There is virtually no one in America (maybe in the world) who hasn’t heard about Terri Schiavo. Terry is the 41-year-old woman who has been in a “persistent vegetative state” for the last 15 years. Her husband wants to pull the plug because he knows she would not have wanted to live this way. Doctors have testified to her persistent vegetative condition and its irreversibility after 15 years. However, Terri’s parents disagree -they believe that since her eyes open, there are facial movements they interpret as smiles, and they believe her garblings can be interpreted – they think she can wake up.

Terri’s husband and parents couldn’t agree and went through the Florida court system. Its highest court finally ruled, and a week ago the feeding tube was removed. Three days later, the President of the United States and Congress decided this was a Federal case, and then it became a Conservative, Liberal, Right-to-Life, Libertarian, or Feminist issue. People were taken into police custody for trying to enter the hospice, wanting to give her water; others, to perform a “citizen’s arrest” on those involved in withholding food.

Everybody understands that it is impossible for parents to let go of their children. The idea that our child is brain-damaged beyond recovery is almost impossible to comprehend. The decision to suspend life-saving measures is no less gut wrenching for children, husbands or wives, but let’s not make this serious debate a media circus. The politicization, partisan debate and TV reality show that this case has become disgusts me.

Healthcare professionals, who deal with end of life issues, have watched individuals and families deal with their feelings of guilt, psychological projections, personal needs, and religious convictions, all of which make these end-of-life decisions painfully difficult. But this is an intensely private matter, and decisions about when to withdraw medical treatment ought to be made by individuals and families. Only in hopelessly irreconcilable cases must state courts be involved.

My heart goes out to the husband, parents, family and to the hospice and homecare workers who took care of Terry for the last 15 years. They come to their work from a place of loving kindness that exceeds most ordinary people’s capacity. They get so little visible return from these patients that their reward must come from touching them at a spiritual level. Hospice and homecare workers do this important work because it fills them with meaning and purpose. It troubles me that they have been screamed at, jostled, and reviled as murderers by enraged picketers. Hospice workers do sacred work and we ought to be thanking them for their commitment and love.

What Terri’s case means for all of us is that it’s critically important to put in writing what we want done if we end up in a similar situation. With extraordinary medical advances, these situations will become more common place. Go to your state’s website and look under “seniors” or “life care” to find documents for: 1) a durable healthcare power of attorney (which give somebody the right to speak for you); 2) a medical care directive (what you want done in certain situations). Do it now and talk to the people you love the most about what’s important to you.

Terry Schiavo, rest in peace, with the grateful appreciation of a world that is better off because you were here.

March in Arizona means more than basketball madness, it’s also Cactus League baseball season. A couple of weeks ago, I took my Little Leaguer grandson to a ballgame for his 10th birthday.

I like taking my grandsons to the ballpark, where I encourage the abandonment of familial dietary concerns and encourage the eating of whatever crap moves us. This includes the gobbling of peanuts and the indiscriminate dribbling of empty shells. My grandson asked, “How come food that tastes good is bad for you, and food that’s good for you, tastes so bad?” I told him he’s learned an important lesson: if it smells good and tastes good, it’s probably bad for you.

So we proceed to polish off two jumbo bags of peanuts, a couple of foot-long hot dogs, beer, soda and candy (I was sick all night). Bloated into a state of carb-induced lip-flapping reminiscence, I told him how I played baseball as a kid in New York City. That without parks and baseball diamonds, we played a street game called stickball.

“Stickball?” he asked with disbelief, “you played baseball with a stick?”
“Yeah,” I said, “with a broomstick or a sponge mop handle; my mother would get a little upset when she discovered it missing and sometimes broken. We hit a high-bouncing, pink rubber ball we called a ‘Spaldeen’.” We called it that because it was made by Spalding, you know, the people who make baseballs and basketball, but that’s how “Spaulding” is pronounced in New York City.

