Parker J. Palmer is a writer, teacher, and activist who works independently on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality, and social change. His work spans a wide range of institutions including: universities, public schools, community organizations, religious institutions, corporations, and foundations. He serves as Senior Associate of the American Association of Higher Education, and as Senior Advisor to the Fetzer Institute and founder of their Teacher Formation Program. In 1998, "The Leadership Project," a national survey of 11,000 faculty and administrators, named Dr. Palmer as one of the thirty "most influential senior leaders" in higher education and one of the ten key "agenda-setters" of the past decade: "He has inspired a generation of teachers and reformers with evocative visions of community, knowing, and spiritual wholeness."

I was very excited to have the opportunity to interview Dr. Palmer for this issue of The Symposium, as I had read several articles of his while preparing for a national conference on spirituality in college (see page 22 for details). He has written several books including The Active Life, To Know As We Are Known, The Promise of Paradox, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life, and Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. What inspires me so much about Palmer is that he does not just write about an education which involves a deep sense of the spiritual, but that he has also lived a life dedicated to that pursuit—through his studies at Berkeley in the '60s, his decade living in the Quaker community at Pendle Hill, and his current work developing his "Courage to Teach" program. The program is a series of renewal retreats for public school teachers and other educators which helps deepen their inner lives for the sake of personal and professional development. I spoke with Palmer recently and had the opportunity to speak with him about his thoughts on spirituality, academia, and the role that education plays in our search for truth.

When did you first realize that something needed to change about our educational system or the way that we teach and learn?

When I was in graduate school in Berkeley in the '60s. And of course that was a time of great ferment in education and in the relation of education to the larger society. I'm not sure how many people who were involved in the revolution or the movement in Berkeley were thinking about the spiritual dimension of things. But they were certainly thinking about the way in which education, higher education especially, may tend to give a person a sense of privilege, to dull their conscience, to sever the relations between the educated person and the larger world rather than strengthen those relationships.

For me, Berkeley in the '60s was a great gift, and it started me thinking very deeply about what was wrong with higher education, as well as what's right with education at its very best. I think the spiritual dimension of this has always been an aspect of my life and experience as a certain way of looking at the world. But it deepened, I think, only after Berkeley and especially as I went on to Washington, D.C., where I became a community organizer and started experiencing the lives of oppressed people more closely than I had before. The spiritual dimension deepened for me even further in the years following my time in Washington, when I lived for over a decade at a Quaker living-learning community called Pendle Hill. Those were the main touchstones on my journey towards what I eventually came to call the "spirituality of education."

What were some of the experiences that you had in community organizing and also at Pendle Hill that specifically shaped your understanding of spirituality and how it might play a part in education?

As a community organizer, I started encountering what I guess you would call "otherness" in life much more dramatically than I had growing up in the '40s and '50s in suburban Chicago or in my undergraduate years at college. By otherness, I mean anyone who is different than I am—which includes most everyone!—but especially across the lines of race, ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, and gender. As I started facing into the challenges of otherness, I sometimes felt threatened, but I also felt the expansion and enlivenment of one's experience and one's view of reality which is possible when one builds a bridge to otherness. And I think I started understanding that it was at the spiritual level that this bridge was most likely to be built.

In the '60s and the '70s, there was a lot of emphasis on group processes to deal with diversity and conflict. While some of them were attractive to me, they always left me ultimately dissatisfied that we hadn't gone very deep with each other—because we weren't taking an inner journey towards the kind of invisible community that exists between us, what Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, called the "hidden wholeness."

When I was a community organizer in Washington, D.C., I started reading the work of Thomas Merton. I had grown up in the Methodist Church, and I really knew nothing of this great monastic contemplative tradition in the Catholic Church, but I found myself very, very drawn to Merton. As a mystic, he seemed to connect more deeply with the society around him than did a lot of folks I knew who were sort of on the front lines of social change.

In the '50s and early '60s, Merton was writing from his hermitage in the hills of Kentucky about the coming conflict of races, the burning of the cities, and the issues of war and peace long before folks on the front lines were really clear about what our society was in for. In fact, Merton was criticized by activists who said, "How dare this cloistered monk tell us that things are going to hell in a handbasket when we are out here working on the front lines to make sure that they won't!" But Merton was right because he saw with a kind of inner eye and connected with the world at a deeper, more interior level.

