I've just finished re-reading our material for tomorrow's class, and to be honest, my head is full of all sorts of possible paths to take in this initial positing on our blog. There really are so many questions that we could begin to think about together.
But I think I'm most interested in hearing more about your initial impressions and response to the prospect ahead of us: our work with Project Angel Heart. Let me share a memory as way to open up this conversation.
In my first year as an undergraduate, I volunteered for an AIDS hospice in Tacoma, Washington. I did this mostly because a friend of mine also volunteered there, and she spoke so passionately about the work she did that it encouraged me to spend some time there, as well.
The hospice was an old Victorian home that had been remodeled for four or five men with late-stage AIDS to live in and have a place to die with dignity. With its wrap-around porch and sturdy architecture, it projected a feeling of warmth, protection, and a quiet kind of respect for the men living there. The staff who worked there intentionally cultivated this atmosphere, and despite the very real and material presense of illness--and implicitly of death's approach (this was before the more successful HIV/AIDS drug treatments were available)--the space was comfortable, strangely reassuring, even.
Still, I remember completing my first few shifts feeling anxious--that churning-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach kind of anxiety. Nervous I would do something wrong or say something inappropriate, I was uncertain and felt awkward spending time there. In my mind, it seemed like such a daunting task, helping care for these men who were so close to death. What should I say to them? How would we interact? How to talk to the one man who seemed intolerably grumpy? And what about the man who never seemed to leave his bedroom? For the more experienced, these fears might have seemed naive or immature, but for me, they were real.
As I continued working, I grew more comfortable and adjusted to the social conventions of this place. Surpisingly, I begin to see our work there like any other. Despite our closeness to death, life went on. We cooked meals for the men, played card games, and had the most typical of conversations. Death didn't pervade every interaction, endowing our work with meaning at every turn. It just was.
I reflect on this experience as a way to ask you all about how you're feeling right now about working for Project Angel Heart. Do you have any reservations or anxieties? If so, what are they? Have you done work like this in the past, either with regard to this issue or involving community service in other capacities? If so, what was it like? What's your impression thus far of our attempt to forge a connection between academic writing and research and a non-profit organization like Project Angel Heart?
Please take a moment and use the comment feature to reply to this post. And be as candid as you're able. Thanks.
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Perhaps the best way for me to describe my feelings towards our upcoming shift working alongside those in Project Angel Heart would be to provide a short story as well: Several years ago a friend of mine was completing his Eagle Scout Project. His goal for this was to rebuild the first few miles of an obscure hiking trail in the San Juan National Forest.
Nearing the end of our patience and energy on the third day of work an old man with an equally aged yellow retriever pulled up in a pickup truck at the base of the trail. I first became aware of his arrival at our section of the trail as a dog tongue licked the side of my face while I struggled to place an erosion log into a recently dug slot. Shortly after making my acquaintance with this friendly dog, his master came around a corner of the trail.
He stopped to talk with us, introduced himself and began to reveal his appreciation to us for working on the trail. He explained that he was a widower and had, in the past year, been diagnosed with an ultimately terminal form of cancer. Being retired and living alone since his wife had passed away, this old man had been hiking our trail to find solace with his life. He had personally witnessed one of the only enjoyable things left in his life erode beneath his feet.
This man’s gratitude was so sincere that his eyes gleamed with tears as he spoke to us, deftly explaining the moisture on his cheeks as a result of the rain. Having read some of Audre’s own personal struggles, I think I can begin to understand just how happy that man must have been to see us. Knowing this, I am certainly excited to have the chance to throw my lot in with Project Angel Heart.
In the beginning she was misdiagnosed. They had to wait until their one-year-old daughter began seizing in the middle of the night before the idiot doctors screwed their heads on and came up with the REAL cause for her symptoms. Before the hour was up, she was wheeled into an operating room, the hardness in her tiny head excavated by cold chrome. Medulla blastoma. (That’s cancer.) We became citizens of the hospital then. Tucson’s air was hot and alive, but inside the white rooms movement was mechanical. There were others like us. All my parents’ friends had sick children. The kids I played with had cancer or siblings that had been diagnosed. I see now what a huge blessing that built-in structure of necessary relationship was, especially in a town and a time when new acquaintances excused themselves from calling my mom to schedule play-dates (because Kathy’s youngest has a brain tumor, shh).
