Dear Sugar Letter #11

Vespers

Jennifer Pastiloff’s tattoo. Photo credit: Jennifer Pastiloff

Dear Sugar,

In the seventeen years I’ve been a nurse I’ve had many challenging times on the job, but since March 2020, they’re on a different level. I’ve never been so stressed out and exhausted--physically, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. Empathy comes naturally to me, and in fact it was my concern for others that led me to a career in nursing, but lately I find myself feeling defeated and despairing. I’m also angry that a virus that impacts us all has been politicized and keeps people from doing things that will protect themselves and others.

To be fair, my stress isn’t entirely job-related. I’m 48 and peri-menopausal, my parents both have health issues, and my son’s middle school was online for more than a year, so there are demands on me in several directions. I’m drained and burned out. Many days I think: I don’t know how I’m going to do this. I feel like I have nothing left to give and yet there’s no way around the fact that I must keep giving.

I know there are things I can do to improve my mindset and I try to do them. I take mental health days occasionally and I had a much-needed vacation a few months ago. I exercise, eat, and sleep well enough. I have a therapist, a wonderful husband, and great friends—all who offer me support and love. I’m not writing to you looking for tips on better self-care or the suggestion that I look for another job. The truth is, I can’t even say exactly why I’m writing to you, Sugar, because I know you can’t change any of the things above. I guess I’m writing to you because I’m seeking some words that will help me on the days when I think: I don’t know how I’m going to do this.

How has your pandemic been, Sugar? What do you do when you find yourself spent and weary? Perhaps I’m asking a question for all of us. In these hard times, how do any of us push through?

Spent

Dear Spent,

Last spring I noticed I’d suddenly lost about a third of my hair. When I finally got to see a doctor a few weeks ago, she told me I fit the profile to a T. She said that menopausal women with full-time jobs and kids who’d been in online school had been showing up at her clinic in significant numbers with the same complaint for months. She’d never seen so many of us in such a short span of time. We are now a category: middle-aged menopausal moms with their hair falling out. What we have in common is that we are exhausted. We are stressed. We are in utter fucking despair.[I]

I’m pretty sure my hair fell out because I’ve had a terrible year and a half too, Spent. The only era of my life that I’ve suffered as profoundly as I have in this past era was the one during which my mom died thirty years ago, when I was 22. In my 52nd year, I didn’t keep track, but I’m certain the days on which I wept (and sometimes wailed) outnumbered the days I didn’t weep (and sometimes wail). The days on which I thought: I don’t know how I’m going to do this were pretty much every day. It wasn’t the stress of my job, in my case, but that someone I love very much was deeply struggling and nothing I did helped.

And I did a lot of things. I did and I did and I did and things only got worse and worse and worse. I felt like I was living in hell.

One day late last year, deep into the horrible time, the subject line of an email in my inbox caught my attention: “Weekly Prayer Vespers.” The email was from the Unitarian Church of which I am a member, though it’s been years since I’ve attended a service because I’m too busy and overwhelmed and terrible at getting myself out the door on Sunday mornings. I think I read the email simply because I liked the word vespers. I didn’t know what it meant—in fact, I only just now looked up the definition—but I liked the sound of it because I sensed it meant something like whisper and what I have needed more than anything for the past many months was for someone to whisper to me very gently on a regular basis that as awful as things were now, someday it would be okay.

On top of that, I don’t believe in God, so praying is complicated for me because when I try to do it, I spend most of the time wondering what’s the difference between me praying and me talking to myself in my head? Which is a question so complex and distracting that I inevitably smother my so-called prayer in my own heathen ridiculousness and give up.

I read the email from the church I seldom attend anyway. It said that every Friday evening there’s a prayer session that members can join on Zoom and that anyone who wants a prayer said for them can send a request and it will be read out loud. What about this? I thought. I’d tried everything else I could think of to help the hard thing and none of it had worked. Maybe this would. I clicked the link and signed up.

That Friday happened to be during Advent, a few days before the winter solstice. It was literally the darkest week of the year and there I was searching for light. Help me, I thought (prayed?) as I ascended the narrow stairs to my attic office. Help me, I thought as I logged on while the sun faded from the sky. Help me, I pleaded inside of myself as I watched strangers appear in the little boxes on my computer screen—almost all of them women with thinning gray hair who were ten and twenty and thirty and forty years older than me.

One welcomed us. One sang a song. One lit a candle and talked about the liturgical theme for that month, which was mystery. I muted myself, as instructed, and listened on my headphones as she said things I already knew but needed to hear again. How in darkness, we are waiting. How it is in the times that we must search hardest for the light we are most profoundly transformed. As I listened to her, I walked slowly on my treadmill, my laptop on the desk before me, my own face appearing and disappearing on the screen like a lighthouse beacon as I turned my camera off and on and off and on again, depending on how self-conscious I felt.