He saw things that people on the front lines of social change really couldn't see or didn't want to see, perhaps because of their ego involvement in believing that everything was going to be okay because of their hard work! Discovering the work of Thomas Merton was a major turning point for me because here was a person deeply devoted to the interior life, yet also deeply engaged with the world around him in a prophetic way.

When I left Washington and my work as a community organizer, I was in the process of absorbing a lot of Merton's stuff, and I moved to this Quaker living-learning community, Pendle Hill, where I lived for 11 years.

There I discovered that the Quakers have their own wonderful way of joining the inner life with outwardly oriented non-violent social change. I learned a tremendous amount from just participating in the life of that community, a community devoted to education. It's really an adult education center, but it's so different from the university in so many ways that it's hard to know where to begin describing it. For example, it didn't matter if you were the dean of studies, as I was, or you worked in the kitchen or in the shop or in the garden—we all made the same base salary, and everybody was on an equal footing. It was a real community, unlike the hierarchy within the university. Everyone in the community was valued for his or her gifts, for his or her selfhood. Living, teaching, and learning that way was a tremendous turning point for me.

In To Know as We Are Known, you talk about creating an educational atmosphere as a community of truth. You say that in education we borrow communal images from other realms, but that these images don't necessarily work there. From where should we draw communal images that are to be brought into education? How do we create a community of truth there, or do we have to create something completely different?

For me, a community of truth is the kind of community that we need to be at work creating on college and university campuses. What I mean by a community of truth is related to the way inquiry and discovery have always gone on in the scholarly world. These have never been isolated acts of individual genius, although they often get portrayed that way. Scholars are embedded in a community of fellow seekers who share certain norms and certain passions and who extend out over space and time. The work that any one seeker does is very much guided by, and then tested by, that community. So at the heart of scholarship itself is this image of a community devoted to trying to understand something important, whatever it may be.

That community has to learn how to do a whole bunch of things well in order to achieve its scholarly goals. For example, it has to listen to the world, which means that the people in it have to speak openly and honestly to one another other about what they are hearing from "out there." That means the people have to learn to listen to each other and learn how to sustain their differences without letting conflict destroy their relationships. They also have to learn the disciplines and skills of coming into consensus around what people are hearing or seeing and what they think it all means.

What I mean is that we educators don't have to go somewhere else to get an image of community that could sustain our mission. If our mission is knowing, teaching, and learning, as I believe it is, those are essentially communal activities. The image of community that higher education needs is right at the heart of the academic enterprise.

One thing that undermines community in higher education is this strange commitment we have to competition. We persist in believing that competition is the way to get the best efforts out of people. But, in competition we don't reach for the new idea, the tentative hypothesis, or the fragile insight, because those things are too vulnerable. Under intensely competitive conditions we reach for the old idea that we feel secure with—and that we know how to wield as a weapon against others. We stay safe by staying with what we know. Well, to me, that has nothing to do with the call to intellectual inquiry, to exploration, to discovery.

What's required if we are going to be seekers and discoverers is new levels of trust among each other, new levels of collaboration which will allow for intellectual risk-taking. Risk-taking always involves falling on your face from time to time, and that's just not something you're going to do in a community that is so competitive that you're going to get trampled on when you trip. It's a complicated issue, but when we keep focused on the educational mission, we can sort out a lot about what does and does not help community happen in higher education.

As a college student, I saw myself as separate from that community of scholars—I didn't have a degree. How do you see students as being a part of that community?

It's the responsibility of faculty to understand that an important part of their job is to bring students in as colleagues in the community of scholars. If faculty members don't understand that, they have, unfortunately, the power to block students out. They hold the keys that can either lock or unlock the door through which students come to colleagueship in discovery and inquiry. And to me it's vital that students become our colleagues in this sense.