We’d play it right on the street and if a car or truck came, we moved aside until it passed and went back. A sewer was home plate; any of the bases could be cars, a lamppost, or a chalk mark. We could hit that Spaldeen a mile, and they lasted forever. I waxed poetic about how Carl Furillo, the great right-fielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers, could hit a Spaldeen the distance of three New York City sewers.

“They stopped making them 30 years ago,” I lamented nostalgically. I told him that I still had one, thinking I might inspire him to treasure this prize, and told him I’d give it to him if he wanted it. He looked at me incredulously and asked “Did you bring it from the old country.”

You know what old is? Old is when your memories are somebody else’s idea of a museum exhibit.

My friend, Rubin, is a university chemistry professor, and also a practitioner of Ericksonian psychotherapy. His focus is treating patients facing end-of-life issues. Rubin wrote to me recently about his friend, Mary, living with ovarian cancer for the last four years. After the initial surgery and chemotherapy, she went into remission. A year ago doctors found brain metastases which subsequent treatment did not eradicate.

Trained as a scientist, Mary is also a peace activist and a ceramicist. A student of Native American culture, she has participated in Native ceremonies and wears a Native healing amulet around her neck. Rubin had given her one of my books awhile back, with which she resonated. Then he wrote several weeks ago, to ask if I’d send Mary my guided imagery CD, Facing Serious Illness. I was happy to and sent it along with a short note saying, I hoped my voice would speak to her between my written lines.

A week later, Rubin got in touch again and said Mary was declining and that it would mean a lot to her if I called. I did, and we spoke for a while. She said hearing my voice on the CD was great and that she loved my books, but hearing me live, right now, she could also feel my spirit. It was a wonderful connection and before goodbyes, I asked her to send me a photograph of herself so that I could picture her when I sent blessings.

A week later, I got some photographs of Mary, her husband, children, and grandchildren, along with this note:

I very much appreciated your call yesterday, it was definitely a big moment in my life. Without Rubin in my life we would not have made this connection. I think that’s the most important thing I’ve learned in life. It is my connections to the world that are healing. That’s different from how I was raised. I’m from Knoxville, have a Master’s in bacteriology which made it hard for me to break away from rational, scientific, tunnel-vision, about how people get sick and well.

But life shakes you up, so you have to approach things differently. Opening my self up to a healing community has been a transforming experience. All my relations keep my spirits up (and I hope my immune system is well). I am optimistic, look forward to every day. Thank you for being connected to me, I feel your blessings.
–With love, Mary.

That evening, I went to a concert featuring my favorite contemporary bluegrass band, Alison Krauss and Union Station. I love bluegrass music; the infectious, toe-tapping banjo riffs make me happy, and those plaintive wails of endless suffering touch my soul. Alison is a magnificent fiddler, and she has surrounded herself with a band of world-class musicians. It is her voice, however, that penetrates my heart — a clear, high-pitched voice of an angel. Alison came back for an encore following thunderous applause. She walked out alone and sang a’ capella. It was a bluegrass spiritual, “ . . .let my life, be a living prayer my God, to thee . . .” and I saw Mary’s smiling face, surrounded by her granddaughter wearing a red clown nose, and again sent my blessing.

Connecting with someone this way is a gift to them and to you.

Everybody has heard about the myth of Oedipus; a young man who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. Freud used this Greek myth, as the organizing principle to explain his theory of infant sexuality.
Welcome to the new sister complex, The Lot Complex, which Robert Polhemus, Chairman of the English Department at Stanford University, tells us about it in his new book, Lots Daughter’s: Sex, Redemption and Women’s Quest for Authority (Stanford University Press, 2005). The Lot Complex is about the intercourse of older, powerful men (fathers) and young women.

You may remember part of this biblical story from the Book of Genesis (Chap.19, 1-38). Lot was a righteous man, and because of it, he was allowed to escape the annihilation of the city of Sodom. He left with his wife and two daughters, making it clear to them not to look back at the burning city, just as he had been commanded,. But his wife couldn’t resist a backward glance, and because of it she was turned into a pillar of salt.