We were young, all us children-of-the-hospital shared a generous naivety and a profound innocence. But we dealt with the patients better than any overanalyzing adult could have hoped to. It’s because we didn’t ask them whether they felt bad, or told them we were sorry for their situation, or tried to establish that things would be fine or, God forbid, throw them an “everything happens for a reason”. We also weren’t so afraid of saying the wrong thing that we refrained from any kind of intimacy. We were kids, we played Barbie with the cancer patients and build Lego spaceships. Unbeknownst to us then, our living without the burdens of adult worries led us to treat the patients like people. Not just tiny houses playing host to likely death.
What if I drop a large, boiling pot of something in the kitchen? What if I deliver the wrong meal to someone with special dietary needs? I'm full of "what ifs" about potential minor disaster scenarios that I imagine have crossed several of our minds as we consider our upcoming service with Project Angel Heart. Interest tends to override my anxiety, however. It is a relief to be getting out and physically DOING something for a class instead of being closeted away with a mountain of books. Since we've heard a couple of interesting personal accounts of previous experiences in volunteer situations and/or interactions with people living with an illness, I begin my thoughts with one of my own experiences.
I spent an entire summer in fourth grade helping my mom deliver meals to nutritionally at risk seniors, part of a local program called “Meals on Wheels.” The clients we served had a variety of health problems and appeared to be equally varied in their attitudes toward the program. Most were visibly grateful for the service we provided, apparently viewing it as a way to maintain some independence, but I think a few were acutely aware of what their use of this service said about there current state of life, possibly feeling a loss of independence and privacy. I often found my participation in this program slightly embarrassing, as though I were an intruder into lives of these people, too much of an intent observer and too interested in the peculiarities of dated houses and elderly faces, limited mobility access ramps and prescriptions lined up on the table. There was one lady who liked her meal left in the hallway, didn’t want to see more of us than she had to. Of our friendlier clients, I remember most vividly an elderly artist named Lauren, a stroke victim with limited mobility and difficulty speaking who loved to keep us as long as possible to talk. He gave me several tubes of acrylic paint at a time in my life when art was the pastime and the fantasy by which I defined myself. That was over ten years ago. I imagine Lauren and most of the clients have passed on by now.
Thinking back on this experience, I feel I’m ready for something else now, a closer, more informed look at illness. I’d like to get to know death on a purely observational level, without fanfare or excess emotion. I look forward to absorbing the realities of illness and death, not poeticizing them as I have often done in the past. Yes, even I have used the tubercular character “type” in a number of short stories, toyed with different ideas of death by illness and its “romantic” possibilities. Perhaps there is something more poignant to be found in the stark reality, an intensified and more genuine brand of poetry that lies in stripping illness of the romantic views we have imposed upon it. I look forward to this experience with only the faint apprehension that comes from heading into unknown territory…and the possibility of adding the wrong ingredients, cutting myself with a kitchen knife, dropping pots and pans….
Project Angel Heart. It's about helping those who have life-threatening illnesses. It's about sharing an experience with them and creating a bond with someone who is just like you. I feel for the cause. I want to help. I hope to make a difference. But right now, I don't know how I am going to do that other than what the Power Point about Project Angel Heart showed me.
The truth is that I don't have a life threatening illness experience. My aunt died from Cancer when I was three, maybe four. But I don't remember anything about it. Perhaps her house, and maybe the long roadtrips to Greeley, CO. However, I don't remember the mood in the house, or the conversations with her. I have nothing.
I can't share. I can't relate. I can't compare. What do I do? It's a subject that I am passionate about, but yet I have no direct connection to. When the time comes to actually go face to face with a person with a life-threatening illness, what will I do? Especially someone who is a stranger. I have no previous experience, and I don't know what to expect.
But volunteering at Project Angel Heart is not about how volunteering makes me feel better about myself or more comfortable. It is about the people that I help, and how I benefit them in some way, shape, or form. How I evolve is just something extra that comes along the way.
I am deeply looking forward to volunteering, I believe, for all the right reasons.
I am not the least bit proud of it, but in the past I would skirt around people who were sick in my life. Whether it was the grade school friend who had to have multiple jaw surgeries, or my own grandfather, who had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, I found myself steering clear of seeing people who were ill. As much as I wanted to make excuses for my avoidance, I always knew that this was a cop out. It was really fear of losing them that made me act this way.
Then, in my sophomore year of high school, I began volunteering at a horseback riding center for physically and mentally handicapped children called Praying Hands Ranch. Although the majority of the kids did not have life threatening illnesses like cancer or HIV/AIDS, they struggled with their health all the same. It was there that I met a 12 year old boy named Frank. Frank, although he had cerebral palsy required the use of leg braces to move around, was one of the most personable and eloquent people I had ever met. Frank, along with the many other children at Praying Hands, opened my eyes to the fact that people do not have to be defined by their illness. Each week the kids were absolutely delighted to ride the saint-like horses, not appearing to be sick at all. Those children helped me to realize that sick is not equivalent to dying, it is merely an obstacle that must be either overcome or tolerated.
