Tag: community

We Brought Our Kids to the Vigil

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By now you know about the terrible tragedy in Pittsburgh.  Eleven faithful Jews gunned down by a madman, fueled by rage and social media.  You know that it was the gathering time for a Bris, a naming ceremony for a baby boy, just eight days old.  A celebratory time, a time to welcome that baby into the congregation.

It was an unspeakable tragedy in America.  A collective gasp was heard across the nation, but in my town especially. I live in a small New England town with multiple synagogues, christian churches, and even a mosque. We have an active interfaith community.  To see the news unfold and to see the antisemitism in America grow and go unchecked is terrifying.

I contacted a rabbi in town and asked if there was going to be a vigil and she sent me the information.  It was to be held at the largest synagogue in town on Sunday evening. As I sat down for lunch with my family, before going to Wendy’s soccer game, I told them that we were going to the vigil to support the Jewish community during this time of mourning and fear.  I explained what happened in Pittsburgh and said that it was important for us to go.

The kids didn’t really want to go.  But I pressed the issue, along with Michael.  We said they didn’t have much of a choice.  We are not Jewish. And We were going.

Vigils are uncomfortable.  Looking at death is uncomfortable.  But it’s important for the community, especially the gentiles, to go and show support.  Stand up, show up, and shut up.  Our job is just to show them they are not alone.

As we walked to the synagogue that evening, I held Penny’s hand and told her that if she had any questions during the service, that she should ask them and I would do my best to answer, but to make sure she asked in a whisper because people will be lost in their own thoughts.  We thanked the police officers who were guarding the door for being there.

The synagogue  held hundreds of people and it was standing room only.  We ended up snagging four chairs in two different rows:  Penny and me together, Wendy and Michael ahead of us.  The rabbi of the congregation where we were meeting thanked everyone for coming, stating that just by coming we showed that we were not afraid to be in a synagogue after the violence.

Then the words of comfort from different rabbis of all the congregations in town. There were a few songs that they sung in Hebrew first and then allowed us to join later in English.  One rabbi asked us to be silent for a minute and a half.  Another asked us to introduce ourselves to the person next to us and looking around I saw lots of friends and neighbors, both Jewish and non-Jewish.  After the rabbis, a catholic priest spoke, words of healing and solidarity.  Then the imam from the mosque in town spoke with words of comfort.  At the end, all of the religious leaders stood together on the bema and spoke the names of those who died, and then we all rose and together sang “God Bless America.”

At the conclusion, there were lots of hugs.  The woman in front of me, who was sitting next to Wendy told me how lovely she was.  Penny spotted a friend and ran up to her to say hello.  But overall there were very few children, which was a shame.  There is a fine line between scaring children senselessly and showing them ugliness in the world in a way that has meaning.  Michael and I felt the girls were old enough.

And when I asked Wendy this morning in the car, what she thought, she said, “I think it was good.  It was good we went.  And I think it was important to sit in the temple to think about what happened and to show our support.”  And I realized that it really was the right thing to do, Wendy got it.  She understood the importance.

I felt like our little town got it right last night. I was glad to lend support to resilience, and I was glad my kids were there.  In a few weeks there will be an interfaith Thanksgiving at the same synagogue, and I hope to go with my girls, this time for a celebration instead of a great sadness.

It’s good to show my girls that communities come together in good times and bad times, but especially in bad times.  We all have trying times, but it is community that pulls us through. We stand together and lean on each other.

It’s what communities do.

World Transplant Games: Community

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We’ve recently come back from the World Transplant Games, in Malaga Spain. It is a bi-annual competition where transplant patients from around the word gather and compete in athletic events.  This year, over 1500 competitors came from over 50 countries.  Some teams had over 300 participants, some teams only had three participants.  All of them came to make connections and create community.

It used to be that people would identify themselves solely by the place where they were born, and while that is still true, people also identify themselves by who they are and what they’ve done, and they look for like minded people who share their experiences.   But what happens when you have a rather rare experience, like getting a solid organ transplant at a young age?  Wendy knows very few kids who have shared her experience, and she sometimes feels like a party of one.  It’s been important to Michael and Me to help her find her community.