The rest of the story is that he lives in a cave with his two unmarried daughters. Believing that all humankind had been annihilated, they broke the incest taboo. It was a desperate price for ensuring that humankind had a future. They conspire to get him drunk and then seduce him.

Some version of this myth appears in every culture, it is an archetypal story. A young woman with an older man who, if he isn’t actually the father, is old enough to substitute for him. This is how she takes his power, and depending on the version, brings down the King, saves her tribe, or founds a civilization.

This is an enormously rich, academic text that is convincingly detailed with myths, paintings, novels, movies and scandals. From Lot, to Dickens, the Bronte’s, Shirley Temple, Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Polhemus shows us how older men still have the power, run everything (from churches to multi-national corporations), enforce the laws ( or ignore them), and make wars ( but do not lose their lives in them). Over the ages, the same story is played out, although Polhemus says, nowadays with less disgrace.

Times are changing, daughters have more opportunities to increase their freedom and power. Let’s just give them the power, elect one President, and move on.

PS. This bible story can give you the creeps, and I feel compelled to add, this does not mean fathers lust after their daughters. The unconscious mind is not so captured by the dark-side, that defenses can’t contain it. I have 5 daughters, both biological and adopted, with whom I am blessed to have a relationship of love and friendship; that’s what sustains generations.

David Johns is an internationally acclaimed painter whose powerful portraits hang in collections all over the world. He was commissioned to paint a 50-foot dome that rises above the sixth floor of an office building in Phoenix. Reminiscent of the classic renaissance tradition, it is the Native American equivalent of the dome of the Sistine Chapel, and an awesome sight.

David is a traditional Navajo man, raised on a remote reservation and faithful to its traditions. A Roadman (spiritual leader in the Native American Church), he is also a Sundancer, in the Lakota tradition. We have sat and sung together, listened to each other’s stories, met as families. I respect him as a man and healer and call him brother.

Among the Navajo, as in most Native American tribes, healers have always been artists. In addition to their medicinal talents, they were also weavers, carvers, musicians and painters. This was the part of themselves that kept them in balance, and that was crucial to doing healing work. In a language of modern psychology, art is a multidimensional representation of the unconscious. The painter or sculptor connects with his or her intuitive soul and channels that vision into being.

I am fortunate to have some of his pieces, but I do not have one of his portraits. After David dropped by to visit last fall, we agreed it was time for me to have one, and I commissioned him to paint a portrait of a Hatathli, a Navajo medicine man, healer. “Not just the face,” I said, “put something around him that represents his healing power.”

Last Sunday, David came by with the painting. We blessed its arrival, sat down and talked about it. David said that when he began the piece, he started with the background, “Those are the colors of the four directions, seasons, winds, and elements. Black, the color of the north, nighttime, and the element air/sky. East is white, the dawn, and the earth. Blue is south, daytime and the element water. West is yellow, twilight and the element fire. The Hatathli’s power comes from all of nature.

“Then I painted his face, look at his eyes, they are not looking at you; they are looking beyond you, he sees things most people cannot. The arrowheads represent the strength of our ancestors, the stone people; the clouds and lightning are the thunder beings who water the earth and ignite her spirit; the flicker feather, small but powerful to carry our prayers. The leaf I put in the last, it’s from a Cottonwood tree, they used to grow in the washes where I grew up. It’s for all the plant people who provide our medicines. Then I added that drop of water, that’s how we mix our herbs; a single drop of pure water is good medicine.”

My eyes were continually drawn to the leaf, “Why did you put the leaf right there in the middle of the neck?” David said it just fit. Then I told him about my thyroid surgery. They took out the left lobe of my thyroid, which included a benign, fluid-filled cyst, exactly where the water drop was painted on the leaf.

My throat is an enormous source of my power as a storyteller and doctor/medicine man/healer. Somehow, through his unconscious channeling, he focused on my neck as the place to put that healing drop of medicine. Every time I look at the Hatathli hanging in my office, I see the power of the healer. A person who accesses his own unconscious can penetrate into the unconscious of his patients and create a healing metaphor that makes visible a way to move beyond their suffering.