The volunteering that I did, along with a good deal of growing up, changed my feelings toward death and illness. Naturally, I am still slightly apprehensive about working with Project Angel Heart. However, I feel that although I may not be completely comfortable right away, in time the signs of illness will fade, so that all I can see is the person.
Project Angel Heart is an opportunity for personal growth and social understanding. The American way of life is very dependent on utility and most of the time, if someone does not perform to the expected level, they are discarded. However, this is an opportunity, the epitome of an idealistic thought, to truly make a difference not just in the client's mind, but in everyone else's minds, who chose not to concern themselves that there are people with deadly diseases living in your vicinity. This makes me very excited to become involved in with PAH.
While I've volunteered in the past with multiple different organizations, it is something entirely different for me to interact with people, who are face to face with death. I am looking to learn from these fighters.
Though I have always been involved in community service activities, and have also generally enjoyed them, stories of service projects and volunteering were not what came to mind when discussing my thoughts about serving with Project Angel Heart. Instead, my Uncle Jeff immediately pushed his way, as was fitting for his character, to the front of my conscious.
My uncle did not have cancer or HIV/AIDS or even a disease that is commonly thought of as terminal, but he did have diabetes. He was diagnosed early in life and had to battle with the illness until last May, when complications finally took their last toll on him. He was always having health problems while he was alive. Uncle Jeff had a hard time seeing and he walked with a cane for much of his adult life. He also had many health issues that came from his carrying of the disease, and from the fact that he lived while treatments were very experimental and ever-changing.
But these hardships were not what made my uncle the man he was. Surely they contributed to the strength of his character in some ways; however, he mostly lived a life separate from illness, at least in spirit. He was always eager to ignore the restrictions that held him back. In fact, he waited until he had dated my aunt for two years before he even told her he was a diabetic. And he never brought it up with anyone if he could avoid it. Not because he was ashamed, but because he was determined to not let it inhibit him.
Uncle Jeff was a great guy, possessed of crazy habits and hobbies, one of the funniest people I have ever known, an avid farmer and sports fan even with his vision problems, and he had an incredible heart and spirit. Basically, he was a person. Unique and amazing, plain and not incredible, but extraordinary in his own rite, he possessed some of the same traits that are found in all of us. Knowing him changed me, not because of his illness but because of himself as a person, an individual. So I feel like my time with him has shown me not to judge based on relative health or strength, but instead to look at everyone as simply a person, different from me, but also the same.
This is what I plan to do at Project Angel Heart; hopefully it will serve me well. And maybe through this experience I will meet someone as remarkable as my Uncle Jeff, in a client or a volunteer. But if not, I am content with meeting, serving, and sharing with simply, people.
Working with Project Angel Heart will be like no other experience I have ever had. I have been most fortunate in my life thus far in that I have never had even second hand experience with a life threatening illness, much less first hand. My friends and family have been extremely healthy, and I think it will be an eye opening opportunity to be surrounded by people who are battling for their lives on a daily basis. I am a little anxious about the fact that I have really no experience with people facing such extreme circumstances, and I feel like I won't know how to react to them. Do I treat them with sensitivity, or would they rather me treat them as if their disease didn't exist? I don't want to ignore the fact that they have a life threatening illness, but at the same time, I don't want to come across as pitying them. It is a fine line to be walked when interacting with such special people.
In the past I have never had experience with individuals with life threatening diseases, but I have worked with people who were so poverty stricken that making it to the end of the week was a constant struggle. My sophomore year of high school, I took a trip down to Baja, Mexico to build a home for a family of six. The house was no bigger than a one car garage. It was gray, tiny, and plain. It had a front door, two windows, and three sectioned off rooms. It didn't have running water, and heating? That's a joke. By the end of the week, after seven days of being in the 110 hot Mexican sun (with no showers!), the home was finished. By our standards, this would be no home. More or less, it was a shack. But, to this family, it meant the world. It meant they weren't living on the streets. It meant that had something stable in their lives. And it meant that there is still good in the world. I'll never forget how thankful I felt for the things I had after seeing their reaction to the "house" that we built for them. I complain about homework, I complain about my hair, I complain about curfew, but what for? People in the world are dying of starvation, preventable disease, and genocide. And here I am, complaining about what to wear. After that trip my eyes were completely opened to a world outside of the sheltered walls of America. Not everyone in the world is going to be okay and we as privileged Americans should fight for a cause to fix that fact.