When the woman who spoke about mystery was done, the woman who’d welcomed us began to read the litany of prayer requests out loud, one after the other, and I mentally applied myself to them as if I’d been hired for the gig. Prayers for men starting chemo and drug treatment, for women having babies and knee surgeries, for people who’d lost jobs and loved ones. Each request was a brief and direct appeal, one or two lines of please. It felt like vespers—whatever that was—with every beat, I prayed for these strangers in a whisper I didn’t speak.

After a while, I worked up the nerve to submit my own prayer request, which I’d been told I could put into the chat box that only the women running the service would see. I slowed my treadmill and typed: Please pray for X, who is struggling.[II]

It was a simple sentence, but so much of my life was inside of it that when the woman said it out loud a few minutes later, I sobbed so hard I had to slow the pace of my treadmill to nearly a stop and grip the edge of my desk so I wouldn’t fall down.

I went back the next week, and the week after that, and again. Every week I wrote the same sentence in the chat box. Please pray for X, who is struggling. Please pray for X, who is struggling. Please pray for X, who is struggling. And every week I cried when the woman said it out loud. Every week I almost fell down. Every week I staggered on, gripping the edge, walking nowhere on my treadmill, held steady by the old women on Zoom who heard my sentence—my prayer—and allowed it into their hearts. Who whispered soundlessly to me from their faraway rooms.

“I got you,” my friend, the writer and teacher Jen Pastiloff[III] says so often she has it tattooed on her arm. That’s what this vespers thing felt like to me, Spent. Like someone had me. Like for the tiniest glimmer of a moment I was held by a force that is more powerful than the force I could muster on my own.

I don’t have a better answer for you about how we push through the hard times than to say this in some form is available every day to you and me and each of us who feel we cannot go on, Spent. And the way to survive the days you think you can’t survive is to find as much of it as possible in as many places as we can find it. It is what I’m trying to do for you now, through my words, this letter. It is what you sought when you wrote to me—not seeking advice from me but help in the only way I have the power to give it.

I’m sorry this past year and a half has been especially hard for you and for all the people who’ve worked on the frontlines of this pandemic. That you have had to be so strong and brave and self-sacrificing during such a scary and stressful time isn’t fair. I wish I could assure you the year and a half ahead will be easier, but I can’t, though I hope it’s some comfort to know that you won’t be enduring it alone. My inbox is full of so many letters like yours, Spent—from other healthcare providers, from teachers, from parents whose children are in crisis, from people who feel disconnected and lonely and enraged and overwhelmed and devastated by all of the things this pandemic has wrought and ruined and revealed.

Many years ago, when I was in graduate school, a few poet friends of mine told me about an assignment they had that required them to listen repeatedly to a poem in a language they didn’t understand and then translate it into English. Their mission wasn’t to know what the words meant, but rather to hear them, to feel them, to imagine them, and then to conjure something from within themselves to translate the impossible mystery of those words into a poem of their own creation in a language they knew. I wasn’t a student in the class,[IV] and I’ve never tried my hand at this exercise, but it has stuck with me over the years, probably because, as audacious and nonsensical as it first seems, the task is ultimately what poetry—and life—require us to do: attempt to make clarity and meaning out of the incomprehensible.

I’ve thought about that long-ago workshop assignment a lot lately and it came to mind again as I read your letter, Spent. Perhaps because in some ways what we’re all being asked to do right now is create something beautiful from the unknown languages we’ve suddenly found ourselves forced to comprehend. We’ve had to translate the sentence I don’t know how I’m going to do this into the opposite of its meaning and do and do and do this—as you have, Spent—time and time again.

My hunch about the meaning of the word vespers was wrong. It doesn’t mean whisper. It means evening prayers, though I like its original meaning better: the evening star, from the Old French vespre. I am going to whisper to you from my faraway room as you walk toward the hard light of that star, dear Spent sister. I’m going to stagger beside you on the treadmill going nowhere. I’m going to hold you as we find a way through the dark mystery, the hair falling like rain from our weary heads. I’m going to believe what we already know but need to hear again. When morning comes, we’ll be transformed.

Yours,

Sugar

---

[I] And yes, dear readers—please don’t write to me to say this because I already know—we also need to get our blood work done.

[II] Except I wrote the person’s name, rather than X.

[III] She’s wonderful and you should read her beautiful book, On Being Human.

[IV] Which was taught by the marvelous Swedish-American poet, Malena Mörling, whose books I highly recommend.

---

Thank you for being a subscriber. I appreciate your support so very much.

If you want to send me a letter to consider for the Dear Sugar Letters, please email me at deardearsugar@gmail.com