If all we are doing in colleges and universities is dumping into students' heads the information that the community of scholars has gathered and settled on, we're just not doing a very good job, and we're certainly not doing a very interesting job. I think this is quite a boring way to conceive of education. If we are bringing students into an ongoing community of discourse—which includes not only knowing some of the things that are known in those fields, but also learning the tools of those fields in a way that allows you to be a participant in them—then I think we're doing something worth doing and something that will accelerate learning. Every piece of research I've ever seen tells us that students learn much more, and learn it faster and deeper, if they are engaged as collaborators in the process of inquiry rather than being sat down and told to memorize the factoids have been generated by that discipline.

To some extent, the role of students is heavily conditioned by the way their older mentors understand and play their roles. But, in spite of the fact that faculty often hold the keys, it's been amazing in the 20^th century history of higher education to see how often students have found ways to bust open the door themselves.

I would point, for example, to service learning as one of the great pedagogical reforms of the 20^th century, and one that was significantly animated by students.

I would also point out that the experience of Berkeley in the '60s—that was so head-turning and heart-turning for me and also for many other people who went on to have careers in higher education—was also animated largely by student energies. There weren't a whole lot of faculty at that time saying "shut down the machine," because the machine was serving them well. But there were students who knew that there was something out of whack, that although great issues were arising in the society, the university was not becoming more bold in joining those issues, but more timid.

That was really the origin of the "free speech movement" and of all the events that flowed from it. So student engagement, student commitment, student passions about their own lives—and the impact of higher education on their lives—has always been important in transforming higher education, and it always will be.

You have said that as our confidence in facts has risen, our religious faith has declined, that we no longer see the world as a gift. It's really interesting to look at how that is playing out in the lives of young people, especially when they do see participation in science, or any other class in school, as just a memorization of facts that will allow them to do well on a test. What have you observed, what is going on with students thinking like that?

I think there's only one thing really to say when a student is caught in a system like that, and that is, "It's your life. What do you want to do with it? What do you want to have happen for you? Whatever it is, it's in your hands."

And what's interesting about those questions is that this is not the last time you're going to be confronted with them, because the university isn't the last time where you may be asked to jump through a bunch of hoops that have nothing to do with what is valuable or meaningful for you. So if you simply defer the question, when will you decide to confront it? When you're on the first job or the second job or the third job or the fourth job?

At some point on the journey, a person has to take that bull by the horns and deal with it in a very direct way. What better time than when you're a student and have the energy and years ahead of you to live it out, to bring your life into congruence? I see this as a moral dilemma in the lives of young adults. Every generation of students has faced it. I can jump the hoops that I'm being asked to jump or I can get myself an education. Maybe I can do a bit of both. It's up to me. Whatever the answer may be, it requires my thoughtful engagement. It requires me to be very clear about what my real values are and to act upon them accordingly.

I was a women's studies major, and a lot of my women's studies classes actually really did connect well. But I'm wondering, how does that happen in, say, physics or something like that that is so focused, traditionally anyway, on the mind part of the heart and mind?

This is where we need to recover a much deeper understanding of what science is all about. If you study the lives of great scientists, what you invariably find is not some sort of disembodied rationality at work. You find a whole person whose heart and mind are very connected and who has invested his or her whole self in the scientific enterprise. That's how great science gets done. It doesn't get done at arm's length or from a dispassionate distance. Science, especially frontier science, is very hard work, and I don't think that anybody would do it if they weren't passionately and personally devoted to it, to the subject, to the mystery of what they were working on.

There's a mythology out there that to be a scientist you simply have to have command of a whole lot of information and know a whole bunch of technical procedures and then you can go ahead and do it. Well, you can do third-rate science that way, bush league science, but you can't do great science. No really significant scientist ever has. So what I say to folks who teach science—and I find a lot of them agreeing with me—is "Let's reveal to students what a passionate engagement real science is." If we did, I think we'd find more students attracted to science. How do you do that? Well, for one thing, you plunge students into direct engagement with whatever part of the world that science happens to be interested in. You plunge them into the ethical and moral issues surrounding the doing of that science. I mean, how in heaven's name can you be a geneticist these days without being deeply reflective about the ethical and moral issues involved in genetics? How can you be a physicist or a biologist or a geologist without the same—because this knowledge is being used in ways that are transforming our world.