This experience at Project Angel Heart will open my eyes to the people of America that may not be okay. It will be a completely different experience to witness people who have everything today, and may have nothing the next
When gaging my thoughts and feelings about volunteering with Project Angel Heart this quarter, I am reminded of a great musical commentary on modern American society, "The Ghost of Corporate Future" by Regina Spektor. Throughout the song, Spektor emphasizes the fact that "people are just people like you." She makes the argument that everybody is a part of this everlasting world with separate experiences but one communal over-soul of sorts.
I am hoping to keep this idea of human community with me while working with Project Angel Heart. I can get slightly anxious when encountering new people, especially those that are suffering hardships.
My past experience with community service has mostly taken place in the educational realm. The words "community service" and "tutoring" have long been synonymous for me. I'm excited to step outside of my past experiences in working with Project Angel Heart and to get to know even more, as Regina Spektor would say, "people like us."
I remember the day he walked into the fellowship hall after service. He had a giant smile on his face and his 1 year old on his hip. "I'm going to beat this thing," he said. He had been running marathons, raising a family, caring for a wife and his 2 young children. In a few months, it was all gone. I remember visiting him just a few days before he passed. He looked pitiful and it took every ounce of my effort not to break down into tears. He represented the epitomy of strength and valor for me.
I'll always miss him, but his spirit lives on. Every time I see his two sons, Tanner and Donovan, I see his same smile, that same sparkle in his eyes that was there that day after church.
I don't know exactly what working for Project Angel Heart will be like, but I'm looking forward to having the opportunity to serve others and to volunteer my time, to try to make a difference. I don't know what I'll encounter, but I do know that it will give me a new perspective and an appreciation for my health and those that care for me.
At times, I tend to look at things a little too objectively. When I first heard that our class would be spending a significant amount of time at Project Angel Heart, the first thing I considered was the logistics. How soon can I begin volunteering? What transportation will I use to arrive? With whom will I be training and volunteering? Preparing food, delivering meals…
But it’s not.
In approaching Project Angel Heart as simply a task or chore, I realized that I was missing the point entirely. Project Angel Heart is about people, relationships, and compassion. The organization is defined by the patients they serve, the selfless staff they hire, and the dedicated volunteers that crave a meaningful connection with the Project Angel Heart clients.
I certainly harbor a little apprehension for today’s shift at Project Angel Heart, but my fears are far overwhelmed by my excitement for all that today will hold. After hearing Betty describe the volunteer’s role at Project Angel Heart, I am convinced that none of us will leave this class unchanged. During this first shift, I am eager to see what new perspectives I will gain regarding the people in our class. Will I glimpse a new facet of my classmates’ personalities when they are asked to step up to this role—compassion, tenderheartedness, courage, perhaps? What new side of Laurel, for example, will I discover when we deliver meals together? What new perspective will I gain about myself and the way I relate to people living with illness? After our lives have intersected with the lives of the patients, I wonder how we will be changed as a class.
My greatest anxiety about volunteering at Project Angel Heart is the uncertainty. In my group of friends, I am always "the one with the plan." I like schedules and I like order. I like to know rules and restrictions, possible outcomes, the most likely outcome. In any case, I am unabashedly anal retentive.
My grandmother began her battle with lung cancer when I was twelve. She had smoked all of her life, and until that point, had been remarkably healthy. I don't recall that her situation was optimistic. At that point, I had in my mind the pre-teen Disney movie scenario of illness in which everyone is devastatingly sad, squeezes out some Oscar-worthy tears and goodbye sentiments, and the person with the illness either a) miraculously recovers or b) dies offscreen, and then there is an understated funeral, and the heroine of the story (me, obviously. I was twelve) is overdramatically sad and doesn't really understand why. But has to act sad anyway, because she's a good actress. Obviously.
The scene I remember most in this movie occurs right the day of my grandmother's lobectomy. It is the first time I remember being in a hospital, and the first time that I remember being afraid of them. We had flown from Denver to San Francisco the night before. I didn't know where we were going, what my grandmother would look like, what I would do or say. Should I smile? Make a joke? Cry? Ask her how she was feeling? Everything I could think of seemed so inappropriate, and so ingenuine. I couldn't decide what to do because I didn't know what to expect.
