British-born author, literary critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of 62 from complications of esophageal cancer. To read his New York Times obituary, click here. The Sassistas! would like to honor Hitchens by posting this perspective from him:
I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.
Three years ago this morning, Flannista's beloved cat, Isaac, left this sweet world after a year-long struggle with failing kidneys. For Christmas that year, Matissta gifted Flann with the scrapbook (pictured above beneath my holiday tree) filled with photos she had taken of this great and gentle feline.
Isaac's ashes are still on an altar in Flann's living room that has become a memorial to many beloved beasts. Next to the small box holding his ashes is a small pile of post-its with the following names of pets who too have left this sweet world in the past three years:
Today, let's take a moment to remember and give thanks for the four-legged critters in our lives.
While hiking Wye Island on the first Sunday of Advent, treesta pointed out to the Sassistas! the above beech tree. On May 24, 1991, a couple first carved their initials and the date. They did this for more than a decade. Below is another side of the tree which reveals how this story ends.
What was their story?
Yesterday marked the First Sunday in Advent, the first season of the Christian church year, leading up to Christmas (and including the four preceding Sundays). To mark the day, the Sassistas! took treesta up on her offer to hike what is a sacred place for her: Wye Island. When we learned that Sukey had died, our visit became even more sacred, thanks to treesta, who decided to build a spirit house for Sukey (pictured above). Here is treesta's description:
About six years ago, I participated in a Vision Quest, seeking guidance and direction in my life. Before beginning the Vision Quest, we also participated in a sweat lodge ceremony. Rocks were heated for several hours at the base of a fire just outside the sweatlodge, and the red-hot rocks were then placed in the center of the sweat lodge. After the Vision Quest, I brought home some of the rocks used in the ceremony and created a little altar around which I built a garden.
When I awoke Sunday morning, it was clear to me that we were to use the sweat lodge rocks to make a spirit house for Sukey. We chose a grandmother of a White Oak tree under and made her spirit house there. May her Spirit be guided on her journey.
This is the grandmother White Oak tree chosen by treesta:
It is a morning like no other morning.
There is a signifying in the silver dawn.
Stars hesitate, streets listen,
Snow melts in tenderness, trees wait.
-- from the poem, "First Light" by Myrna Reid Grant from
A Widening Light: Poems of the Incarnation
On Thanksgiving Day, our dear sista and friend, Justista, lost her dear sister and best friend, Sukey, to cancer. Following is the email Flann received from Justista late yesterday afternoon:
The Walking Sisters always stopped at this place on the trail to Salmon Lake. We congratulated ourselves here for making it this far on the hike, particularly in the last few years. Sometimes we took our picture with the camera with a timer. On November 24th, as I got up to continue the hike, Sukey put her hand out to tell me to sit back down on the rock. She handed me her day pack (she always brought some nuts, some bug repellant and 2 apples) and she walked on ahead of me. The trail curved. I couldn't see her anymore.
Good bye. My sister. My friend.
_______________
Flannista: it was a brutal dance to the end. I am empty.
Love, Justista
May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, dear Sukey. Deep peace and condolence to our dear Justista.
For the first time since 1/1/01, a date with repeating numbers is a holiday, namely Veteran's Day. When asked recently how Americans ought to mark the day, a Vietnam veteran suggested calling it, "A National Day of Listening to Veterans".
The veteran was responding to psychologist Paula J. Caplan who, in a recent Washington Post article detailed the benefits of listening to veterans. All too often when we encounter a veteran we blurt out, "Thank you for your service," and then turn away. According to Caplan, we -- citizens of a "war-illiterate nation" -- ought to stop and listen to their stories:
Veterans tend to suffer in isolation, and vast research shows that isolation worsens nearly every kind of emotional pain. We ignore the silent suffering of untold numbers of the 23 million American veterans while substance abuse, family breakdown, domestic violence, homelessness and suicide rates among their ranks steadily rise. Although only about 7 percent of Americans have served in the military, veterans account for 20 percent of suicides in this country. In addition, the Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that veterans make up about one-fifth of the homeless population. At a Harvard conference this past week on welcoming veterans home, Andrew McCawley, chief executive of the New England Center for Homeless Veterans, predicted that the numbers will rise even more when currently deployed service members return.
Caplan goes on to write that "many people mistakenly believe that only therapists know how to heal those veterans who are experiencing grief, fear, shame, anxiety, loss of innocence of moral anguish. Nothing could be further from the truth."
Taking the time to listen transforms not only the veteran but the person listening. According to Caplan:
When I began listening to veterans years ago, I discovered the power of this simple act. These veterans are the forward observers for the rest of us. They have encountered the most extreme situations, fought for their lives, seen buddies blown apart, killed other human beings and forged intense bonds with other service members. They have experienced the most powerful emotions — positive and negative — that anyone can have. All of that, combined with the honesty of the veterans who spoke to me, made these sessions sacred time.
All of us could use some more sacred time. The next time you see a veteran, offer to buy her or him a cup of coffee. Thank them for their service to our country. Then say, "If you want to talk about your experience, I'd like to listen. I won't judge. I'll just listen." Show the vet that you care. And be prepared to be transformed.
By now, the entire world knows the last words uttered by Steve Jobs before he died, thanks to the publication of his sister's -- the writer Mona Simpson -- eulogy in the New York Times on Sunday (click here to read the entire thing). Following is the ending to the eulogy:
His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.
This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.
He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.
Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.
He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.
This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.
He seemed to be climbing.
But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.
Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.
Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.
Steve’s final words were:
OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.
The eulogy itself is an odd piece, both heartbreakingly personal and maddeningly uneven, but Flannista knew as soon as she read it that its headlines would be "OH WOW." Not that that's a bad thing -- "Oh wow" seems precisely what Steve Jobs would say hovering between words. But it does overshadow another piece of wisdom in the eulogy and the only sentence Flann copied into her journal:
We all -- in the end -- die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.
Flann read that and thought: "Gwen's story will never be over. Neither will Tim's. Or Sukey's. Or mine, for that matter. Maybe that's a good thing."
Is it?
Something to ponder on All Saint's Day when we pause to commemorate our beloveds who have left this sweet world.
Late yesterday afternoon, Matissta sent Flannista the following news story from the New York Daily News:
A Los Angeles woman died in her cubicle at work last week, but her body wasn't discovered until the following day, local police said.
The body of Rebecca Wells, 51, was found slumped over on her desk by a security guard at the Los Angeles County Department of Internal Services on Saturday, L.A.'s KTLA-TV reported.
"I came in Saturday to do a little work and I saw them when they were taking her out," co-worker Hattie Robertson told the station.
The Sassistas! think this is a very sad story. What does it say about cubicles? Corporate America?
"They tried to make me go to rehab,
but I said, 'No, no, no.'"
-- Amy Winehouse, composer/performer "Rehab"
1983-2011
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