What are you working on now with which other people might be interested in becoming connected?

There are a couple of things. One project, which is about eight years old, and is now a national project, is called, like my book, " The Courage to Teach." It's a national program of renewal retreats that has to do with helping K-12 teachers in the public schools deepen their inner lives for the sake of personal and professional development.

I'm writing a new book that represents a larger slice of my work and my life. I'm toying with the title Divided No More: Spiritual Formation in a Secular World. Connecting our inner lives with our outer lives in community with others is the focus of this new book, and it is based on some thirty years of experience working in "circles of trust," whether it be with educators, teachers, administrators, business folk, politicians, citizens, parents and others.

I just think there is a great yearning in our society for the undivided life, and I think we know something about the conditions under which people can take that journey with each other. So I would like to write about this in a way that would make that knowledge and those processes more available to more and more people.

The more personal part of my work right now has to do with the fact that I'm 62 years old, and at that point in life, you realize that you have an agenda called aging, and you want to do it consciously and gracefully.

I'm really doing a lot of spiritual discernment around the next steps in my vocation, as I start moving into those years where I'm really not going to want, or be able, to get on the airplane all the time and fly around the country giving talks and workshops as I've been doing for 25 years, years when my interests may well start to turn in some other direction. So right now, I'm just trying to pay attention to my own inner journey in the most faithful and fruitful way I know how.

Mary Alice Scott is the Executive Director for the Self Knowlege Symposium Foundation.

Golf in Hell (top)
August Turak

About ten years ago, I returned to Raleigh from a dream vacation in Bermuda feeling severely depressed. It was my golf game. I had played three of the most beautiful courses in the world, but my scores were so bad that even now they are too painful to share. The culprit was "the shanks." If you play golf you probably just shook off an involuntary shiver, but for those who don't, the shanks is the one bad shot that makes playing the game well nigh impossible. To shank the ball means to hit a shot that so quickly veers off that it darn near ends up at a right angle to the target line. After a few shanks, a golfer's confidence is gone. "Afraid to hit it," he becomes tentative with his swing, exacerbating the problem until the shank is "grooved in" and the player enters the lowest circle of golf hell. I had struggled with the shanks for quite a while, but they reached a crescendo in Bermuda, and returning home I was convinced that I either had to get some help or give up the game. I decided to get some help. I had my own consulting business at the time and was between assignments, so I decided to forgo work for a while and give it everything I had.

I started working with a pro named Kent. Kent was the quintessential golfer—good looking, blond, blue-eyed, and fresh off a stint on the pro golf tour. With a couple of children to feed, Kent didn't have the money to stay on the tour until he "made it," so he was getting by giving lessons at a local driving range until he could find something better. At our first lesson Kent simply said, "Hit a few. Let me take a look at it." I obliged and let him look at eight or ten "grooved in" shanks in a row. Unfazed, Kent simply said, "We'll get it," and then told me what we would be trying to accomplish. By the end of his five-minute spiel I gathered that the goal was to give me a smooth, repeatable, low-maintenance, relaxed, athletic, tensionless, natural, spontaneous, effortless golf swing. That sounded pretty good. I signed up for three lessons a week.

What Kent said we were trying to accomplish and what actually transpired could not have been more different. Everything we did seemed anything but natural. He twisted and turned me into positions that I was certain the body was never intended to attempt, let alone attain. Every muscle in my body ached, sweat soaked my clothing, my hands were covered with blisters, and within a couple of weeks I had lost seven pounds. Everything Kent wanted me to do "felt" wrong, and everything that I "felt" was right Kent blithely told me was in fact wrong. Far from natural, everything seemed awkward and the height of artificial, and I would often think to myself that what he called the correct way to do things was just downright absurd. Kent would point out that I insisted on "over-cooking" it, which I took to mean that I was trying too hard. But when I tried to relax, and the ball shimmied off the turf in front of the tee, he would exclaim, "Hey, I didn't tell you to quit on it!" Not to put too fine a point on it, Kent put me through hell. But whenever I got discouraged Kent would just smile that boyish smile of his and say, "Don't worry, we'll get it."

