Sisters of the Heart
This week was Ash Wednesday in the Christian tradition, the Spring Festival for our Chinese siblings, and the beginning of Ramadan for Muslims. In short, a week of sacred space in at least three spiritual/cultural traditions. I found myself talking about community and the gift of life in my own spiritual home, themes that seemed to come up again in a reflection by a current CPE student named Leisa Alger. Below she shares how a visit with a resident at her clinical site, a skilled nursing facility, touched a bit of her own story. I thought it might resonate with some of you around the theme of the family we choose vs. the family we’re given, and how we build and are gifted by difference. Enjoy.
“The deaths of my father and sister following extended illnesses in which I was an active part of their care and maintaining them at home was brought strongly to mind in an encounter with someone who was the best friend of a resident who died within the last month. She wanted to talk about her friend and their antics, in particular those stories that speak to their differences and how they came to be friends – sisters of a sort. I recognized that her desire for others to stop checking in on her related to “how she was doing” was because she truly had already made meaning of it and thereby peace with it, and questions aimed at how she was doing felt dismissive of her friend. She wasn’t avoiding or denying anything, in spite of staff’s view. It was her love of the origin story with this friend and the focus on their differences and how they became “sisters” that connected to my sister.
I could relate to the chosen sisters of vast differences. She wasn’t my sister by birth. I met her when she was 13 and I was in my early 20s. She was in a group home for children with Intellectual/Developmental Disabilities & I worked there. We chose each other in that place – when I left the job, I couldn’t leave her. She had no other family and had been in institutions since she was 5. I became her legal guardian and she became my chosen sister. Her personality was so free compared to my own, we were opposites in many ways. And it is that origin story of the mischievous antics and fierce, sometimes disruptive tenderness that was born between us and its impact on me that matter to me now. In this encounter, I clearly connected that in the end, watching her waste away made me pray for her death with absolute certainty that she had fulfilled all she was here to do. It stopped mattering to me what came next – I no longer needed to know. I believed her purpose was beyond space and time. She squeezed every blessed drop out of the years she had – gratefully and fully – no excuses, no hesitations.
This encounter reminded me how deeply I value the bittersweet nature of life, and how my belief surrounding the purpose of life is reflected in the poem written on my sister’s grave – “When Death Comes” by Mary Oliver. It reminds me of John 10:10 “I have come that they may have life and have it to the full”. I realize as I have aged that God is a God of more “Yes” than “No”.”
