In January, I posted a story about finding shade for one of Mother and my favorite benches. Situated on the Heinz Walkway overlooking Lake Macatawa, the west-facing bench was the only bench protected from the afternoon sun. We called it “Cottonwood Corner,” a place of peace and tranquility shaded by seven leafy cottonwood trees.
Sadly, disease struck, and summer leaves began disappearing. First one tree became a skeleton of silver, then the next. The city of Holland removed all seven last autumn. On December 28th, I met with Andy Kenyon, Director of the Holland Parks and Recreation Department, to ask if the trees might be replaced. And quickly. Mother is 97. I did not want her last memory of Cottonwood Corner to be that of the stumps. It took only two months for three small red sunset maples to appear beside the walkway! Donning winter coats and gloves, Mother and I strolled along the path to welcome the trees. We talked about the hours of joy we hope to experience this spring while sitting on the bench watching the leaves unfold, the fishing poles dangle from nearby railings, and the boats skim across the water. Mother and I decided to rename our corner “Sunset Corner.” So many reasons to do so. It could not have happened—and happened so quickly—without the warm weather, a responsive team of city employees, and the support of so many who share our dream of making nature more accessible to seniors in Michigan communities. Thank you.
0 Comments
It is thought she died of post-release mortality,
her 13-foot long, 1500-pound body traumatized by what happened after the hook was firmly embedded in her jaw. I suspect the great white would have preferred to die a natural death; not to have been dumped at water’s edge by a Florida storm, dragged behind a backhoe for two long miles, dissected as a specimen for scientific learning. I suspect she would have preferred to have been born a bottlenose dolphin, loved and forgiven for mistakes made when she could not see clearly; to have been accepted for the role she played as keeper of balance among the mighty predators of the seas. I suspect she would have preferred a more melodic song hummed at her passing-- not the famous two-note theme song synonymous with fear. As her body lurches through the sand before me, I see the open jaws, rows of jagged teeth, once white underbelly now pink with blood, slippery gray skin shining silver in the sun. But it is her eyes, black and piercing, that prompt me to retrace the tire marks and find the chaotic scene in the powdery sand where she was discovered, lifted, tied with a towline away from the sea. I bow, for I suspect she did her best. Isn’t that all any of us can do? And prefer someone to notice? for the Great White Shark of Navarre Beach Abruptly, the asphalt ends,
the tires dust up dirt and stone sending the white bug of a rental car bumping along a one-lane track threading through plywood shacks that remind him of Deliverance. Ahead, the path is swallowed by a stream. No place to turn around. Google maps and reality collide. II I am alone in the Black River Forest, defenseless, holding a camera on a tree-rooted path that makes hasty retreat without injury difficult. Rustling along river’s edge, something larger than a squirrel stirs the underbrush. Suddenly, without provocation, it charges, feet scurrying beneath an armor of steel. Instinctively, I take a step back. “Do not be afraid,” I whisper to it, to me, for the unfamiliar need not be frightening. With its prehistoric-looking shell, tiny eyes, pig-like snout, pointed ears, long, ringed tail, it looks like an escapee from the museum of natural history. Singularly focused on finding food, the “little armored one” rushes past me, sniffing, clawing, digging the wet earth. I might as well have been invisible. III Contrary to what my husband was told by the fishermen while waiting by the car for my return, the water moccasins did not drop on me from the branches overhead, the river path was not overrun with baby gators, and I never saw or heard a single bear. Maybe next time. By Mary McKSchmidt It was a whimsical thought, the kind that drifts like a low-hanging cloud over a marginal sea still reeling from last night’s storm; the kind that demands attention-- like the lingering waves curling, crashing, flattening the powdery white sand alongside the unfamiliar road cutting through the long and narrow barrier reef island. Why not say a prayer for those memorialized on benches? it asks, even before I see the palm-thatched umbrella shading a bench overlooking coastal dunes of sand and gravel. Words etched on the back of the green-slat bench hard-stop my jog. Carol Ann McBroom Mum Artist Best Friend Stunned, how could I not sit on that first bench and ponder the coincidence? Remember the woman I’ve called “Mum” since our relationship reached a level of profound intimacy, who is an artist, best friend, but whose name is not Carol Ann McBroom? How could I not pray for both mothers and their children? personalize every bench that followed, grateful for that one curious thought that changed how I think about strangers? Oh what joy, whimsical thoughts! Welcome!