After several weeks of non-stop lessons, pounding balls on off days, and rehearsing in the mirror at night, I did think I was noticing some improvement. I wasn't shanking the ball, and while I wasn't hitting it straight either, I began to think I was turning the corner. I even managed to get a little praise from Kent in the form of the occasional "Good, that was close." I began to relax a little and enjoy my lessons.

One off day I headed up to the range as usual to "beat some balls." For the first few minutes, everything was fine. Then I shanked one. My heart leapt, and I walked around for a minute or so to collect myself before addressing the next ball. Another shank. Now it was real fear, and like a diver after a belly-flop, I opted to immediately hit another one in hopes that my best strategy was to get right back at it. Another shank. Fear turned to panic. I changed my grip, made an "adjustment," and hit a shank. I moved farther from the ball before swinging, made another adjustment, and hit another shank. Over the next hour, as I grew increasingly frantic, adjustment followed adjustment until I had unwittingly and quite literally moved away from everything Kent had drilled into me. What was worse, I was now hopelessly "lost in my swing." I had lost count of all the adjustments and I had lost the feel of the swing. Now everything felt right, and so nothing was right. I couldn't remember how to get back to square one, and the sickening downward spiral continued. When the bucket of 125 balls was finally empty, so was I. I was completely and utterly beaten. I felt like a man with ten kids who sleeplessly pumps three month's mortgage and grocery money into a slot machine one quarter at a time on a three-day binge. With the quarters all gone, exhaustion complete, and the early morning sun in his eyes, he slumps in his car in the parking lot and cries uncontrollably.

I staggered home beside myself. Three months of hard work and hard-earned money had proven wasted. I sat alone in my living room wondering what to do. Competing ideas raced through my head. One moment I would decide that Kent had been taking me for a ride all along. He had known from the beginning that I didn't have what it took to be a golfer. Kent just needed the money, and even if he wasn't dishonest, he had simply fooled himself in order to better fool me. A moment later I would be just as sure that my suspicions were nonsense brought on by my agitated state. As I oscillated back and forth between convictions, the panic I had felt at the range deepened as I realized that I was now so lost in myself that I couldn't decide whether my suspicions of Kent were absurd or whether I only wanted them to be absurd so that I could defend a tremendous waste of time and money. As I went over it all again and again, the certain knowledge that I had lost my ability to think objectively seriously frightened me.

Just then, my girlfriend decided to pay me a visit unannounced. I was so glad to see her. I needed someone to talk to. I needed someone who would understand. Over the next thirty minutes, I poured out my dilemma. When I finally took a breath and asked her what she thought, she matter-of-factly replied, "Oh, I don't know. Maybe you're just not cut out for golf." Thirty seconds later and at my urging, I listened to her car pulling away.

Finally, at almost midnight, I called Kent at home. Several times I thought my voice would crack as I told him everything that had transpired. He listened patiently, chuckled softly at my distraught state and finally said, "Don't worry about it, Aug. We're going to get it." In the end this wasn't much to go on, or better said, to continue on. I was convinced it was hopeless. Yet for some reason, for a reason even today I cannot articulate, I did go on.

Two weeks later I was struggling through another lesson with Kent. A friend of his, another pro, was watching. After a few minutes he stepped up and waved Kent off. He stood across from me and started a rhythmic patter: "Augie, listen to me. Don't think about golf—just listen to my voice. Just start swinging the club back and forth waist high—no, no, don't look at the tee just look over here and just start... that's it, that's it, just rock back and forth letting the club pull you around. I'm going to put a ball down on the tee, but you keep looking straight ahead and just listen to my voice and keep rocking, ok, that's it there's nothing to it. Now just start sweeping the tee with the club while still looking over here...good, good, now I want you to just rock back just one more t..OK HIT IT!!!" And I did. I hit it sweet and pure. He put another ball down and without thinking I hit another beautiful shot. Quickly this became a pattern. Ball after ball was placed without comment, and ball after ball took marvelous flight. After a few minutes, Kent's friend suddenly said: "Hit a fade." Without hesitation, I hit one that gently fell off to the right. After a few of these I was told to hit a draw, which I did with similar results. For the next forty-five minutes I was in the zone and could effortlessly do whatever I wanted to do with the golf ball. And a week or two after this breakthrough I shot 81 at one of the most difficult courses in the Raleigh area—quite a feat.

