A way of being

I am a Family Resource Coordinator with the local OPO which stands for organ procurement organization. My job is to support families in their grief when someone they love, or loved, or never liked, has died or is about to die, in a hospital. My job is also to talk to them about organ and tissue donation, to explain the process and answer questions, to help them get the information they need to make an informed decision about whether this person who has died or is dying would have wanted to donate or whether donating this person's organs feels like the right thing to do for the decision-maker.

When I tell people about what I do most look at me with some version of horror on their face. Fear. Afraid to even imagine being in that situation--either in the position to be with someone they know dying in the hospital or the position to have the job that brings them into the room of strangers in those moments. "I don't know how you do that," many say.

"I don't know how you do that" is what a lot of people said to me and say to me in my non-working life when they see the mass of toddlers twining themselves around my legs.

I am learning many skills in this new role, so that is one of the ways I do it. I know a lot about donation, that is another. I am comfortable in hospitals, in ICUs. That is another. I feel honored to be allowed to do it, that is another.

Beyond the skills and the traits and the life experience is something I've written about once before--the way of being somewhere with someone. Of being very present and very open to sit with someone in acute, baffling, violent grief and stay seated. Not run away. It takes a lot of energy, sucks it out. It is confusing to go back and forth, from the sunshine in the parking lot to the hallway walking past a mother who has come to the hospital in her bathrobe for the second day in a row. She is praying so hard for her son the young man to survive and I know he won't. Not because I don't believe in prayer but because I know enough about the human body and what it can sustain to know that his has been broken beyond recovery. It is hard to hold those two truths in my heart and not to get sick with the ache and dread of it. It is hard to invite myself in, not to where she is because I can't go there and I shouldn't go there, but I can go to a conference room adjacent where I can lend my hope and quiet and energy to the process she and he and their family have unwillingly entered.

I feel it in my body. I feel some of the pain and sorrow in my skin. My hands. My heart. My gut. Not always but often. And that is one of the many, many reasons I wanted to do this job. Why I probably needed to do this job. There's not much I feel in my body. Due to some combination of my own medical trauma, my own mental strength, my refusal to go to my own anger and fear and sorrow and grief for so many years, and our culture's lack of focus and training on how to be present with and slowly heal and recover from the trauma we all experience by being alive my body is often numb and, when it does try to talk to me, I have mostly shut it the hell up and ignored it. I want to change that. I need to change it.

The laughter comes as sweet relief. I am always grateful for it. Because at some point, eventually or immediately, there are moments of laughter. Will they always come?

I hope so.

What does this have to do with parenting, one child or four? The way of being needed to do the job I get paid for reminds me of the way of being needed to parent. I can't be this way all the time--it's too hard. Too much. Too raw and too painful and too tiring. In some ways it is the realest of the real, in other ways it is something rarer and more special. A place to go sometimes. The edges of the day-to-day. I will keep practicing. Stepping in and stepping back out. Finding the laughter. Allowing for escape. Trying hard to forgive myself for the great failures. Finding rest.