New Column

I have a new Bodily Blessings column up; this one's about my ambivalence about the musical culture of churches.

In less happy news, BLR rejected the sonnets -- sniff -- so I have to figure out where to send them next. I'm pretty clueless about poetry markets, so I have to do some research, but I probably won't get to it until I get back from Albuquerque.

Caring for the Caregiver

My latest column is up at the Church Health Reader. I think I've neglected to post links to the columns for the last few months, but you can access all of 'em via the sidebar.

Another column, Give Her Something to Eat, has been picked up by a company that publishes lectionary resources in Canada. I believe they're even going to pay me for the reprint rights. Woo-hoo!

(Note to self: Don't give up your day job.)

Remains

My latest column has been posted at CHR. It's about what I did with my father's ashes, so it's perfect for Ash Wednesday next week.

Anyone who's been following the blog for a while has already seen this material. I hope anyone who's new to it will find it worthwhile.

Last Supper

One of my Church Health Reader columns from several months ago -- which you can read here -- is now the featured article on CHR's homepage, with the image I've shared here: perfect!

This piece means a lot to me, so I'm glad it's getting a bit of extra exposure.

January Column

Yesterday I swam for an hour (go, me). Checking my e-mail in the locker room after I got out of the pool, I found e-mail from John Shorb saying that this column had been posted.

Great timing!

My long swim, unfortunately, meant that I overslept this morning. Feh!

Things Seen and Unseen

I have a new column up at Church Health Reader. This one's particularly fitting for anyone who's having a blue Christmas, so I'm glad they posted it this month.

I also like their pregnancy focus for Advent. Sunday's homily was about how the church has traditionally described Advent as a time of waiting, and how "nesting" -- the compulsive urge women often feel late in pregnancy to create clean, safe places for themselves and their babies -- may be a better metaphor. Our job in Advent is to organize God's nursery, to create a place in ourselves and our lives for the divine.

Works for me!

Last Supper

My latest column is up over at Church Health Reader. I think this one's especially well-timed for Thanksgiving, when food is so important.

I hope you enjoy reading it.

Two More Columns

The vexed column has been corrected (save for one typo, "reclincr" for "recliner," which is probably my fault). You can read it here.

The second column, my Veteran's Day offering -- a version of an old blog post -- is here. Some of you will have seen this already, of course.

I hope you like them!

Say "Died," Please

When I was in Auburn yesterday, my Bodily Blessings editor (a completely lovely guy by the name of John Shorb), sent me links to the next two columns. The second of those was heavily borrowed from one of my blog posts a few years ago; the first was my story about my mother's death in hospice. I'll post links to these when the final versions are up.

John is a wonderful editor: smart, sensitive, skilled. But this summer an intern did some editing, and that person (whose name I don't know) appears to have both been sloppy and to have suffered from the "if it's not broken, fix it anyway" school of editing, wherein editors feel obliged to leave their own scent markings on perfectly workable prose. That approach is especially infuriating when such folks insert errors into the text.

I'm a very careful writer. I don't commit many technical errors, and my stylistic choices are deliberate and planned. I'm not perfect, and I certainly benefit from close readings by other people, but most of the editors I work with feel that my writing's very clean and doesn't need a lot of line-by-line attention. I have a small but trusted group of Ideal Readers who've proven their ability to point out places that could benefit from reworking, while staying hands-off otherwise. John Shorb is one of my Ideal Readers; so's Gary; so's Patrick Nielsen Hayden, my editor at Tor; so are several friends here in Reno.

Nameless Intern is not an Ideal Reader. Nameless Intern, from the evidence, may not even be a very good reader. And Nameless Intern did a hatchet job on my column about my mother's death, changing things that didn't need to be changed and removing small but crucial details.

For instance: I mention in the column that five hours after Mom went into hospice, I was on a red-eye to Philly, arriving at six in the morning after a sleepless night. Nameless Intern removed all this information, even though it conveys a crucial sense of discomfort and desperation, which in turn creates a crucial contrast with the comfort hospice offered me and my sister, as well as Mom.

There were other problems: sentences rewritten for no reason, information moved to other places (without always being removed in the original location, so one sentence occurred twice), incorrect punctuation changes. But the revision that put me over the top replaced specificity with euphemism. In the original, I talked about how my sister and I stayed at the hospital from the night before Mom died "until the undertaker wheeled away the body." This line establishes that we didn't leave the hospital until she did, until her mortal remains were removed from our mortal sight.

Nameless Intern changed the phrase to, "until she passed."

Passed? Passed? I loathe this euphemism. Say "died!" As I told John in my exasperated note, the verb "pass" makes human lives sound like gas or stool. I know many people use this word because they're afraid that any direct mention of death is somehow too harsh -- even though it's the truth -- and maybe also, if the person's religious, to convey the sense of passing to another life. (Plenty of religious folks I know just say "died," though.) But I've always hated it. Listening to other people use it sets my teeth on edge, but that's their choice. I'd never use it myself.

If Nameless Intern wants to write a column about the death of his or her mother and chooses to use the verb "pass," fine. That's her or his choice. But for someone who's never even spoken to me to apply such a heavy hand to my own story -- about one of the most difficult moments of my life, mind you -- makes me want to scream.

So, anyway, the messenger got shot: poor John got an earful about this! I sent him a copy of my original column, since Nameless Intern had made so many changes that fixing them all would have been a real headache, and said, "Please remove the current version on the site and use this instead."

He did, bless him, and apologized for the messy editing, and sent me a link to the restored version. Reading it, I discovered one typo which was my fault -- and which Nameless Intern had fixed (yay!) -- and e-mailed John about that, too.