Several years elapsed before I began to see that my saga with Kent was a microcosm of life in general and of the spiritual life in particular. As we reach the age of reason and beyond, we become painfully aware of the fact that there is something fundamentally wrong about ourselves and about life. Something is just not working. In short, we get the shanks. At first we are optimistic that the right job or the right mate will fix the shanks. But in many cases we find that the shanks are grooved in at a deeper level, and so we turn to philosophy, self-help books, and/or religious practices as a remedy. For a while this may seem to work, but quite often the shanks return. It is at this point that it begins to dawn on us that we can't do it alone, and so we turn to a teacher, mentor, or spiritual director for help. While promising the effortless rest of a life in God, our teacher often seems to put us through hell. In most cases a crisis eventually ensues. This is called "hitting the wall," and it happens when the ego begins to realize that if God is to come in, the self must be left behind. For the student at this stage, the spiritual shanks come back with a vengeance, so the student frantically makes adjustments and finds himself lost in his spiritual swing. At this stage, all his frustrations, doubts, and anger are focused on the teacher. However, if the student finds the character to weather this storm, he will have a breakthrough. Spiritual literature is replete with breakthroughs—happy endings where the student learns to live a smooth, natural, athletic, spontaneous, effortless, tensionless life in the Spirit.

Yet all too often people rob themselves of these breakthroughs that they deserve and that God so deeply wants them to have. The first pitfall is what my teacher Richard Rose called, "the student's desire to be constantly inspired." Like my lessons with Kent, things will get harder before they get easier. All too often, enthralled by tales of the miraculous, we expect constant stimulation and instant results. Like learning to play a musical instrument, we must first struggle with the basics before we can soar through improvisation. As Francis Ford Coppola said of great acting, we must learn our lines before we can forget them. Too many of us just don't have the stomach for the frustration of the Search.

The second pitfall we face is foolish pride. The foolish pride that keeps so many from reaching out for help when their own attempts are so obviously failing. This mistake often hides behind the vaunted American pride in our overcooked, precious individuality. God forbid that we should have to admit to ourselves or to others that we have adopted the role of a student! Worse yet, we may have to actually do what our teacher asks us to do, even if it doesn't feel right. One of the greatest compliments Kent ever gave me was when he told me that I was a good student. "Augie," he said, "I enjoy teaching you. Whatever I tell you to do, you try your best to do it. You'd be amazed at how many people shooting about a 1000 spend $100 an hour for a lesson and then spend the time telling me why I'm wrong about their swing." Often we treat our spiritual directors the same way. We are loath to give up control, even when it is obvious that having control has done little more than provide us a first-class case of the spiritual shanks. We would be better served to remember the dictum that the doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient.

The final major pitfall to spiritual breakthrough is despair. Despair makes itself known through quitting. It is the spiritual equivalent of selling your golf clubs and giving up the game. It often takes the form of listening to that little voice inside that says: "Maybe you weren't cut out to be a seeker." Richard Rose, my teacher, never tired of telling us that of all the virtues needed for the spiritual life, determination and relentlessness were the most important. If your attitude is one of determination, you will eventually figure out your mistakes and get beyond them.

Over our lifetimes all of us will repeatedly face the dilemmas I have listed above. When should we seek help? Should we follow advice even when it "feels" wrong? When should we admit defeat? When should we pack it up and go home?

Obviously, as the Bible says, there is a time for every season. But I can honestly say that in my life experience I have seen more people fail because they trusted too little and quit too soon than because they trusted too much and beavered away in a hopeless cause.

August Turak is the founder of the Self Knowledge Symposium Foundation and is Vice President of Operations at Mutek Solutions in Raleigh, NC.

