journal entries excerpts 1988-1990

But here we stand, these particular ones of us in a room full of IV bags and heart monitors and nursing staff in white with plastic gloves, we who come here to confront our own pains and find our own healing.

To our surprise, the room already contains Mildred and Elsie and there is some talk of medicine and treatments before I get bold and tell them we are here for Meeting. The chairs come. Merrie Lea and I move to the other side of the bed. I lean over and find Bernard in his eyes and tell him we are here for Meeting. We miss him in Meeting and I sit holding his hand that responds in mine, take Marie Lea's hand and she closes the circle with a hand to his leg. The grip is strong in the first prayerful minutes and then he speaks by moving his fingers and I let loose and lay my hand on him (two or three gathered together/lay hands on the sick) and when I glance towards Mildred and Elise, they too are in Meeting. Merrie Lea breaks the Silence to move to him and speak of winter geese that can't make up their minds which way to fly. I get the oil and explain what I intend to do and anoint both Bernard and Merrie Lea. We close Meeting with handshakes between Friends and I feel for the first time that perhaps Mildred accepts me, Friends.

How many Turks was the issue at pre-Meeting today. How many before it's too many and the they have become the we and the we have become the outsiders, the other, the they. Like Earlham dykes, maybe. Or, Dorothy said: those who are not Christian, who do not live the gospel: love one another. I suggest that perhaps the spiritual attributes we give to Jewish peoples or Muslim peoples or Hindu peoples are actually cultural attributes. We struggle to come up with a Christian parallel.

A lot has happened with Meeting that goes unrecorded here and I find myself angry with those people. Last night talking with Steve, I found a new insight: I have learned recently that most important to Meeting is family, and Steve said that not only means being part of The Families, but having family yourself. I find this very disappointing. . . I miss Bernard.

Bernard died yesterday. Elise's badly timed call that found me irritated and out of alignment with myself after taking Little Car into the ditch near home. Now there's Meeting that must be attended.

It's not good enough to be a Quaker just because you were born a Quaker. And yet in some ways I feel that to them it means something that I am not born a Quaker.

Walking into Meeting, Bernard's memorial service, wrong and then wondering for 20 hard minutes why I am always walking into rooms wrong. . . or otherwise out of order at Meeting. Finally I realized that God didn't care where I sat. In the deepest meaning of the Quaker tradition of seating, I instinctively moved to sit with the family. Osa told me as I came in where to sit, but instead I chose the first open bench and after I sat, I knew in one rush of feeling that I had chosen a place where grieving was. . . I remembered another moment in Meeting when I felt this newcomer self-consciousness. Bernard got cold when I opened a door—a door he even had given his permission for me to open. I watched him shiver in the Silence and suffered for having asked. Later when the women cleaned, they left a red blanket turned across his pew.

None of this feels okay until Merrie Lea tells me about her own uncomfortable moment almost walking in the wrong room and she was late to the memorial besides. After the handshakes, though, there was a long and delicate, but heart to heart hug with Mildred. Only then was it really okay. In my discomfort, I know that it meant something odd in Bernard's life to have outsiders come into his Meeting. A Meeting that was mostly generations of the same families. He could never know the discomfort of not being born in one of those families of not knowing where to sit to grieve the passing of one who was.