Venturing at LifeVentures

One thing about people my age is that we usually like each other.  We like to get together because we understand what that other person is going  through.  We understand  stiffness in the morning,  digestive problems in the late evening,  adjustments to new medications, struggles with old ones,  sleepiness in the early afternoon,  insomnia at night,  inability to run fast  yet the need to hurry, especially to the bathroom.

In 1992 I attended a conference on aging (yes, there were such strange events then)  at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. People talked about what it meant to grow old in this century.  I had been sent there  by a Mennonite church agency  to get some basic understanding of this group of people that I was contracted to write a study guide about.  I was just about into this age category myself.

What I remember most distinctly about that conference is that when presenters talked about the elderly, it was always “they,”   rarely “we” even when it was obvious they had been on Social Security for many years. No one  dared identify with this declining group.  To be old was to be over the hill, finished, on the downward journey.   At the time the word “old” was a four-letter word.

There are many situations in which an older adult is just tolerated, not welcomed.  I have heard of congregations bemoaning the fact that the majority of its membership is old – therefore the church can’t grow-- as if older people are a stagnant body harboring  strange  life forms that prevent forward movement.

Such thinking leads to the kinds of Christmas letters in which parents extoll what their children did during the year – and not how they themselves grew.

When I returned from that conference I started looking for an organization that  viewed this age group not as a finished work but as people with possibilities for intellectual and personal growth, for developing new relationships and learning new skills.  I found it in what is now known as LifeVentures,  formerly Shepherd’s Center.

 It is an inter-faith, non-profit organization.  By inter-faith I mean that no one religion gets top billing.  No one denomination is top dog. It’s a volunteer-based organization with a few great part-time employees to keep the ship afloat.  Check out our website at www.LifeVenturesKS.com

For nearly twenty years I have attended classes sponsored by this group each Tuesday for eight weeks in fall, winter and spring.  I have heard lectures in just about every subject often  taught by retired professionals.  I have gone to classes in history, religion,  health,  travel,  and much more.  There are classes in art, poetry writing and creative writing.  A woman at age 94 teaches piano.  At lunch one day a man age 75 played the accompaniment to “Happy Birthday.” It had been his  lifelong dream.   Before this session he had never played a note.  Ezma taught him. On the program are also  tai chi and yoga. At lunch I keep meeting new people and connecting with old friends.  I love these people.

I have taught poetry writing, journaling,  and especially writing personal or family history.  I’ve pushed the importance of telling our stories, for if we lose them, we lose our connection to ourselves and our families. I've told my own story.  Through the years I’ve  learned many intimate  details about  members’ lives as they read last week’s assignment

When I first started attending  I didn’t know that this association would lead to lasting friendships. What I learned in the classes was the side benefit, not the main one. Older people look for closeness in organizations such as this one but a prerequisite to making friends is the willingness to reach out to new people. 

My age group doesn't want to be abandoned in our declining years. We long for and need friendship. In the movie Cool-hand Luke, the main character,  is in prison at the mercy of abusive guards.  He is sickly, weak, and knows he can’t hang on much longer.  To taunt him the guards place a heaping plate of food in front of him and threaten more punishment if he doesn’t finish it, every last  spoonful.  As his  fellow prisoners walk around the yard each one furtively grabs a spoonful of food from his plate as they pass his corner to share his burden.

I see that as a wonderful portrait of what happens in organizations like LifeVentures--  people sharing the burden of life while enriching their minds and spirits.

A desperate form of birth control

For thirty years I wrote a biweekly column for our denominational organ.  It gave me the opportunity to think in public  about many subjects.  I remember  some columns I was proud of. I’ll also admit to some bloopers. 

A column I wrote in 1980  titled “Convenience...Or Murder?” brought me the most mail I had ever received. It came primarily  from those for whom the issue of abortion was etched in  black and white.  My  editor  later wrote that one letter was signed by 15 women from one congregation stating they did not want readers to operate under the misconception that I was speaking on behalf of all women. I never intended to.  To them this column was worse than a blooper.  