March 27-28, 1991 (top)
Anne Duchesneau

My mother's eyes were closed and her breathing was shallow, with ever-increasing space between each labored inhalation and exhalation. I could feel myself rising and falling in synchronous motion with each breath, my shoulders moving up and down as she breathed in and out. The silly little bunny I had given her was tucked under her right arm, red and swollen from the fluid build-up that was always present since her mastectomy three years earlier. As I looked at my mother lying on the hospital bed, completely engrossed in her breathing, that arm seemed detached from the rest of her shrunken frame, withered and emaciated from the horrible cancer that had overcome her body, her life, and our lives.

For most of the night, the three of us—my father, my sister and I—watched in silent thought, surrounding the woman we loved with love, too keenly aware of her fading presence to do anything more than simply sit and wait and feel. In my memory that night seemed endless, and now, nearly a year later, the feelings that enveloped me then are engraved in that mysterious part of the brain reserved for magical, indeed mystical, moments. At that time, we were there, we were together, and that was what mattered.

I remember Daddy, asleep in the stiff-backed chair beside Mom's bed, exhausted from so many hours, days, and years of caring, uncertainty, and waiting. His head was leaning back; he was breathing heavily and constantly shifting in the uncomfortable seat, but his hand, wrapped securely around Mom's arm, never moved. And I remember my sister, Sharon, clutching a half-empty styrofoam cup of coffee. I was sitting as close as I could to my mother, rubbing my fingers against her little bunny—the humble, fuzzy little grey thing with soft, floppy pink ears and wiry whiskers. Mom would die with the silly animal tucked beneath her arms. Today, the bunny sits in my room on my "Mummy shelf," along with several other "Mummy mementos" I don't want to hide away. The bunny will never understand how much comfort it brought to a dying woman, or how easily it triggers my memories of two remarkable nights.

Recalling the first night, I remember being harshly awakened by the piercing ring of the telephone, immediately jumping up out of bed and thinking a million unthinkable thoughts. "Mom woke up in a panic," I remember Dad saying. "She wants us to come right away . . ."

I remember feeling a surge of something indescribably intense and knotty inside my stomach as I mechanically pulled a sweatshirt and sweatpants over my nightgown, groping around, trying to adjust to the sharp ringing noise and the sudden bright light around me. As we hurried to the car, something made me stop abruptly and run back to my room to get that silly bunny hidden in a bag in my closet. Purchased for Mom several weeks earlier at the hospital gift shop, it was meant to be an Easter present, but Easter was still five days away. Then, in piercing silence, we went into the cold, damp March night.

That night was marked by growing tension and wrenching uncertainty, mysteriously tempered with special warmth and love. I had never seen my mother so afraid, so edgy from the heavy doses of morphine given to combat the excruciating bone pain she no longer had the strength to bear in silence.

When I think of that night, mostly I remember sitting alongside Mom . . . holding her warm, small hand in my own, watching her struggle to keep her eyes open as she drifted in and out of restless sleep and continually apologized for waking us up, for wanting us near, for needing our love . . . needing my hand. She loved the bunny, kept reaching out for it and stroking it, and smiling, like a little girl with a new toy. Each time she woke, her wide gray eyes, scanning the room, would at last come to focus on me and the bunny. It always seemed as if she was discovering us for the first time, even though I'd been sitting close by with the bunny for several hours.

"You need your rest," she kept telling me, looking at the empty hospital bed across the room. "You shouldn't be up so late," she insisted. And as I sat there, stroking her hand, I suddenly broke into an unexpected gust of saddened, relieving laughter, thinking to myself, "This so Mom . . . so Mummy . . . . " "Always a mother," I heard Dad half-chuckle across the room. And it was true. Even as she lay in pain and fear, struggling to hold on, to be there, my mother's immediate, conscious thoughts were of me, and of my needs.

I thought about this, these unceasing "motherly" ways, the next night, as I continued to be with Mom, now in a smaller, private room. Listening to her persistent breaths and watching her pinched mouth, I desperately wanted her to open her eyes again and smile and say something to me. Something that would be a "Mummy" thing to say. Something to make me smile through my tears again.

