NEW JERSEY, USA — Last week I visited a sweet lady in our hospital who was in her 80s. At first, when I asked how she was doing, her reply was, “O Chaplain, all is well. I just had a little accident at home, but I feel great!”
She was beautiful, engaged, animated, and quite talkative. But minutes into our conversation, as she began to talk about the more personal parts of her life, she started to speak slowly. She struggled to find the right words. She took frequent pauses, and finally, tears started to flow from her eyes.
I held her hand and leaned closer. More tears flowed. She began to talk about her struggles as an elderly person living all by herself. She never got married nor had children of her own. Most of her adult life, she was independent, fun-loving, adventurous, and hard-working. She did not want to be a burden to anyone. Her goal was to live a simple and secure life; to see her friends as often as possible; to have some money put away for her needs, and to spend her senior years enjoying the comforts of her small home which she had purchased years ago with her hard-earned money.
Later, I learned that her “little accident” at home was a fall she had sustained one early morning while she was in the bathroom. Thankfully, one of her friends visited her that day. Her friend found her sprawled on the bathroom floor, and immediately called 911.
“Oh, Chaplain”, she said tearfully, “ I am trying so hard to be on my own, but the truth is, I can’t even stand long enough to fry myself an egg.”
There was a longer pause that followed. There were more tears. Then she named the many emotions she had felt these past months: Sadness. Anger. Disappointment. Fear. Regret. Shame.
She also named her gratitude for her friends who always checked on her, her joy for being able to eat fried eggs, and her hopefulness that she will soon have the strength and courage to understand that receiving help is as necessary as giving it; and that assisted living may not actually be a bad idea at all.
My visit with this special lady reminded me of the poem, The Layers, written by the late poet Stanley Kunitz who died two months before his 101st birthday. The poem is described by many as a haunting yet hopeful piece about aging and loss.
One of the most quoted lines in the poem reads, “Live in the layers, and not on the litter.”
It reminds me of a powerful image of layers upon layers of intricate rock formation that accumulate throughout time. Each layer tells a unique story of a geological era. Each layer represents the stories and the struggles of people unique to that time. Each layer captures the mundane and powerful events distinct to that moment in human history.
The poem reminds us that when we fail to connect and integrate all our experiences in life, everything becomes a scattered litter — useless, meaningless, and annoying.
But when we learn to see the complexity, beauty, and richness of the layers of our lives — our painful and joyful moments, our victory, and our shame, our youth and our aging, our exultation and our grief, and how they have been uniquely compacted together by mighty God’s hand to create something stunning and beautiful — we are able to see the richness of the past, the preciousness of the present, and hope that is yet to come.
The Layers
(By Stanley Kunitz)
…In my darkest night
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
Wow! We are not done! The Lord is not done. The layers will continue to build up. Our stories are still being written, and they will be told over and over again. What a gift!
And so with this poem comes by own prayer:
“God of time, God of history, and God of the layers of our lives, we give you thanks for life. We give you praise for breath. We honor you for our tears. We praise you for stories that bring us an awareness of your presence and the sacredness of being in community with others.
Give us your grace so we could make sense and find meaning in the scatteredness of our lives. Teach us to connect the dots. Guide us so we can integrate. Enable us to see the inter-connectedness of all our experiences, and the preciousness of every person you bring our way. Open our eyes so we could see patterns of hope, images of courage, and formations that are life-giving to us and to others.
We say a special prayer for the elderly — for those of us who feel vulnerable, for those of us who are frequently exposed to danger, for those of us who are living alone, for those of us who are having a difficult time sharing our true stories, for those of us who are in the crossroads of decision-making, for those of us who have fallen physically, emotionally, and spiritually — we ask for hope, perseverance, grace, and self-compassion.
We also lift up to you all the prayers that are so deep in our hearts — written, spoken, and even those that have no words. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.”
Ecclesiastes 3: 1 -2; 11: There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot… God has made everything beautiful in its time.
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