Thursday, April 7, 2022

Hospice in Lent: Beryl's Spring Newsletter

 

 


  Spring 2022

Though this newsletter is a year late, I’ve thought of you often and planned to connect earlier. I tried several times but could not summon the will to continue. I’d run short of inspiration.

 When asked how I’m doing, I say, “great” but does the ability to smile equate with feeling great?

 My husband Bill, who was diagnosed with terminal interstitial lung disease three years ago, was recently admitted to hospice.  Lent is almost over. It’s been a time when the cross has intersected with our lives.

I’ve been practicing Lectio Divina: meditating on the daily gospel readings that take us with Jesus on his final journey to Jerusalem. He knows he will suffer a horrendous death when he arrives, yet he never turns back, never ceases to minister to those who crowd around him seeking hope and healing.

Helplessness besets me as I watch Bill struggle to breathe and know I cannot help him. I want to deny what lies ahead, just as the disciples tried to do with Jesus. Death in Jerusalem could not possibly lie in wait for him they insisted.

In her book The Grace in Dying, Kathleen D. Singh: quotes Dr. Kubler-Ross as saying “death is a highly creative force. The highest spiritual values of life can originate from the thought and study of death.”

On reading the above words, I was struck with the knowledge that Bill and I have, in this experience of hospice, the opportunity to achieve spiritual transcendence. Now, rather than fear I feel hope and gratitude that we have this time to prepare for separation.

I hope all goes well with you. That you and your loved ones have negotiated Covid with courage, and that you greet Easter with joy.

Fondly,

Beryl

PS My email account has grown unwieldy again. So that I might keep friends in a separate account, please change my email address from:  bsbissell@icloud.com to bsbissell@boreal.org.

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About Me

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Beryl is the author of The Scent of God: A Memoir published by Counterpoint NY in 2006 and A View of the Lake published by Lake Superior Port Cities Inc. in 2001. She’s been living on Lake Superior for seventeen wonderful years, and spent 10 years writing two popular columns for the Cook County News Herald: Newcomer Notes and Putting Down Roots. Beryl is past president of the Schroeder Area Historical Society and a long-time chair of its Oral History and Marketing committees. She is a past board member of the Violence Prevention Center in Grand Marais and committee member for the Grand Marais Art Colony’s first ever annual North Shore Reader and Writers Festival. She’s been published in the Sun Magazine, Minnesota Monthly, Lake Superior Magazine, and The Trenton Times and in the anthologies, Surviving Ophelia published by Perseus Publications in 2001 and The New Writer's Handbook, Vol. 2, published by Scarletta Press in 2008 and was named Best of Minnesota Writers by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She is currently working on her third memoir: the sequel to The Scent of God.