By Mary McKSchmidt Like the colorful ribbon of a balloon partially buried in the sand, or the aluminum edging of a beer can tossed in the soft of a season’s first snow, the flash of purple on a park bench causes me to break stride, turn back, pick up the unfamiliar card with overlapping circles of orange and red. Through the mist I see white letters right of center—"D E B I T”-- and imagine a person reaching into a pocket to buy gas, milk, a last-minute gift, casually fingering the lining, panicking when there is nothing. Searching the other pocket. Nothing. Looking everywhere. Nothing. Lost in the chilling dampness of despair. I call the number on the back of the card, learn replacements take seven days, follow a triage of prompts that all end “goodbye.” Raised in a small town in a different era, I stop by the police station. The door is locked. Sign says closed for the weekend. Frozen fingers trace letters where a name should appear— “B I O L I F E D O N O R”-- and I remember sitting on a bench with a mother watching her eight-year-old boy running, how she no longer feared a fall, scraped knee, a bleed that might lead to his death, how grateful she was for donors. I drive to the plasma center hoping the card reaches the pocket of one gifting Christmas every day. I am told to destroy the card. I call them “story poems”—poems I write to noodle through an unusual encounter or a bizarre experience. Examples include: To Somebody’s Father (6/14/22), Trying to Make Sense of Things (7/13/22), No Leisurely Stroll (8/15/2022), The Holiday Card (2/1//23).
This poem started out as a story poem but morphed into a “poem’s story”—meaning it wrote itself. I prefer happy endings, but the poem forced truth at every turn. It placed a mirror in front of an era that makes human connection so difficult, often impossible. Perhaps that is why I am drawn to benches—sitting on them, reading stories about them, adding more benches to parks and senior living spaces. Benches create community. And community is essential to one’s health. At least it is essential to mine. Mary Birthday Ribbons Seven years ago, my little sister died very suddenly a week after her husband’s heart attack. We are a small family – just the two of us and our parents came as refugees in the 50’s. My sister and I were close – a kind of phone call every day close. She had a wicked sense of humor and our calls were filled with laughter and we expected to be old ladies together now that our families were launched.
I grieved for her and ached for her. There is no burial plot to visit, nowhere to talk to her of my sadness. Until…… Across the street from my home, at the Women’s Park in Chicago, a memorial bench to a friend, surprised me one day and I immediately made arrangements to honor my sister. Now I have somewhere to visit my beloved sister, to decorate the bench with ribbons for her birthday, to clean around it so others can enjoy the beautiful spot comfortably. The bench has lightened my pain. M.O. of Chicago
By Dirk Hollebeek I don’t consider myself much of a joiner but recently my wife and I joined a book club, my first but not hers. There are a lot of Reformed pastors and teachers in the group, and so, the first book selected was The Blood of the Lamb by Peter De Vries, an author I had never heard of let alone read. I would later hear him compared to Paul Schrader. Both are artists deeply acquainted with the Reformed subculture and critical of it, using novels or film as their preferred expressions. The Blood of the Lamb is perhaps best described as a semi-autobiographical work of fiction. The main character, Dan Wanderhope, grows up in a Dutch Calvinist household in Chicago only to reject that religion, just like De Vries. Don and his wife have a child named Carol who contracts leukemia, mirroring De Vries’s actual daughter. The disease’s diagnosis, subsequent treatment, and dooming complications form the second half of The Blood of the Lamb. In the penultimate scene, Wanderhope enters the hospital carrying a cake inscribed with Carol’s name, meant to celebrate her impending discharge after achieving remission. Instead, Wanderhope witnesses Carol’s release of a different kind, as result of a rampant infection that consumed her in a way the cancer was unable to do. Her blood, once full of cancer and then temporarily and terminally full of germs, choked her body of life. As he speaks his last goodbye to his daughter’s body, he whispers simply, “Oh my lamb.” Wanderhope goes outside and finds himself opposite St. Catherine’s church. Remembering the boxed inscribed cake, he removes it carefully and, finding his target, hurls it full force at the crucified Christ statue on the church’s exterior. It hits Jesus’s face squarely. As the cake and frosting dribble down the stone Savior’s body, Wanderhope slumps to the worn front steps, not to repent or pray, but to rest before continuing onward. Wanderhope does go on, and the days and weeks pass, but he and De Vries remain steadfast in not looking to the divine for healing, hope, or peace. The concluding paragraph of the book begins with “Time heals nothing–which should make us the better able to minister.” It goes on to suggest that all that suffering can bring is a shared experience and subsequent comradery but nothing else. “How long is the mourner’s bench upon which we sit,” Wanderhope ponders, “arms linked in undeluded friendship, all of us, brief links, ourselves, in the eternal pity.” I related to a great deal of The Blood of the Lamb. Like Carol, I struggled with illness as a child. De Vries’s descriptions of inpatient pediatric hospital wards, while set in the 1950s, mirrored my experiences in the late ‘70s, from the roommates to the playrooms to the whispered conversations between doctors and parents just out of earshot but not from view. And when Wanderhope narrated the events that led to Carol's leukemia diagnosis, I read those sections