Today is Father’s Day. Ten years ago while in a bookstore in Highlands, North Carolina, an orange leaf on a book cover caught my attention. I read the title “Parting – A Handbook for Spiritual Care Near the End of Life.”
My initial thought, “It’s too late for that book.” My dad had passed away in April and the grief was raw in June. I had believed he would live for many more decades due to his love of life and learning. But everyone was blindsided when he was diagnosed in March.
Instead of passing by the book, I picked it up and read the Foreword, which included:
… Spiritual care for the purpose of this handbook is soul care, helping the human spirit in its search for peace. It is the attempt to help those near the end of life feel whole, fulfilled, and in harmony with their world and higher power. Religious experience may or may not be spiritual, and spiritual experience may or may not be religious. Regardless of the dying person’s religion or persuasion or faith tradition, spiritual care near the end of life supplies a deep human need.
My personal grief provided an heightened awareness of the collective grief. My dad had ensured everything was in order, but that orderliness didn’t lessen the grief, sorrow or the immense loss I felt and experienced.
I bought the book that day and read it during Father’s Day weekend. An odd thing to do—dive into the dying, my motivation was to dissect the misery of grief and what had transpired in forty days. I needed to understand and touch meaning. “Helping the human spirit in its search for peace” offered me a light in this darkness. I accepted the light. It was as gentle as a single candle flame.
As I read, I questioned:
One physician says that the best way to improve spiritual care for the dying is to improve it for the living. All too often, the day-to-day business of life gets in the way of the inner life. Death clears the calendar; it uncrowds life so that spiritual needs come to the forefront.
My question, “Why wait? Why wait until end of life to pay attention to our spiritual needs? Why not now? Why not pay attention to our spiritual needs now?” These questions have stuck with me since 2010. I continued to cycle through changes and transitions, recognizing the gifts and seeing new life but never found a bridge of connection until April 2020. The physician touched upon it in “Parting,” the day-to-day business of life gets in the way of the inner life. In March 2020 there was suddenly time to pay attention to the inner life. Death had cleared the calendar. Whereas before it was on a mirco scale, this time it was marco—a global pandemic. My daily routines and familiar ways of navigating through the hours of a day ceased. On March 13, I believed the “holding pattern” was two weeks. Even then, I knew the spaciousness of time would create a lot of change. The two-week pause transformed into Stay at Home orders that finally lifted on May 22, 2020. Ways of doing changed. There were endings and each ending carried a loss.
“Helping the human spirit in its search for peace” returned during the pandemic. With nowhere to go, few distractions, and time fully available, I paid attention to life and death, the known and unknown. Now I understand that in 2010 I bought the book to help me through the transition of the changes due to my dad’s death. “Helping the human spirit in its search for peace,” connected me to my sense of purpose, to what I found on the ground of remembrance and to RESURGAM (Latin: I shall rise again).
From my pandemic journal, “Listening to What is Alive Within Us – Reflections During a Global Pandemic,” Volume IV Bearing Witness to the Wholeness of Being, June 21, 2020 (C) 2020 Jean Niedert
creative meander 
Leave a comment