The World Transplant Games are a great way for her to meet people from around the world who are just like her.

She competed in swim and track events. During those events, she met girls her age who also had organ transplants, but who were from Italy, Britain, Hungary, or Australia.  She and they would introduce themselves and gather before competitions, and then when it was time to compete, they would.  Then they would gather back together and giggle and exchange addresses.  All these girls, who were once gravely ill, who take medications multiple times a day, from all over the world, sharing this experience at the age of thirteen.

I don’t know what you were doing at the age of thirteen, but I was wondering if my mom could bring me to the Mall to meet my friends. I was not hanging out with kids from around the world who had organ transplants, and then competing my heart out when it was time.

Across the board, this group of girls broke world records in swim and track.  They are determined, they are fast.

Most of all, they are both defined by their transplants and transcend the commonly held belief that they are “sick kids”.  They are not.

They are warriors.

Then there is the group of men and women that Wendy met through Team USA.  We had over 150 competitors from all over the country.  They ranged in age from just younger than Wendy to members in their seventies.  They help to show her that yes, life has its ups and downs, but that you keep going.  I think (as a mom) that it’s super important for kids to get positive messages from adults who aren’t me, because at some point our kids turn our voices off.  So when Wendy was a part of the 4 x 100 relay race with women who were kidney, lung, and heart transplant patients, who taught her how to receive the baton, who showed her where to line, up, and who were her loudest cheering section while she ran, well those other women were real role models for her, and I am forever grateful to them.  They probably didn’t even know they had done anything.

In the coming days, I will be writing another post about Wendy and her individual journey at these games.  I’m super proud of her, and of her journey.  But this blog post had to come first.  This is a community worth celebrating, people who truly are living their best lives since they’ve been given a second chance.  Competitors who radiate gratitude at the ability to feel good and come together to compete.  A community that  supports each other, celebrates each other, claps for the person who comes in dead last as much (if not more) as the person who wins.  Because, and I say this without hyperbole, they have all won just by being there.

Wendy is lucky to be a part of this amazing community.

I am grateful to witness it.

You Are Here! With Wendy!

Posted in Compassion, coping, Education, Emergency Department, Resilience, UncategorizedTagged , , , , , , , 8 Comments

The Cartoon has been completed and sent to the hospital!

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should read the #projectW blog post first.)

After over two and a half years, through multiple drafts, multiple meetings, and multiple mediums, we have a finished product that will (hopefully) benefit young children and their parents.

Picture this.  Your kid gets hurt, to the point where you need to go to the emergency room.  Your child is in pain, and is scared, and is nervous.  Do you know what is going to happen?  Probably not, because not many people spend a lot of time in the Emergency Department.  So you as a parent are also stressed and wondering what is going to happen.  Most stress in the hospital happens in the waiting room of the ER.  So how can that be alleviated?

Wendy and I wrote this little story with that in mind, giving an introduction to the Emergency Room and to the hospital in case the child gets admitted.  It runs about nine minutes long, enough time to get settled and have your questions answered.  It also gives you some suggestions on how you can prepare yourself for when you meet the doctors.  You can write out what hurts, when it started, what you’re worried about, how you feel, and it will get the conversation going more quickly.

So it’s designed to alleviate stress and foster communication.  Imagine if all hospitals worked on ways to incorporate these things into their care scheme.  We had whole teams on this project, both in the hospital and at Payette, an architectural firm that specializes in hospitals.  In the hospital, the Family Advisory Council brought together a group of experts to comb through the script.  There were doctors, nurses, social workers, and child life specialists, who all added their advice and counsel.  Then at Payette, there was another whole team of creative people who put it together.  There were animators and musicians, people who were good at the storyboarding and composition.  There were people who spent Saturdays recording Wendy’s voice and teaching her some elocution so she could enunciate well.  They made sure they included Penny in one of the pictures (that’s Penny getting the thermometer over her forehead!) and they included Wendy’s stuffed animal Teddy who has been through all of the hospitalizations with her.

And get this, all of these people did this out of the goodness of their hearts.  Nobody was paid for a moment of any of this, through months of preparation, meetings, and work.