aghast and open mouthed, occasionally wiping away tears. I had been diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML), early in 2018, and after achieving remission, received a bone marrow transplant later that spring. In the days before my AML diagnosis, I shared Carol’s experiences of fatigue, fevers, headaches, and general malaise that are more typically associated with colds and the flu. The blood work results reported by the real doctor in my life and the fictional one in Carol’s changed everything. There is a knowledge gained from being an oncology patient, a knowledge no one willingly chooses. A knowledge about how time, priorities, and expectations shift with just a few words over just a few seconds. Suddenly, life becomes not about plans or a future, but merely about survival. As De Vries puts it, “The future is a thing of the past.” Survival is everything. Surviving the cancer, surviving the treatments, surviving the complications. Surviving damning statistics. Surviving. It is harder than it sounds. At the beginning of my treatment, the nights were usually the most difficult as I would wake up randomly with a variety of symptoms. It might be nausea, pain, or discomfort. Early in the chemo, I would wake with the common side effect of night sweats. Gown, diaper, sheets, blankets, completely drenched, and I would wake with a start because I was shivering, teeth chattering. On the worst night, it happened twice. Each episode was another obstacle to overcome by calling the nurse, drying off, and changing clothes while the sheets and blankets were being switched, settling in, and trying to warm up again. I would shiver for half an hour under a pile of blankets before I would start to warm and then kick them off so as not to overheat and become even more nauseous. Sometimes that would work and I would sleep the rest of the night. Sometimes it wouldn’t, and I would start another day of chemo and struggle exhausted. However, most sleepless nights were not caused by these conditions but by a restless mind. The emotional and spiritual battles that raged equaled my physical battle for life. In the dark, partly illuminated by the various screens of monitors and pumps, I would look out the window and wonder. I have come to understand why humanity has historically been afraid of the dark. Everything is a little more overwhelming in the silent darkness. Numbers, percentages, and survivability statistics are more jagged in the dark. I would despair over the starkness of facing a life-and-death disease full in the face. I thought of those who face life threatening disease alone. How do they manage? It’s lonely enough in a crowd of supporters. And with faith. At other times, I would remind myself that there is nothing I did to deserve this disease. It was not a reckoning, a judgment, or a curse. It is cancer. Savage, faceless, merciless. It does not respond to emotion nor demands nor pleas. I did not bring this on myself, or on my family or my community. It simply descended on me. Every person who has heard the word “cancer’ as part of a diagnosis has walked the road of denial and rationalization. There is a relentless outpouring of self-defending anecdotes and comparisons (even if never uttered aloud) to demand leniency. But all the defenses, all the best excuses, don’t matter. Rationalizing doesn’t shrink a growth, and reasoning doesn’t change blood counts or pathology reports. Cancer doesn’t care who or what you are. Speak all your evidence, demand all your rights and entitlements, share your unfulfilled dreams. And be prepared for silence. Cancer isn’t listening. It wasn’t listening to Peter De Vries or his daughter, Emily, the inspiration for The Blood of the Lamb’s Carol. She died in 1960 after struggling with leukemia for two years. I have always maintained, even on the worst days of nausea and/or sudden and irreversible incontinence and/or nerves being damaged by the chemo with a sensation of burning flame and/or a fatigue so deep that I felt glued to my bed, that it could be worse. Worse, for me, would be if cancer had happened to my wife, Stacey, or one of our children. It is precisely this scenario that De Vries experienced and shares through Wanderhope–facing the worst possibilities, struggling to hope while being surrounded by sick children and their stricken but imperfectly enduring parents. As an adult patient, I was spared the charade of perpetual positivity that oncology parents must exude, save when our children would visit. De Vries had no such luxury. In the end, he finds nothing to bring solace but a metaphorical bench upon which humanity can and should sit to commiserate and minister to one another. Not in faith, but in sorrow. And not in belief, but in loss. I find the image and idea of this bench compelling for its invitation. For its honesty. For its openness. Particularly as the bench in my mind is a ragged old bench, repurposed from beams and iron spikes that held another function centuries ago. They now have been painstakingly assembled by the master carpenter, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, to comfort people in their time of deepest distress. It is a mourner’s bench large enough for the world, small enough for me. And you. A place for all to join. Photo and story provided by Jeffrey Munroe, author of the new book, Telling Stories in the Dark: Finding Healing and Hope in Sharing Our Sadness, Grief, Trauma, and Pain, and editor of the Reformed Journal, where this story first appeared. The Mourner's Bench was posted with the permission of the author, Dirk Hollebeek.
|
Author, Poet, PhotographerFrom briefcase to pen, paper and camera, one woman's journey to influence how we care for the environment, our seniors, each other. Due to technical difficulties, comments are not posting correctly to this site. Please contact me with thoughts while I work through this issue. Thanks for understanding.
|