My last job was that of Christian education director. I had no previous experience when I took the job, but I was desperate for health insurance and figured I could find Sunday school teachers with the best of them. I was surprised to find how passionately I came to feel about the work; much of it was helping people find their places in the community and another large part was helping children and adults learn to live liturgically. One of my gurus was the author and speaker Gertrud Mueller Nelson, who wrote the book To Dance with God. Nelson feels strongly about the place of ritual, not just in church liturgies, but in day-to-day living. Transitional times, she says, are dangerous times. The Church has always recognized this and marked those transitions—birth, coming of age, marriage, death—with sacraments and rituals. Nelson encouraged us to mark important moments in our lives and difficult periods of our days with well-designed rituals to make them safer times.She says, "In our creative ritual making, we draw a circle around that place and that event so that we can be more fully awake to the magnitude of the moment." We ignore these transition times at our peril. Liturgy of transition can moor us to what and who is important, while ignoring those times or pretending it's just another moment can cause us to feel unsettled and beside ourselves.
Forgetting this wasted a lot of time and did a great deal of harm to Elizabeth.
In the last four months, she has careened around the state, going from a level II foster home, to Duke Hospital ER, to Central Regional Hospital in Butner, to a PRTF in Winston-Salem, to Baptist Hospitals ER, to their psych ward, and then back to Butner. She fought desperately to get back to CRH, at one point telling me, "But I didn't get to say goodbye to everyone." She left Baptist, her home for a month, with just an hour's notice. She muses about how nice Aunt Jackie, her foster mom, was and how she hopes she can see her again. She has a lot of regrets.
I knew we had to do a better job of helping her depart if we didn't want a repeat of the previous fiasco. I asked Mr. G, our CRH social worker, to help her figure out what she needed to do to say goodbye for good as she prepared to leave for a new PRTF. She asked for a notebook and had staff and peers write in it. That was a good start.
Our friend Tom, who has met with her almost weekly for a year, came up with the idea of a ritual as she left. He wanted her to know that she was part of a community and that she was loved. His hope was that she could use that love to sustain her through hard times. We invited those who were close to her to come to Butner and tell her in person. Because the hospital wouldn't allow children to come in the unit, Mr. G suggested that we be given a pass to take her out.
Tom and his wife Janice brought her to a restaurant in Butner, one where Claire and I ate regularly when we visited, one that had the advantage of a private room. Our friend Patti brought four of Elizabeth's friends. My sister and niece were there, as was our neighbor. Paul, our youth minister from church, rode with me and Claire. We ate pizza and mugged for the camera. The kids, who hadn't seen her in four months, picked up right where they had left off.
After our meal, Janice presented Elizabeth with a decorated shoebox. Tom explained that he and Elizabeth had talked about putting all that was important to her in a metaphorical box and holding it close to her when she left. This was metaphor made concrete; in the box she placed the letters and pictures we gave her. Each of us told her what we had brought and what she meant to us. She listened, wide-eyed, nodding at the things people said. Each item was placed carefully in the box. Tom talked about how he hoped, when she felt out-of-control, that she would use the love she was taking with her to help her remember to control her actions. Elizabeth and Paul recited the 23rd Psalm, alternating every word, something they did whenever he visited her. Then Paul prayed, asking that God be with Elizabeth and with us during this time.
It was good liturgy: meal, symbol, psalm, charge, prayer. And at least in the short term, it helped. She was tearful that night at bedtime, but appropriately so, as anyone might be who was leaving something comfortable and familiar to go to something scary new. In the morning, she was excited. When I talked to her Friday night, she seemed settled and happy. We acknowledged the magnitude of the moment and gave her something tangible to hold on to. We made it clear that our family and community were what she was leaving, not just Central Regional. And we told her directly, that even though she wasn't with us, she was still a part of us and deeply loved.
This is where we went wrong before: we didn't acknowledge the magnitude of the moment. In my desire to protect her from my pain, it must have felt as if we didn't care. That's not a mistake I will make again.
Go in peace, Elizabeth. Our family and our community are strong enough and elastic enough to handle your absence for a time. You are still a much loved part of us and always will be. Remember that and use it to help you do the hard work you have to do.
