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Sixteen years ago, we met: a mature sweet gum tree shading the front of my new bungalow with rich green foliage. It had survived the city’s removal of a large limb, its wound long healed.
Months passed, before spotting a solitary yellow leaf laying on the grass, its stem dormant, announcing the change. I looked up. Still largely green, occasional bi-colored leaves hung on the branches. The surprise was unfurling like swirls of colorful cloths shown at auction: scarlets, lime greens, buttery yellows, and thievery browns.
For several weeks, the show continued until its demise: mounds of faded shriveled leaves strewn around the yard, later raked and bagged for the city’s yard waste pick-up. Stripped from my natural beauty, I grieved. It would be a long wait for its return.
As years passed, the sweet gum tree continued prospering, with more bags of gum balls lined at the curb for the city’s pick-up.
Then, the disruption began: 2021’s violent rain storms wrenched two large branches from the trunk leaving large swaths of exposed wood. Its woundedness remained with us until three weeks ago, when another large limb crashed to the street, with nothing precipitating this loss. The sweet gum tree was ailing and the arborist’s response was to take it down. A red cord, now circling the trunk, will enable the crew to identify it.
The analogy between the ailing sweet gum tree all that lives, including ourselves, is obvious, but our spirits continue on.
We wait for the inevitable.
It was February 1, 2022, an overcast day, twenty-eight months since my sign-up to receive hospice care for my diagnosis of Interstitial Lung Disease with Rheumatoid Arthritis.
The doorbell rang. It was the hospice nurse practitioner to evaluate my continue participation that occurred every six weeks, given the Medicare protocol for my disease and treatment.
During our last evaluation, my insides had jellied when she said, “Liz, you continue doing so well, perhaps too well. Not much decline since our last being here.” She looked away, then added putting away her stethoscope, “We’ll certify you for another benefit period, then re-evaluate next month. Now, you’re not to worry. We’ll work this out.”
But I did. I still remembered the compassionate response of the ER doctor that Halloween morning, 2019, “You’ve come to the right place, Liz. From here on out, palliative care will serve your medical needs. No more going to hospitals for tests. No more doctors’ offices.”
Only after the nurse left did I learn the difference between hospice and palliative care: Patients not ill enough to qualify for hospice and too ill to benefit from home care services. Perhaps that’s where I belonged.
Yet, hospice did pick me up.
“I said this would work out,” the nurse practitioner said, her eyes smiling behind her mask. “We’re going to hold on to you, after all. That new medication for your breathing warrants our continued surveillance.”
I smiled, another experience of God doing for me what I could not do for myself.
In today’s quiet, I returned to the lyrics of the protest song, Sounds of Silence (1964), its symbols pin-pricking the Alice-in-Wonderland world shapeshifting around its composer Paul Simon. Then, it was the war in Vietnam, with nightly footage of its atrocities numbing many viewers into powerlessness, voicelessness. Something was very wrong in our world. Switching channels helped.-
In my perception, Sounds of Silence still evokes shudders and speaks to our country’s splintering beneath heaps of social, political, and economic disorders. Morals no longer work; in their place, the bastardization of language.
The protest song opens with the imprint of a powerful dream upon the narrator that commands its communication to
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
And at a later disaster was heard: “Just keep them quiet,” said one of the terrorists on the phone recovered from the debris of United flight 93.
The lyrics continue as if echoing Yahweh’s pleas in the Psalms:
“Fools”, said I, “You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you”
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed
In the wells of silence
The warning was given. Yet, with passing years, even more trivia has dulled imaginations, stoked hot pursuit of substances, and atrophied psyches—even evolving into monster-like-minions of
the neon god they made
The timeliness of conversion of heart has never been so urgent—it can be done.
Heart Whisperings 