To make a long story short, my grandmother beat the cancer. But it was the not knowing if she would or not that scared me the most. Not knowing how to treat the situation in the interrim was almost worse. I felt compelled to do everything in my power to help her -- the problem was, there wasn't much I could do. But I could be there, and make the most of my time with her, whether it was the last few moments of her life, or just another day. I never really understood this until I got older. And in retrospect, I realize that this is more the perspective I need now. Do all that you can that remains in your personal jurisdiction, and don't stress over the things that are not. And maybe acknowledge that not everything has rules.
It is a daunting task, trying to understand and come to terms with one's own fears. That being said, allow me to clarify that I do not have any aprehensions or concerns about the work itself. It seems somehow illogical to me to feel anxious about what is generally universally accepted as a gesture of kindness. Why, I ask myself, should this be any different than, say, building trail for an open space park? Personal interaction? I certainly do not fear social situations. Could it be, then, because the aforementioned personal interactions will take place with the terminally ill? Perhaps.
Yet I do not fear death. I fear dying--as does any man--but only because I fear the loss of those I have grown close to. I do not fear the unknown, and so I have no anxieties around those for whom the line has been blurred. These are people--real people, with real personalities , real experiences--and to acknowledge them as anything else is no better than the use of metaphor mentioned in Sontag's writing. If you were to meet someone on the street, you would still smile and converse with them even though they may have a terminal illness. Why should the knowledge that they do affect this? It all seems so logical.
Yet logic cowers before emotion, and we all know that the actual situation is rarely what we expect it to be. The phrase "the only thing to fear is fear itself" comes to mind and brings with it my own ironic smile, for this is exactly the case. My reservations about working with Project Angel Heart have in fact nothing at all to do with the actual work I will be doing for Project Angel Heart. Instead, I fear that I will enter a situation where emotion will triumph over logic, and I will feel a twinge of... something. Something I can't yet place. I have done plenty of volunteer work in my life, yet I have never experienced anything quite like this. I will, therefore, be confronted like never before with the possibility of my own weakness, and it is this--and only this--that frightens me.
Yet, in spite of this fact, I am quite excited about working with this organization over the next few weeks. I have long wanted to do this particular type of charity work, and Project Angel Heart seems to be among the best candidates available. My outlook on potential experiences is not one of what reservations I have going into the experience, but rather what within it I am excited and passionate about. In the case of Project Angel Heart, I feel that I could not possibly be more ready.
In all honesty, I am very excited to start working for Project Angel Heart. I think that what the organization does is incredible, although I have never really done any volunteer work that is at all similar to Project Angel Heart. The only volunteer work that I have done was working in the children's center of my local library, and while it was wonderful work that I learned a lot by doing, it was much more superficial than what goes on at Project Angel Heart. I feel like volunteering for Project Angel Heart is so much more intimate than my former volunteer experience - the work that I will be doing will be saving a person's life on a very basic, primitive (in a survival way, not a barbaric way) level.
I almost wish we were able to spend more time in direct contact with the people the organization is helping. I want to know them and for them to recognize me when I come to their doors. However, the distance and the lack of relationships forged with these people almost allows me to approach the volunteer work as something easy, something not to be feared. In the spirit of being candid ( and at the risk of sounding a bit heartless), it is just so much easier for me to deliver a meal to someone who will remain faceless, just another name and address on my list. Once a relationship is forged, then I would constantly be worried about that person and his/her condition. It is easier to stay distanced. I think that at this point in my post one can tell that I am afraid of becoming attached to the people we will meet through working at Project Angel Heart - not because I don't want to meet these extraordinary people but because it would break my heart to have to see one of them die. Apparently I have an incredible fear of attachment (which I honestly didn't realize until writing this post). I am just going to have to go into these volunteering activities with a very open mind and attempt to stash my fear of attachment - please don't get me wrong, I love helping people and really am excited about working at Project Angel Heart. I guess we'll see what happens...
This truly is a different class. Never before have I been asked to do community service. Always it was considered an extra curricular activity-albeit a required one at most catholic schools-and one that no one really wanted to do. It has a certain stigma around it, one that was highly prevalent at my school. Whether or not this was brought on by it being required at my school (which most likely it had) is not the sole reason for this stigma. No, I think what really created this was the fact that I went to a private school where most of the people attending had fairly rich families, and the amount of students going on to college was 999 out of 1000.
Why would this facilitate an aversion to community service? Because most of the upper and upper middle class believe that if you are poor or can not support yourself that it is your fault. Why in some cases it is true, often it isn't.
Thus far, this class seems to start the breaking down of this stigma. It forces us, members of the upper middle class all, to forget our stigma and start to help .
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