They did it because they thought it was important.

Think about it another way.  Every time you go on an airplane, you get instructions on what is going to happen during the flight, including what might happen in an emergency.  Do you get the same instructions when you go into the Emergency Room?  Why not? Wouldn’t you feel better, as an adult, if you did get some instruction or information while you were waiting to be seen?

Now imagine how much scarier it must be for a kid to be hurt and worried.

Here is my hope.  My hope is that this post and video go wild, that it helps thousands of sick and scared kids, that it inspires other hospitals to do the same thing.  I hope it encourages collaborative efforts because they are important, not because someone is going to get all the money or all the credit associated with it.  My hope is that there are fewer sick and scared kids, but when they arrive to Emergency Departments around the country that they will be given an introduction on what they can expect so they won’t feel so lonely and vulnerable.

Please watch this video.  Please think how many people put their hearts into this production.  Please share it widely.

https://vimeo.com/186454486

Thanks to everyone for your support through these efforts, including your kind words and suggestions.  Thanks for not letting me give up on it.

I asked Wendy what she thought about the whole thing, the more than two years, the different iterations, the meetings, the pictures, the recordings, and she just said, “I think it’s pretty cool and I think it’s going to help a lot of kids.”

She said it better than me, and in fewer words.

Firefighters and Architects

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“This will be a new litmus test for your friendships,” he said as we were walking down Cambridge Street. It was a warm summer day, and Mark was his usual affable self.  A friend from college, I remembered that he had the same email address as the doctors at the hospital,  so when I wrote to him, and said, “Hey, do you work at Massachusetts General Hospital?”  he came by the PICU that day and took me out to a bagel shop around the corner from the hospital.  A psychologist by training, he worked at MGH and managed to take us around a little at a time, orienting both Michael and me to the hospital and surrounding area.  He took us to the chapel, the central quad, and the Healing Garden:  a rooftop garden that overlooked the Charles River and had both inside and outside seating.  He brought us a loaf of banana bread that his wife made.  He cracked stupid, softball jokes.  He was just what we needed at the time.

He was right.  Our trauma, the medical trauma of our child, reordered our friendships, reshuffling them like a deck of cards.

There were some people whom we found drifted away.  For whatever reason, they couldn’t handle our trauma with us, whether it was because they had their own more pressing problems, or because they didn’t know what to say or do. Phone calls and emails got fewer and farther apart.    The loss smarted like a sunburn, but we all moved on.

Some people whom we had considered acquaintances, nice people but with whom we didn’t normally hang out, they were a nice surprise because they rose to the occasion, they met us at our lowest place and helped to lift us up.   They helped Wendy, by bringing toys and gifts.  They helped us with food and ideas and cards and hugs.  This was our nicest surprise, and those friendships have survived beyond the initial trauma.

Mostly, though, we found that our friend base, and even our families, fell into two groups:  Firefighters and Architects.

Firefighters rush in. They fix the immediate, broken parts.  They take care of the schedules, the child care, the food, the logistics.  They say, “I’m on it,” and they take care of whatever “it” is with efficiency and without you having to ask again. They are the ones who immediately call. They are there in the trenches with you, helping you to fight the immediate acute battle.  Their actions are their help.

They they retreat when the immediate assault is over.

In move the architects, who rarely are the first to call, but who sit back and wait to see what you will need later.  They are the ones who listen to your problems and offer long term solutions.  Often they are the ones who will tell you the hard truths,  help you make the big life changes,  help you to systematize and reorganize.  They help you to look at the wreckage and begin building again.  They stick around longer.  Their advice is their help.

Let me be clear, you need both of these kinds of people.

Rarely do you have a friend who is both a firefighter and an architect, each person has a  definite strength.  Sometimes a good friend will try really hard to be both, but to be honest, it’s exhausting when you are playing against your strength, and one set of characteristics usually rises up.  We found that often in a couple, one person is the firefighter and one is the architect, which makes sense because they balance each other out.  They are doing the best they can with what they’ve got.  So are you.

Friends and families will get you through the initial trauma, and the after effects.  It won’t be until later when you are looking back that you realize how much they helped.