"Be selfish, Lisa," I read, confused again for the
first time. I was sitting in a conference plenary lecture, multitasking as
usual. The speaker entertained, inspired, taught, but somehow, not for me. The
old journal from long ago had whispered to me from my bag. I pulled it out with
attempt to be nonchalant, inoffensive. It was for my writing class, to start
that night. On a whim, I had decided perhaps it was time to continue writing in
it. A bound leather journal, with gild-edged pages and wide-spaced lines on
which to write. My handwriting spoke the year easily—1998. Back then, I had moved
from printing in all capital letters into a tentative cursive script, feeling
my way slowly into a more gentle, embodied flow of life. So my own script
read back to me, “Be selfish, Lisa.” I knew to trust what I had written, but I
had no recollection of what was there on the page in front of me.
Allow me to introduce you to my Ed Sullivan. I call him ‘mine’
mostly to say he’s not the famous comedian of old, Ed Sullivan, but a Hospice
patient with whom I met four times in our second incarnation. We had apparently
met once before, a first incarnation of our companionship, when I had served as
a hospital intern in the heart ward of a local hospital. I don’t count that
time. He had apparently been one of many that year and I had not been as
mindful as I should have been to remember him. No, Ed became Ed for me when I moved into my Hospice
internship, calling a stranger-patient on my list to schedule a home-visit. “Is
this Ed Sullivan?” I asked over the phone. “This is Lisa, the Hospice chaplain.”
“Hi, Lisa,” I heard. “It’s so good to hear from you again.” “Again?” I asked. “Yes,
you met with me once, a year ago, in St. Mary’s hospital.” I had moved
institutions, changed jobs, been given a home number I had never had before,
and still been recognized. He
recognized my voice, he said, on the
phone.
In my journal’s recollection, we met a total of four times.
I’m not sure whether our erotic-but-chaste love began at the phone call or
sometime amidst the four visits and one phone call, but that’s what happened. I
fell in love with him mind, soul, spirit and body. His death, predetermined
though it was by the definition of Hospice, devastated me. The 1998 journal was
a preliminary attempt to grieve through prose, to rail at the universe for
bringing such a holy beloved into my life and then ripping him away again.
I had begun the journal of grief with a question, “What does the communion of saints signify…?”, which is how any fledgling
theologian would attempt to process her grief. One theologian taught me a
highbrow answer. She said it “signifies the relationship flowing among an
intergenerational company of persons profoundly touched by the sacred, sharing
in the cosmic community of life which is also sacred. Ultimately,” this author
argues, “it points to the Creator Spirit who vivifies creation, weaves
interconnections, and makes holy the world.” Elizabeth Johnson, whose words
these are, names this communion a “circle
of companions by the power of Spirit-Sophia.” My prose throughout the journal
entries then moves deeper to describe a short companionship with Ed or “Sully,”
as he was called, begun September 30th, 1998.
Perhaps not as short
as I had supposed.
Ed was from Newtown Pennsylvania, and celebrated his 38th
year of marriage to a lovely woman, Mary, about three weeks before he died.
They had had three sons, reared true to Irish-Catholic roots. He had lung
cancer, congestive pulmonary disorder, both probably from his many years as a
smoker, which accompanied his decades of alcoholism. He’d been dry for over 20
years but spoke easily of his regrets, the turmoil that his addiction had inflicted
on those he loved most. I found out much later that in his AA meeting, he was a weighty elder, a demanding sponsor and excruciating truth-teller for those on the
path to long-term sobriety. “You were Ed’s
Hospice chaplain?!” a colleague in ministry asked me, with a tone of awe or
fear, I couldn’t tell which. “I would have died
if I’d had to do that.” She was part of his AA meeting.
His words to me, recollected in my script, came from the
last time that I ever saw him, on the fourth visit to his home. I had planned
on visiting patients on the other side of town, but changed my plans at the
last minute. I called to set up a visit, and Ed whispered into the phone that
he would welcome me. He had COPD and was on oxygen, after all. I then had intentions
for our time together—some Scripture, perhaps a bit of singing for him, if he
couldn’t speak much—but those got interrupted by the local parish’s Eucharistic
ministers coming to his house. “Interrupted” only in my own mind, of course.
The sacramental setting, shared in a larger web of relationship, contextualized
all of what Ed and I shared together. My hand-written words then recreate a
long-forgotten scene. “As I left this time,” I wrote, “(Ed) said, ‘Be selfish,
Lisa.’ Confused, I asked him what he meant and he said, ‘You have a gift and if
you say yes to too many, you won’t be able to share it. Be selfish.’”
Dumbfounded was the word I used to describe my
reaction then. It works pretty well to describe my re-receiving the words
nearly fifteen years later. I interpreted it then within my original intention
to visit patients on the other side of town that morning, plans changed to
visit with him in what was to be the last time. I had decided to narrow my
efforts to fewer patients to visit per day. This time, fifteen years later, his
words overwhelmed me in the plenary lecture, surrounded by people but isolated
by circumstance, even un-seeing choice. Tears flowed easily, beginning in the
throat but moving more deeply and quickly in awareness, both coming from my
core, my gut. “Be selfish, Lisa. You have a gift and if you say yes to too
many, you won’t be able to share it.” I received something sensate, aligned,
generous and risky. But what? I shrugged
it off, put the journal away. Really. Didn't give it another thought.
Yet within twenty-four hours of this last “hearing,” my work
life changed in tectonic ways—clearly by my willingness and choice, but almost
without effort or realized intention. A dissonance and weight I had carried for
months was lifted as my life moved into an alignment I had only intuited but
could not see. Way opened for narrowing my work energies and expanding the ways
I can be present out of my strengths, not out of others’ needs. Something in me
heard him, across the years, and I became selfish enough to honor what it is
that I have to offer in abundance.
Whatever that may be. I’m not sure what that gift is that Ed saw so clearly. I don’t think I actually need to know
how to articulate it or describe it. I do need to offer it, however, to be
willing to steward my unknowing, allow it to flow through me, and as it does,
align me with who I know I am being asked to be, in my gut, at my core. The
flow comes through in what I am coming to learn, to know, to write as “a
companionable way,” which I never connected to Ed, for some reason. In terms I’ve
used before, he’s an “absent antecedent” I had not known in such fashion. The anam cara ring that has coursed with
such significance in my life these last years? I got it to signify him, I re-learn from my journal. His
Irish-Catholic impishness had come to mind while browsing in the Celtic shop in
town after he died; I seized on the connection. When my parents asked what I
might want for Christmas, I told them “that ring.” How could I have forgotten
its origin in the time of grief after Ed’s death?
And it wasn’t all in my head either. We met each other a
total of five times, and when I left that last day, he expressed his love for
me, unbidden and startling. I told him I loved him too, because I did. The
section of the journal concludes, “I remember being in my car, waiting at a
light and thinking, ‘I’m in love with another man…’ How would my boyfriend (of
the time) hear that? Two loves, so different, yet both so intense.” I loved
him, deeply, even still. I can feel it, at my core.
The pragmatic side of me pulls me out of my gut and into my
head… Who was this man anyway? I don’t even know his sons' names, let alone
anything substantive about him, like what he did for a living, what a bastard
he must have been when he was drinking, what kind of faith enlivened him as an
Irish Catholic. Like those were the point for either of us. He recognized my
voice, on the phone. He saw me in ways I could not, ways I yearned to be seen.
He shaped my life in ways I had forgotten, opening doors I had not remembered.
And his words awakened me once again, precisely when I needed to stir to life
in faith again.
Incarnation is like that, I guess, whatever its rendition.
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