On December 6th, Pope Francis opened the massive door at the Vatican, officially beginning the Year of Mercy (2016).  This is a Jubilee year in the church’s calendar, so historically the sitting pope has opened this giant portal as part of the celebration in Rome.  Francis has stipulated that this Year of Mercy is to be extended to two groups of people usually not considered top tier by Roman Catholic hierarchists—women who have made the difficult decision to have an abortion and people who have gone through a heterosexual divorce.  Adding to the radical nature of this move, the Pope also granted permission to every cathedral in the world to hold its own Year of Mercy door opening, saying “Everyone cannot come to Rome, but Rome can go to everyone.”  Sundays find me in a pew at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis, MN, so my church was among those granted this first-time-ever permission.  So on December 13th, the 9:30 a.m. Sunday mass began with all those in the congregation who wished to do so going outside, following the choir and priest.  We stood in a unseasonal drizzle while the choir sang something lovely in Latin.  

I happened to look to my left where my eyes met those of a dark-skinned woman in a rain hat who smiled at me and said “This is a special day.”  After I agreed, we stood quietly while I let myself feel pleased that the small, single door that I usually use to enter church but which has been sealed shut in anticipation of this ceremony would now become usable again.  Over its bronze surface was draped a six foot colored hanging of a benign Jesus holding his hands in blessing.  The first one of these issued to the Basilica went missing almost immediately, later found under the viaduct near the basilica, obviously taken as a “blanket” to warm one of the homeless men who sleep there.  Rather than reporting this as a robbery, the staff asked for a second hanging, saying to people like me who asked what had happened to the first one “Well, the person who took it down needed it more than we did, so we just got a replacement.”  Now the bronze frieze depicting two saints unspecified by me was unhidden, though the tall hanging has been wrapped around one of the giant pillars of the church’s façade.

Suddenly, when there seemed to be several hundred of us congregants assembled in the light rain, the choir was climbing the granite steps and entering  the narthex, so people began filing back into church behind them.  Suddenly, the woman beside me took my hand and smiled again at me as we both teared up.  As I looked more closely at her face, I became convinced that she was of Middle-eastern origin, so I winced to recall how angry and spiteful many of my fellow Americans feel about Muslims in our country and elsewhere.  

We kept our hands together as we slowly maneuvered the stairs.  Just as we arrived at the marble doorsill, we said simultaneously “God bless you,” and went under the massive lintel.  We parted and I made my tearful way back to my pew where I’d left my glasses to mark the spot.  Just as I had never seen my companion before we were standing in the gentle rain, I probably will never see her again.  I believe she is an angel sent just for me at that spirit-filled moment.  I certainly will not forget our three or four minutes joined by a shared faith and a shared hope for connection over isolation, for fellow feeling over fearful antagonism.

After 21 years with my beloved companion cat, Sophie, I knew I wanted to wait before visiting my local humane society to see if a kitten might want to go home with me.  A couple of months went by and I began to feel the emptiness of my big old house—I knew I needed another breathing entity to touch, be responsible to, and grow to love.  My trip yielded my new kitten whose name on her cage, given by a vet who gave her initial shots, was Darla.  As we were driving home, I said “I don’t think I can live in the house with someone called Darla—I don’t know what kind of name it is.”  Thinking about her coloring as a tortoise shell, the new name came to me in a flash—Patches because of the flecks of gold woven into her otherwise black fur.

She is now six months old, weighs 4 pounds, and is a joy in my life.  Since my previous companion animals lived so long, it has been 21 years since I’ve played with a new kitten.   What I observe in Patches and what delights me is her joyous playfulness.  She will run all over trying to capture the neon pink feather at the end of a long black wand.  Up on chairs till she almost tumbles over from the top of them, burying herself among the various pillows on my living room sofa where she is sure she can confine the elusive pink thing, jumping mid-air after agilely turning her whole body 90 degrees because I change directions on her.  All this goes on every single day and has for the whole three months she’s lived here.

I believe animals can teach us deep life lessons if we are only patient enough to observe them.  What Patches is demonstrating to me, even as I lean dangerously close to despondency as city after city has its own “Ferguson moment” or yet another senseless mass shooting occurs in some innocent locale, is the ability to remain a sense of wonder and hope, day after day, without any real conclusion to her/our quest.  A wise 12-step sponsor of mine often responds to my emergency calls by saying I am to “trust in God’s provision.”  Even when I don’t believe her, I act as if.  Watching this tiny, magical kitten chasing yet again after the ever-elusive feather, I repeat that mantra to myself and keep fluttering the wand so Patches can make one more attempt to contain the elusive.  May she and I never tire of this pursuit.

