Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

The year we got married we made a lot of decisions. We purchased a fixer-upper. We had to get a car. We built a garage and searched for a lawn mower at the hardware store my father sent me to over in the Back of the Yards.

We also completed a budget together, elected an executor of our estate, little estate that we had as twenty-three year olds, and chose agents to make healthcare decisions for us if and when we couldn’t make those decisions for ourselves.

I selected my brother Mark, both because I trust my brother and because I didn’t want my wife to be in that situation. Mark will answer his phone and talk through the implications with a medical team, with my wife, with a cool demeanor. Mark will make sure I’m cared for.

I wanted to plan ahead and put that responsibility on my brother’s shoulders. That advance directive is still in place. Mark decides for me if I can’t decide for myself. He communicates for me if I can’t communicate for myself.

At a recent family dinner I reminded everyone of this. We were actually celebrating my mother’s birthday last fall, and I took the moment to nudge my loved ones to plan in advance. I told them that I didn’t want to live in a prolonged state if I had been oxygen-deprived for longer than 10 minutes. I gave specific instructions, in the presence of my family, to my brother and to the others. Mark’s the agent but they all heard about my decision. Again and again, I will remind them that there are wishes I have regarding my medical care. I will refine those as I go and certainly the longer I’m in healthcare as a chaplain.

Today is national healthcare decisions day. I went to a program about it here at the hospital. Randi Belisomo spoke about her organization, Life Matters Media, and talked about the simple and important process of choosing an agent. Of course, as a chaplain, I walk through the steps of this simple process with people. I witness their completion of the healthcare power of attorney form. And sometimes I get to tell people how vital it is to do this simple thing.

If you don’t choose a person to speak for you, the law has answered your lack of choice. The law puts surrogates in place when you have not chosen. Someone always speaks for those who don’t speak for themselves. So, today, if you haven’t chosen a person to stand in your place, to communicate for you what your medical care should look like, and how aggressive those interventions should or shouldn’t be, consider it. If you need to update your form, the form generally opens with something like, “This Power of Attorney Revokes All Previous Powers.” You can change it at any time.

Consider your feelings and thoughts on these matters, taking the opportunity to involve your family in your thinking, in your care, and in your planning. Communicate your wishes to your loved ones and to your agent, and realize that this is a good way to communicate what you want so that that doesn’t have to be decided for you. Document it on your state’s version of the healthcare power of attorney, and these don’t have to be notarized or done by an attorney, as long as you have a witness who isn’t named as the agent. You’ll want to consult your state’s version because every state is different, but they should be similar from one to another.

If you’re in Chicago today, Life Matters Media is working with the Chicago Public Library at two locations this afternoon to explain these advance directives and to help people fill these documents out. For more information, look here at Life Matters Media.

For the Illinois form, you can visit my hospital’s page and print off a copy.

30 Questions for (Engaged) Couples, pt 2

My spiritual mother has a pretty expansive questionnaire which she created when she led a Chicago church.  My questions aren’t as good, but they reflect some of the common questions I bring up with couples in our church.  I need to keep a running list since I don’t keep notes on such meetings.

Some of these feel immediately appropriate for personal reflection; all of them assume that a couple will discuss them at some point.  Of course, the inability to talk through questions like these are always clinically interesting to me.  With some revision, all of these questions can be asked at different points in the future of a marriage.

This is the second part of the list.  I’ll frame these as if I’m not in the room with the pair.  What would you add?  Here goes:

1. When we’re at our best together, what are we doing, what aren’t we doing?
2. How would I capture my spouse-to-be in a word, phrase, paragraph, and page?
3. How much time we spend talking in a week?
4. When I close my eyes, what’s the future I imagine with you?
5. How will we spend our time together?
6. What does an expanded family look like for us?
7. What are the changes, transitions, and decisions in front of us for the rest of our lives?
8. What will I shine at in this relationship, and what will I inevitably fail at?
9. What will my spouse-to-be shine at in this relationship, and what will s/he inevitably fail at?
10. How has my loved one shown me grace in the past?
11. What is the significance of the party (i.e., wedding) we’re planning?
12. Who are some of my dead relatives I wish my loved one could have met?
13. What do I mean by the vows I’ll take?
14. Where can we put our joint energies and our best collected efforts as a couple?
15. How will this marriage make me, change me, challenge me, and better me?

30 Questions For (Engaged) Couples, pt 1

My spiritual mother has a pretty expansive questionnaire which she created when she led a Chicago church.  My questions aren’t as good, but they reflect some of the common questions I bring up with couples in our church.  I need to keep a running list since I don’t keep notes on such meetings.

Some of these feel immediately appropriate for personal reflection; all of them assume that a couple will discuss them at some point.  Of course, the inability to talk through questions like these are always clinically interesting to me.  With some revision, all of these questions can be asked at different points in the future of a marriage.

This is part one of my list.  I’ll frame these as if I’m not in the room with the pair.  Here goes:

1. Who are the characters included in our story?
2. How did God bring us here, to this point?
3. Where have we celebrated so far, and where have we struggled?
4. Why do we want to get married?
5. What do my friends say about my intended?
6. How will my family interact with this person over the next forty years?
7. Can we talk about our credit reports?
8. What do I simply adore about this relationship?
9. When I’m stressed, how does it impact my partner?
10. How would I like my partner to describe me to someone else?
11. What about my background haven’t I shared with you yet?
12. Can you tell me what’s bothering you in ways that I can understand?
13. How can I best explain my sexual history and how I’ve been created, shaped, formed, and active sexually?
14. What don’t you want me to know about you when it comes to sexual intimacy?
15. How do I think a pastor or a counselor can enrich our relationship?