Recently I read Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh, a novel about pioneer  life in Manitoba in which some women, overworked, undernourished, without medical care,  figured out a strange  method of  aborting a fetus. 

The novel was first published in 1925 and condemned as   “obscene” and “indecent.” Grove taught in the Winkler, Manitoba,  school system for several years and married a Mennonite woman. It was later republished in 1989 and heralded as great literature. The novel has a dark outlook on life and is sometimes compared to works by Thomas Hardy, Theodore Dreiser and others. 

In Grove’s novel women suffer because they are expected to work like men yet accept the burden of childbearing to provide  future workers for the farm.  Ellen’s mother had been forced to leave behind two of her three children in her native  Sweden when she and her husband emigrated to Manitoba in the early 1900s.  Her husband demands she help him with the outside work, yet satisfy his needs at night. When she becomes pregnant, he blames her as if she has committed a crime,  for pregnancy keeps her from helping clear the land  and  build his farm. What can she do?

Throughout the ages women have  shared secrets  and folklore  about birth control. It happened when I was a young married woman. It happens today even though  birth control is no longer illegal or  immoral as it was in my mother’s and grandmother’s era.  I sensed as a child  that female relatives were discussing something clandestine related to a topic I did not understand.  

A woman in an earlier time was expected to accept however many children the Lord gave her, for hadn’t the Lord said to  be fruitful and multiply?  And without birth control women sometimes kept bearing children into their middle forties, year after year. My genealogical records show women who bore up to 12 and 14 children, one after another – and then died to be replaced very soon with a new wife – and child-bearer. I wish I could share the stories of some of these women.

In Grove’s novel,  a neighbor gives Ellen’s mother her own foolproof method of not bringing a child to full term:   work harder than a man in the early stages of pregnancy.  The mother does that – lifts heavy things, walks behind the plow for a day, saws huge  logs  with a bucksaw, chops wood  with a heavy  axe, carries bundles, clears brush until she miscarries.  Her husband carries the little  bundle out  to the woods to bury it. And the process starts again.  The mother  tells Ellen she recognizes she is murdering her unborn children, but can see no  way out of her dilemma of working like a man yet bearing children like a woman.  

Even when she is a skeleton of a ghost her husband prays mightily at the bedside before insisting on his rights as a man.  After one difficult  miscarriage  he orders her to whitewash the cabin.  Her strength gives out and  she dies.  

Vilhelm Moberg broaches the same topic  of too many children and not enough strength in his novel  The Settlers, the third book in his series The Emigrants about Swedish pioneers in Minnesota.  Kristina is certain her weakened body cannot  survive another birth,  yet finds herself pregnant for the eighth time.  She had prayed  earnestly, desperately, to be relieved of the sick and miserable feeling for the first few months, the shuffling about on heavy feet to carry the increased burden of her body, and at last the terrifying labor, her strength spent, and then the great weakness and fatigue afterward with her limbs heavy and aching.   Why did God create another life in her?  When her prayer is not answered,  she doubts the existence of God. 

Other immigrant novels examine the same topic of too many pregnancies in weakened bodies, with greater gentleness and delicacy. It appears too often to be ignored as unrealistic.These novels depict the desperation of women forced to bear child after child and what they did to prevent this burden.  Only fiction?  Fiction is often closer to truth than reality. 

As I  re-read my column of 1980,  I wondered again why readers had been upset.  I did not advocate abortion as a method of birth control.   I only asked readers to look at the inconsistencies in our thinking about it.  For example, personhood begins at conception some people proclaim vehemently, yet an early  miscarriage is flushed down the toilet, an unnamed  blob of mucous and blood, sometimes accidentally.  If this were truly a person,  shouldn’t it be shown the respect and dignity of a name and a proper burial? 

In my old age, I am less concerned about certitude about many issues that troubled me earlier.  I hope I am becoming more tolerant of women in this country and underdeveloped countries about their concern about an issue that has been discussed too little.   At what point is enough children enough?

I want my aunt to have a legacy

I come from a one-dimensional family. Let me explain.  My father had a mother,  five brothers and one sister.  No father that I was aware of. Lots of  Funks around.    My mother had no father, no mother,  and only one brother, or so I thought.  Few Janzens.  Having relatives on only one side seemed natural.  

