of practice by this time in her life). This methodical Mary wanted to undergo this certification process to be sure that her teaching was consistent with the format of its founder, Thomas Keating, and therefore, with 1600 years of a rock-solid contemplative tradition. According to Mary, practitioners of Centering Prayer experience the same psychological phenomena as all people who try to meditate: “internal conversations,” “worries,” “to-do lists,” “internal movies,” “recapitulations of marital conflict,” and 100,000 other things. As distinct from meditation, the use of a single sacred word is used, not so much as a mantra, but as a “symbol of consent” to the God within. And so the twenty minutes are “not me trying to achieve twenty minutes of silence,” Mary insists, “but it is me trying to stay with my intention of consenting to God’s presence and action within me.” In the moment, when she is actually “absorbed into the Mind of God,” she has no awareness of it. One gets the sense that awareness, itself, sort of falls away. She only becomes cognizant of this absorption into the “God within”…in retrospect, when the contemplative sit is over. “When the timer goes off, I am not aware of how time flew by.” Her job, in this method, appears to be the creation of a daily space where “a reservoir of stillness” can be filled. The events from the day deplete that reservoir, so she provides another twenty-minute space for it to be “refilled in the afternoon or evening.”
For Mary, the revelation of the “Transcendent-within” is not so much revealed within those two daily spiritual exercises as it is revealed in the “other 23 hours of the day.” God’s fingerprints sculpting her heart and life within this practice show up over time in the slow transformation of the self. For example, Mary said that, “in the past, there would be something that really would have set me off, but nowadays it doesn’t do that anymore.” “Over twenty-five years, I get more of that, and more of that, and more of that.” “Eventually,” this is what made her “at peace” with the possibility of her own diminishment…even with her own death.
As I reflect on Mary’s story, it occurs to me to ask, “how many times has Mary breathed in, or breathed out her sacred word…her “symbol of consent” to the Ground of her existence? Each and every time she has done that, it has been to release her grasp on a pesky thought, or a story that her consciousness has just now delivered, or a “to-do list,” or a resentment, or just about anything that the human imagination can conjure. If one were to count how many times Mary has performed this operation, would it number in the hundreds of thousands? Would it be a million? Each time Mary has surrendered what the ego wanted to rehearse, or fixate on…. she did that in order to return to a silent absorption into the Ground of her being. My question? Could all those years of that have functioned like years of training for the big race? Could it be that twenty-five years of such training allowed Mary to fully accept “what is” rather than what “she wished was,” and therefore, she found peace when she needed it most. The consent that Mary has whispered in the dark for so many years was never meant to bend God to her ego’s wishes. It has always been the other way around. That well-developed muscle served her well, through the equivalent of a pretty tough, ultra-ultra marathon.
When listening to this part of her story, it is not hard to resonate with the words of the observant diner in the movie, When Harry Met Sally, “I’ll have what she’s having.” Mary insists that, like a habit of physical exercise, it may be hard to get into it, and then get used to it. But over time, she insists, one actually “looks forward to it.”
If you feel compelled to “have what Mary’s having,” you can search the words “Contemplative Outreach, Ltd.” There you will find coaches and workshops to instruct you in this practice, no matter what city you live in or around in the United States. A wide array of books can also help you with this project (Cynthia Bourgeault’s Centering Prayer, James Finley’s podcast Turning to the Mystics, Thomas Keating’s Open Mind, Open Heart and anything else he wrote, Martin Laird’s Into the Silent Land, Basil Pennington’s Centering Prayer).
Epilogue
Since this interview, four years ago, I’ve wanted to have what Mary and Pat were having. So since then, I’ve been doing my twice-daily, Thomas Keating/Cynthia Bourgeault-style, contemplative sits. I think I’ve begun noticing the subtle kinds of shifts Mary predicted in this interview. Looks like I’ll be able to use a “reservoir of peace” here pretty soon.
This week, I’ve learned that my mom is getting ready to graduate out of hospice for the third time. The first two times, she matriculated back into her memory care facility for more years of being cared for, and letting go, and letting go, and letting go. It appears that this time, she’s getting ready for her final letting go and a graduation ceremony into a brand-new existence. This afternoon, I’ll be conducting my contemplative “sit” next to her bedside, holding her hand. Keep her and my family in your prayers. When I decided to publish this article a few weeks ago, I had no idea I was writing it for myself. Hmm. Coincidence? I think not.
Please share with the SMC community your thoughts and/or reflections in the comments below.