Following a recent physical exam, I was sent for an echo cardiogram because my GP heard a heart murmur. The cardiogram tells me I have something called aortic stenosis, meaning a valve to my heart has shrunk and may need attention. Because at 78 I am blessed with extraordinarily splendid health and have not a single symptom of aortic stenosis, as I wait to consult with a cardiologist, this all seems unreal to me. But I have the good sense to have a session with an excellent therapist who listened as I answered this question: “How would it change you if you decided not to have interventional surgery?” Immediately I said, laughing, “Well, I’d have to step up the pace of my culling the pieces of paper in my house, so my friend who will have to get rid of everything when I die will have a fewer decisions to make.” To my amazement, the therapist replied “Ah, you won’t have the luxury of the illusion that you have forever to do that process.”

This phrase has stayed with me, letting me understand on a new level from whence much of my procrastination comes: I obviously live under a giant illusion, supported by my stunning health for my age, that I might escape the inevitable, that I might have control over when I leave this life. I’m humbled by this new understanding of something attendance at Al-Anon has made clear repeatedly, i.e., I am powerless over virtually everything except my own responses to what befalls me or takes up residence in my brain. Daily, I try to act as if I truly believe this and, certainly, I’ve made great progress in that regard in the past decade. But working my way through this strange and surreal diagnosis about my heart is giving me new awarenesses. And, importantly, I may have a chance soon to accept the giant truth embedded in my therapists phrase, “the luxury of illusion.” Once I processed my personal relationship to this phrase, I began seeing much broader applications of it. Most immediately, it pertains to how most of the world presently is behaving vis a vis climate change. How else to explain such massive and potentially disastrous procrastination about changing policies that might at least slow down the damage we are doing to the only planet we have? As a people, we insist, in the face of overwhelming scientific and phenomenal facts, on refusing to face the consequences of our egocentric thoughtlessness toward the world around us. And this particular illusion has the capacity to overwhelm us on every conceivable level, making a world like “luxury” obsolescent.

In my back yard has stood for who knows how many decades a majestic elm tree.  Each of its three trunks has been massive with the first growing straight up into the sky.  The other two have fanned out to make a graceful and huge canopy, shading my house from the Western sun in summer, providing myriad birds a place to pause on their way to my feeders.  Squirrels have nested and chased one another up its many branches and I have raked its tens of thousands of leaves into bags each fall.  But at approximately 11:15 a.m. today, June 14th, 2014, while I was getting spring rolls for lunch, a strong straight line wind came through my back yard and tore the outermost trunk away from its mother trunk right at the angle at which it branched into its fan.  My next door neighbor tells me she heard the loud crack and knew something major had occurred.  I came upon the catastrophe only when I had parked my car in the garage, closed the big door and opened the small side door that admits me into my back yard.  That back yard was completely occupied by the tree, leaving me barely room to get around it and into my kitchen, crying all the way because of the magnitude of my loss.

My initial impulse was to call my tree man who has nursed that elm by injecting it with a protective substance every third spring, successfully warding off the deadly Dutch elm beetles that have ravaged neighborhoods all over this country and all over my neighborhood.  He said he couldn’t come himself because he was keeping watch over this three year old child but that he would make calls and see if he could find workmen who could come and help me.  An hour and a half later, four incredibly kind and skillful men arrived with two huge trucks to begin sawing and hauling out to the street where the chipper waited my beloved tree trunk.  At first I thought to retreat to my third floor and close the windows so I wouldn’t have to hear the chain saw, but that seemed too cowardly in the end, so instead I decided I needed to be with my badly wounded tree that had given me such solace and pleasure for all of my thirty-five years in this house.  I wanted to be with her as she was dismembered and put to rest, to be a witness to her passing.  So I stood in the drizzle that fell periodically and in the wet yard when it was not actively raining, taking in fully the weight of what I was losing, cutting small branches myself so as to touch the leaves and branches myself.  The workmen seemed to understand my need to be involved, only asking me to step back when they worried that chips might fly and hit me from their saw.  Only one man sawed and he used a very small chain saw, so the noise level was the least it possibly could be.  And he only sawed a few places at a time, turning off the machine to drag what he had sawed into open ground.

Two and a half hours after they arrived, they last little piles had been raked up, the giant trunk had been sawn into manageable lengths, and they had driven their big yellow and red trucks away, accepting my sincere thanks that I gave to each of them.  They had made a horrible event as decent as it could possibly be and I was deeply grateful.  Now I wait until next week when my arborist who knows the tree well will come and talk about the second fanning trunk, about whether it is “safe” to leave standing, whether it may need to be braced to the stalwart straight up trunk.  But my back yard does not look like my back yard; it seems naked and raw, like I feel inside.  Grief is not always about the loss of someone human; my tree has been an intimate part of my life for almost forty years.  Only one cousin and a few very old and close friends go back further, so my heart hurts.  But standing with  her as she experienced the loss of a major third of herself seemed a little like what I imagine it is like to wash a loved one’s dead body on the kitchen table.  I did not abandon my tree to strangers, albeit kindly ones.  I stayed present to the end of the process and will remember the gift of that trunk as I go about accepting the changed nature of my back yard.