Of course, while we children were growing up there were  passing references to a former home in the Ukraine, to our Janzen grandparents, to Janzen aunts  and uncles and many more,  but those people weren’t as real to me as my Funk relatives  whom we visited regularly.  A child accepts whatever reality she experiences as normal. One grandparent was sufficient – and I never realized until later that most children had four grandparents, all living.

Only as an adult did I learn I had a huge extended family on my mother’s side who had been trapped by the Bolshevist regime in the Ukraine after 1929.  Some had spent what will have seemed like endless lifetimes to them in forced labor in Siberia.  

I met one aunt in Germany and another in Moscow in 1989 and began to aggressively  research my mother’s relatives. Who were these people who had contributed to my gene stock but also my cultural upbringing?

Recently I wrote a 4,500 word article with photos  about Aunt Aganeta Janzen Block, which was published in CMBS Newsletter Fall 2011 She lived an entire lifetime in Russia and the former Soviet Union.  Unfortunately it is not online but available for a suggested  of $5  or more sent to Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies,  Tabor College, Hillsboro KS 67063.   If I live long enough I hope to expand this writing into a book-length manuscript.

After my visit with Aunt Neta Janzen Block she began writing her life story in letters to me, a sister, an aunt and to her nieces. She was a reader and a story teller. During the limited time I spent with her in 1989 she told  me stories about her life while I took notes feverishly. I collected everything I could lay hands on.  In the article I wrote about her life I could only highlight a few major events of her amazing, though difficult, life gleaned from her letters.

She   wrote about her conversion as the result of an experience with the demonic in the life of a young man in her community.

About being married to the son of a kulak (landowner) and  the resulting hardship of being forced out of  their home three times,  carrying only a suitcase in one hand and a child in the other.

About the Great Trek from the Ukraine to Poland of thousands of German-speaking citizens of the Ukraine during World WLar II.   She wrote later that she only understood what was going on in that terrible march  when she read about it decades later in the Rundschau in historical reports.

About the night her husband left home after being conscripted into the German army. He died on the Belgium front. She sent me his last letter to his family – a last will of his hopes for his four children.

About being shipped like cattle to Siberia to work in forced labor in forestry work,  heavy construction , mining and similar industries,  always hungry, always cold. Always mindful of her four young children.

About being interrogated by the secret police, night after night,  who attempted to force  her to  tell lies so they could “legitimately”  punish her.

About seeing her sister Tina after a separation of more than 25 years. This sister and her family had been exiled to another part of Siberia in the 1930s.

In Canada,  Mennonites  are familiar with these accounts.  A large wave of Mennonites who had survived the tumultuous events of the war and its aftermath immigrated  to Canada  from Paraguay and Europe after World War II and brought with them their stories about life during the Bolshevist rule.   Here in the United States we know about the Amish, the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Mennonite migrations of 1870s from Russia to the prairies, and such events, but too little about this aspect of our story  and the  difficult sojourn in the cold hell of Siberia.  It needs to be known.

My aunt deserves a legacy.  Through this article I have begun to give her one.  It is the least I can do.

One Hundred Points of Meaning

In the weeks before my daughter Christine died in 2000 it was sometimes hard to hang onto life – not just physical life, but the spark that is life itself.   So, in the evening before we went to bed,  sometimes we tried an exercise in staying alive.  Could we identify what in that  day had been life-giving, what life-denying?  

Sometimes the ledgers were heavily weighted on the life-denying side as we sorted through the day to find a life-saving moment:  A phone call from a friend.  Christine had kept down  one meal.   A bird had tweeted a song just for her  outside her window. The postman had waved.  Small events, no doubt, but life-giving.

Recently I watched a TV show in which a man with Lou Gehrig’s disease was explaining how he stayed “alive” while he was dying.  His suggestion was to make a list of one hundred  things that gave meaning, joy, or pleasure to life.  Then,   though some  will  disappear, slowly or suddenly, one by one,   you will still have 90, then 85, then 80 items that give meaning. 