Poor John! The life of an editor isn't easy. I hope they give him a raise.

Catching Up On Columns

I think the last Bodily Blessings column I linked to here was April's. In the meantime, Hope and Healing has changed its name to Church Health Reader and has posted four more of my columns.

Here's the August one, which is one of my favorites. You can use the sidebar to reach the ones for May, June, and July, should you so choose.

Thanks for reading!

Basic Hungers

A new Bodily Blessings column is up (it's dated April; the site's catching up after some lag time).

Enjoy!

Rethinking Neediness

My latest Hope and Healing column is up. Coincidentally (or not) my friend Wendy Smith, a Seattle therapist who specializes in working with people coming to terms with disability or illness, just posted an essay that comes to very similar conclusions.

Great minds think alike!

Five Months of Lent

My latest column is up at Hope and Healing. Anyone who's been following this blog for any length of time has already read versions of this many times, though, so it's not required reading!

If you do read it, I hope you get something out of it.

Next Tuesday will be the anniversary of Dad's last trip to the ER. I followed the ambulance in the rain, focusing on his pale face through the window.

I'm so glad, for both of us, that all that's over. But I miss him.

Heaven Can Wait, Redux

I forgot to mention that my latest column is up at Hope and Healing. This piece was mined from my fuller and longer blog post on the same subject, which some of you will already have read.

Happy reading!

Winding Paths

My December Hope and Healing column just went up a few days ago. The sidebar to the right of the text links to earlier columns; I'm not sure I've posted all of them here.

Happy New Year to all, and I hope you enjoy these meditations.

New Column Up

My latest Hope and Healing column, Going to Work, is up.

Happy reading!

Moving Uptown

It rained really hard today. I was very glad to have my Goretex and my Dansko clogs, both of which are ideal for sloshing through a lot of water. The inside of my backpack got slightly wet, but the computer's okay, thank goodness. (It's in a protective neoprene sleeve, but one still worries.)

I had lunch today with John Shorb, my editor at Hope and Healing. He's signed on for another year and wants another twelve columns from me, so we came up with a list of topics. He's a great guy, smart and funny and fun to talk to, so the lunch was both productive and pleasant.

Then I went back uptown to Claire's apartment, finished packing, and -- by some miracle -- managed to get a cab right in front of her building. The cabbie had his off-duty sign on, but he was headed in my direction and agreed to give me a ride.

My friends Larry and Laura, whom I've known since college (we were all in the Princeton Science Fiction Society together) own an amazing brownstone in Harlem, at 153 and St. Nicholas. They're close to Columbia Presbyterian, so it will be easy for me to get back and forth from the Narrative Medicine workshop. And I love their house, three stories of dark, inlaid hardwood floores, (nonworking) fireplaces, tall ceilings, and beautiful details like the carved stairway bannisters. I have my own bedroom with a private bath; the door to the bathroom has a leaded window, and inside there's a deep, old-fashioned tub. The house feels like the setting for a fantasy story.

Larry told me that they bought the place for a song eight years ago, and then had to have virtually everything inside redone. But it was worth it! You don't find a lot of places like this in New York anymore; they've all been cut up into individual apartments (and Larry and Laura have a family renting a basement apartment).

Larry and Laura have two sweet and lively daughters, Nicola and Eleanor. I have to say that one of the great pleasures of this trip has been seeing my old friends parent so capably. Claire and Pete's son Nathan is a delight, and so are Larry and Laura's girls.

Once I'd gotten settled here, I headed down to the West Village -- via subway, this time -- for a sushi dinner with Ellen Datlow. Ellen has the world's coolest collection of stuff and two of the world's cutest cats (although mine are cuter, natch). We hadn't seen each other in ages, and really enjoyed catching up. Unfortunately, her father's having health issues, as is Larry's. In fact, nearly all my friends' parents are having health issues. We're at that age, aren't we?

Ooops: lots of sirens outside. I think I've discovered the downside of beinb so close to Columbia Presbyterian. But I grew up a block from a hospital, so I'm sure I'll tune the sirens out in no time.

The Good Servant

My latest column, about chaplains ministering through their own grief, is up over at Hope and Healing.

This topic is newly resonant for me, since I've returned to volunteering as a chaplain after my father's death. During my shift this week, I chatted with a security guard I've known for years now. He was curious about why he hadn't seen me for a while, so I filled him in on our family dramas these last six months. His eyes widened, and he said, "But you can still come here, to be positive for other people."

I explained that being at the hospital makes me feel better, for the reasons I describe in the column, and also that I'm better equipped to deal with grieving patients and family now, since I'm walking in those shoes myself. The guard nodded solemnly.

I've found this at work too, though, or even in the grocery store: when you say that your dad just died, people get it. This isn't a grief anyone has to suffer in isolation. Almost all of us will lose our parents -- unless, tragically, we die before them, the situation the chaplain in the column was facing -- and everyone who does will have to get on with life. It's a real blessing that so many other people know the territory.

Two Journeys

My latest column is up at Hope and Healing. Dad died a month ago today, so it seems like a fitting time to post the link.

Gary said last night over dinner that it feels like Dad died much longer than a month ago. To me it feels like years ago, on a different planet. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing; it just is. I'm sure the pain will sharpen again on significant days: Father's Day, his birthday, the anniversary of when he moved out here, and certainly the anniversary of his death. But for now, the haze covering the memories is a relief.

Two Patients

My latest column is up at Hope and Healing. It's very apt right now.

Thanks again to everyone for all your comments and prayers.