I lay my head down on the bed, gazing at the beautiful cards on the bulletin board, each a symbol of unselfish love and caring—a hand outreached. I thought of the friends who had sent those cards and sat by Mom's side, much like I was now. Most of all I thought of her friends from the cancer support group. How horribly frightening for them to see someone once so full of energy and life, hope and radiance and kindness, slowly being robbed of all these treasures. What thoughts must go through their minds?

Lying there looking at the cards, absorbing the surrounding sounds—Dad's snores, Sharon's fingers gently rubbing across my own, the late-night nurses quietly moving about the hall, the constant hum of the overhead lights, and, above all, Mom's strained breaths, in and out, back and forth, permeating the room—I felt an unexpected wave of calmness and comfort. Somehow, at that moment, things felt okay.

Maybe a half-hour later—it seems much longer in my memory—Dad awoke and stretched his arms long and wide, then walked out into the hall and spoke quietly to the nurses. My sister and I just watched Mom lying there, still breathing—in and out—eyes closed, I knew, forever. I am in awe now as I realize how much energy she used concentrating and fighting to hold onto increasingly shallow, crisp, hollow breaths. I tried to imagine her thoughts. Lines from the Dylan Thomas poem she had kept on the bedside bureau at home flashed through my mind: "Do not go gentle into that good night . . . Rage! Rage against the dying of the light . . . " Beneath those closed eyes, that tightened, pinched mouth, was Mom raging inside?

I began to have flashbacks to several hours earlier that night, before Mom entered this coma, when she was still in so much pain, thrashing around violently in the bed, knocking off her oxygen mask. I remember sitting beside her, never before feeling so paralyzed and helpless. "I want God!" she gasped, looking up at me with tremendous, droopy grey eyes I didn't recognize as my mother's. "I can't get Him! I can't get God!" she cried, a desperate, cutting edge haunting her dry voice. I wanted so much for her to find her God. "He's coming," I whispered, kissing her forehead, trying to sound sure, ignoring the pounding in my heart. Her frustration, pain, and intense longing were so tangible. I will never forget that mysterious image—Mom looking up at me, calling out for God, asking, it seemed to me, for release from her pain and fear. Asking, wanting, to die.

These were the last words I would hear my mother speak. They rang through my mind continually that long night. She wanted God. She wanted peace and an end to her pain. But now she lay in the hospital bed struggling so fiercely to hold onto the remaining life in her dying body—"the dying light"—fighting against the very things she had so desperately cried out for, almost in spite of herself. But as the minutes passed, I could feel Mom becoming less and less resistant, her breaths growing calmer and lighter, more gentle and soft, and so very beautiful and peaceful. I could see my mother was slowly letting go.

The three of us, surrounding her, stood unafraid, captured by the moment. Countless times I'd feel certain in my mind that she was gone. But another breath would come and the corners of her mouth would turn upward, ever so slightly, as if in defiance of my thoughts. And I would feel my own breathing quicken and my shoulders drop. We were still together.

"It's okay to go, Mo," Dad whispered softly, again and again. "It's okay..." I remember kissing her hand then, and saying myself, "It's okay Mummy..." I said the words, but still I waited for her mouth to turn, for the sound of a breath, not able to let go of these small signals my mother was still with me and a part of my world.

Much later, my father would describe these last moments as a "symphony winding down." For myself, I cannot think of a more eloquent image of what we shared that night my mother so beautifully and so peacefully left this world behind.

Today, as I hold the silly bunny in my lap and remember that night on the third floor of the hospital, I'm keenly aware of the awesome revealing, healing power of time and change in our lives. Nine months ago, as we walked into the early morning fog and dampness, I couldn't know all that I was losing and leaving behind, or how much my world was to change, how lonely I would feel, and how much strength I would discover inside of myself in the weeks and months to come. There wasn't time to be afraid then, to realize, or even to understand. No, that night all feelings were occupied with the weight and awe of each fiery moment, each breath, and holding onto an indescribable sense of warmth, love, and beauty. Even now, with all that time, distance and change have permitted me to realize and absorb, I still find myself comforted when I hold that silly bunny and remember these powerful, mysterious, precious nights.

Anne Ducheshneau lives in Raleigh, and is about to begin pursuing her Master of Social Work at East Carolina University.

Return to top of this issue