He recommended  that people should talk about death more.   I admit that people talk about sex today as freely as they do about yesterday’s ice cream sundae with a cherry on top. They know all the ingredients, how long it takes to eat, how it tastes.  But death – that is left to the hospitals, doctors and nurses -- when it  could be an enriching experience for all concerned.

At this stage in life I am very much aware that I am mortal. I am closer to 90 than  I am to 80.  And so I have begun listing my hundred  points of meaning.

1.      I enjoy the feeling when  my tongue slips   over  my teeth after I have brushed them in the morning.  I wait each morning for that clean smoothness, the fresh taste.

2.     I enjoy having a shower, feeling the hundreds of  points of sharp wet heat hit my skin—but not too much, or too long, advises my dermatologist.  My skin is getting too thin, too dry for extended enjoyment under the shower-head.

3.     Speaking of skin, I enjoy remembering the feel of my husband’s skin against mine even after these many years that he is gone.  I’m thinking, in bed, without clothes. 

4. .   I enjoy eating my morning oatmeal, but not the instant kind.  It’s a throwback to my childhood when I rushed home after school to be the first to grab the leftover breakfast porridge, the stuff crusted at the  bottom of the pot, from long cooking.   I eat mine today with skim milk, artificial sweetener – and that’s okay.

5..   Writing in my journal nearly every morning gives meaning to life. I look forward to my time with my journal. Not that I write many wise things, but it is a way of fastening down my life so that I can look at it.

6.     I look forward to my quiet time  with God in the morning. Years ago I didn’t have time for more than a quick prayer before I headed for the door.  Now I can take time to read, to pray, to meditate. My faith sustains me. But I don’t get antsy if I don’t have time.   God understands. 

7.     Holding a newborn baby gives me great pleasure, but it doesn’t happen often. The softness, the smells, the snuffling,  the helplessness, the beauty of innocence—life has  chance to try again. 

8.     Creating with words still excites me.

9.    .  I love a cup of  tea brewed with real tea leaves, not the tea bag stuff made with floor sweepings.  Green tea is good as is Zechung Oolong.  

1        10.     I  like my little lists of things to do, e-mails to write, purchases to make, ideas to think about, and such stuff. I like even more crossing out items when I get them done.  It makes me feel in control. 

11     I like standing at my window watching that last leaf on a branch hang on. Tomorrow I will look again and the next day, again. Until it’s gone. 

12 I like doing the daily crossword puzzle as well as the long Sunday one.  Mission accomplished, I tell myself. My mind is still working-- to a degree.

13.   I like having lunch with my son and observing  how much he resembles his father whom he never knew.  Heredity is powerful. 

14.     I like having lunch with friends who have time to talk ... and talk. None of this eat and run. 

15.     Which reminds me that I love stimulating  conversation above many things. 

16.     I like listening to CDs  with the old music on them. Eine kleine Wassermusik.  Even Elvis Presley singing old Gospel hymns soothes my spirit. 

17.  gives me joy to hear a grandchild phone and say, “Hello, Grandma!” It doesn't happen often enough in this age of Facebook and Twitter. 

18. I enjoy writing my weekly family email. Does anyone read it?  A few say they do.  But I know I am doing my part to keep the glue of family relations from drying out.  Faithfulness is important. 

19.     This next is a non-entry.  I could write it down and then cross it off.  I no longer enjoy shopping. I only do it in stores that have carts I can hang on to.

At this rate, I think I could make it to 100 points of meaning.  I’m well on my way. So how many have to be gone before I can say, “I have finished my course”  and  let go of life?  Twenty? Thirty?   

But maybe as I keep  listing old meaningful items,  I can keep adding new ones as well.

Old and new -- now that gives life meaning.  

The Other Holocaust

A few years ago I told the chairperson of a  women’s club that I would be speaking on “The Other Holocaust”  at their upcoming meeting. Later, she told me she had  hurried to the university library to research the term so that she could make a few meaningful comments before I began speaking. She never found any entries referring to another  holocaust.  I had coined the phrase.