Questions for Preachers, Writers & Everybody Else

Peter Scazzero, a pastor in New York, asks 10 questions of preachers in an article at Preaching Today, and they just may apply to other vocations and professions as well with some slight nuance.  See if any of these speak to you, your life.  I’ve included a sentence from the article along with the question:

1. Am I grounded in my own contemplation of God?  Quoting Benard of Clairvaux under this question, “You don’t have the walk with God that sustained the weight of responsibility that you’re carrying and I fear for your soul.”
2. Am I centered in Christ?  When we’re not centered in Christ, we end up preaching out of a reflected self—finding who we are from other people rather than who we are in God.
3. Am I allowing the text to intersect with my family of origin?  Our family system defines us far more than we think it does.
4. Am I preaching out of my vulnerability and weakness?  The truth is that we’re as weak and broken and vulnerable as anyone in our congregations.
5. Am I allowing the text to transform me?  This sounds simple but it isn’t.
6. Am I surrendering to Christ’s process of birth, death, resurrection, and ascension?  This process can’t be forced or controlled.
7. Am I making time to craft clear application?  It is not something you do at the last minute.
8. Am I thinking through the complexities and nuances of my topic and audience?  It takes sensitivity and empathy for how complicated human life is.
9. Am I doing exegesis in community?  But I always try to have at least one other person that I can talk to…
10. Am I connecting the message to our long-term formation?  I try to connect people creatively in ways that sheer speaking can’t.

I think all of these are relevant for ministers, even ministers who aren’t preaching regularly.  But these questions can be just as anchoring for people who work in other areas.  Peter’s post is full, and if these questions interest you, do read the entire article here.

Dancing with Death

When I started blogging, my friend David told me to blog about the things that I think about, the things that matter to me.  Lately I’ve been thinking about the decline of my father’s health.  That’s why I’m posting this on both blogs.  I’ve not had much free mental space over the last few months because my dad has been there taking it up with a thousand questions of varying sizes and shapes.

My dad is demented, meaning, he has dementia.  What is the appropriate form for that sentence?  Is my father demented?  It feels like a misuse of language to have to write that way: my father has dementia.  It’s one word or two too long.  Plus, it isn’t true.  Particularly since it feels most days like dementia has my father, like the synapses in his brain are freezing over or cracking or deteriorating or doing anything but firing in the way all my college classes suggested synapses do.  I paid a lot of attention to those classes at U of I.  I got mostly good grades, though I hated statistics and could have done better in Don Dulany’s course, especially if I hadn’t been devoting all that time talking to schizophrenics at strange hours through the night.  But these days I’m thinking that I could have paid more attention.

Anyway, my father’s dementia and the accompanying decline in his condition is essentially unsettling.  My experience of him and his health feels like all the sturdy things in my history with him are getting up, spinning around, and landing in a different place from before.  It feels like every conversation with him, each road trip to Little Rock, leaves me tired from the passing lane and sweating after a long dance with this disease.

And I’m not the one doing the real dancing.  I catch myself to say this.  Over the last six months, since we found out about the strokes and since we’ve started to confuse (i.e., not be able to tell) the stroke’s grip for the dementia’s, I’ve remembered consciously that it’s my father who is suffering.  And that’s the worse part.  Not our collective suffering as we watch or join in as a family responding to our loss and grief.  His suffering is the basic problem here.  I can recover.  Can he?

And I wonder to myself if there is a little grace in my dad not knowing how much he’s suffering.  And I check myself again at the hint of such arrogance.  Can my father, complex man that he is, be written off by my saying, “Well, he doesn’t realize what’s happening to him?”  How can I trust that?  How can I take comfort in the corrosive way the disease is handling him so that his head is all messed up, his memories following?  How can I be encouraged that his brain, eating or sucking or dropping away all the memories which make him him, is so distorting his reality that he is in some way spared?

I ask these questions because I want to be spared.  My father isn’t spared.  We aren’t either.  And these instances of death, these suspensions of time, when I’m not sure if my dad is “there” or “somewhere else,” are not healing.  They are small deaths, and they are upsetting, unsettling, and disturbing.  He is as pained as anyone in this.  He didn’t wish for this end.  And he can’t find the ways to express that any more.  Not on most days.  He’s the one really dancing.

Even though his feet are inching into a straddle some days and stepping normally on other days, it is my dad’s feet that I’m watching.  It is his pair of legs that my eyes fell to the other day as he walked to me on the arm of that nurse.  I had been buzzed into the acute care facility in Searcy, the place where they specialize in treating elderly men and women with psychiatric problems stemming from the disease I keep thinking looks like Skeletor.

He was shuffling slowly, arm wrapped in a sturdy nurse who introduced himself as Billy.  Daddy recognized me and that recognition was a gift even if I was struck by my dad’s gait.  It was an interior compromise, thankful for the recognition and willingness to overlook the pulchritude.

I could overlook that daddy looked bad, really bad.  Bad the way he was when he had the stroke in July.  Bad like when I first saw him in July, my brother Mark at my side, I was wondering where my father’s weight went.  Bad like I saw him for the first time as a truly different figure, no longer the man with muscles and a bench press in his basement with weights I’d never be able to lift.

My father’s arm was attached to his nurse, straddling, dancing, and I met him the rest of the way, took the other arm, and listened to the music of his experience and started dancing with him.  We walked slowly, really slowly.  And instead of going to the designated room, we sat in the closest chairs.  I suggested them because the distance to the room was too far for daddy after the stint from his room and too far for me after driving those eleven hours.