While Mom was pregnant with me, my father was a student pastor in a small church in Hammond, Indiana. In celebration of my impending birth, and as a gift to my parents, a woman of the congregation made a quilt from random fabric squares, mostly of wool and flannel backed with blue linen. It was …
The “BRAIN” behind Informed Consent In the book Grace and Grit: Spirituality and Healing in the Life and Death of Treya Killam Wilber, author/theologian Ken Wilber talks about the years-long struggle his wife had with breast cancer. After numerous attempts, often cutting edge or non-traditional, even “natural” treatments, to stem the progress of the disease, …
I set up the camera and let it roll. In her kitchen. In rural Iowa. August, 1993. Over the next two hours my eighty-four-year-old friend, without hesitation, without probing, without concern, spoke…about her itinerant life and the struggles of share-cropping, about the infidelities of her husband, his alcoholism, their divorce—and their remarriage the following year, …
Nancy Cruzan lost her life January 11, 1983. She was finally set to rest in peace after being pronounced dead on December 26, 1990. In the intervening eight years she lay in a permanent vegetative state. She lost control of her car near Carthage, Missouri going home from work at 1:00 am. She had been …
“I Am Not Who I Was!” Coping with the Loss of Identity There is no greater suffering than constantly measuring yourself and coming up short except perhaps the realization that your suffering is hurting others. ~ Vironika Tugaleva Mom stared down from their 4th floor retirement community apartment to the parking lot below. Their …
“We are all in pain, we choose to suffer.” I remember, as a teenager, my father spending hours in the yard landscaping as an escape from the vagaries of pastoring a church. I always think of him as the bishop’s troubleshooter in the local United Methodist conference. On behalf of the church, he led civil …
While Mom was pregnant with me, my father was a student pastor in a small church in Hammond, Indiana. In celebration of my impending birth, and as a gift to my parents, a woman of the congregation made a quilt from random fabric squares, mostly of wool and flannel backed with blue linen. It was …
Out of the corner of my eye, as I passed her room in the health care center, I caught a glimpse of Fanny staring blankly at the wall. She attended chapel every Sunday, but she had been missing that day. I stopped, knocked on the door, and asked if she was all right. Still surprisingly …