Few people do not know about the Holocaust that annihilated about six million Jews during World War II in the infamous gas chambers of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

Too few people know of another Holocaust in which possibly more than sixty million Russian citizens were killed, directly or indirectly, as a result of Communism between 1920 and 1990.  I had always used the figure of thirty million.  Then  researchers kept  adding to that figure.  On March 24, 2001 The Wichita Eagle reported  the number as sixty million.  I call that The Other Holocaust.

Why no general  outcry?  Because the crimes were committed by the Soviet government against its own citizens.  It was an insider job.

My own interest in this holocaust  stems from the fact that among those millions of  citizens who perished because of the war, executions, starvation, imprisonment in gulags,  forced labor,  confinement prisons, were close relatives of my mother.  They had  remained in Russia after the large migration in the 1920s, which brought my parents to Canada.

During the 1930s any religious and intellectual leaders such as ministers,  poets and writers,  kulaks (landowners) and children of kulaks – anyone who threatened  the Bolshevist regime in any way-- was shipped off to the gulags or into forced labor, to prisons, or simply disappeared.

One aunt and her preacher husband and family were exiled to the Perm area in Siberia in the early 1930s where he died shortly thereafter. There were hundreds like them. Writer Solzhnitsyn describes these gulags as “man-made hells.” 

In the 1940s the USSR needed  energy to develop its rich natural resources in Siberia.  Thousands of  German-speaking Russian-born citizens were forcibly  exiled to sites in Kazakhstan  following the division of Berlin by  the Yalta agreement.  They were condemned as traitors to their country.

They were crammed into cattle cars and transported  across the vast Soviet northern expanse to work at hard labor in forestry, construction, mining and industry at near-starvation rations in the bitter cold. Lives were expendable. There were always more available.  The supply was inexhaustible.

Among these expendable  bodies in forced labor camps  in Siberia were my mother’s  six sisters and their families.  Husbands and brothers had been mostly  conscripted into the military or labor army and died  there.   Being a conscientious objector to war was not an option.   Over a period of years one aunt  who survived wrote me the story of her experiences in forced labor after I visited her in Moscow, where she was living with her daughter and family. 

Reading her experiences and as many accounts as I could get my hands on  when I became aware of these relatives in the 1950s  brought me to the conclusion that sixty million was a big enough number of think of this as The Other Holocaust.

The other evening I went to hear Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, a fictional account of his experiences as a reluctant soldier in Vietnam.  It too was a holocaust of massive proportions.  It claimed the lives of more than  58,000  Americans and wounded another 300,000.  Estimates place the number of killed or wounded North and South Vietnamese at roughly four million soldiers and civilians – roughly 10% of the population. I recommend the book highly.

 His point was that instead of being “healed” of  experiences such as the Vietnam war, we should remember them.  Remember the horror.  Remember the uselessness.   Remember the waste of human lives on both sides. 

He writes: “War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.” 

 A holocaust only makes you dead.

And so I continue to write and speak about this other Holocaust that cost countless human lives.  I don’t think the exact number will ever be determined.  Is it sixty of seventy million? I don’t know.  Even one person who dies at the whim of another is too many.  We must never forget.

To Hoard or Not to Hoard

I don’t watch TV reality hoarding shows. Once was enough.  Looking on as  some  woman agonized whether to toss  a stack of Styrofoam takeout trays saved from McDonald’s  or  to keep  them was not for me.  People like her need more help than a TV show can give. 

Hoarding is not my vice. I learned not to stockpile from my mother.  She had years of experience with bare cupboards during the Russian Revolution of 1917-19, the  ensuing famine,  and then the Depression years in Canada. She learned to live more with less.

 In my little apartment the top and bottom shelves of my kitchen cupboards are nearly empty because I no longer climb on step-stools to look for a long-unused item or fold together like an accordion to retrieve  an out-dated can of beans near the bottom.  Extreme couponing to build stockpiles of food  is not my way of shopping. I see that as another form of hoarding.

But let anyone suggest I throw out files – or even books – and I’m defending my stash  like a she-bear with newborn cubs.   Let anyone recommend thinning files grown fat over the years and I tremble.  Clinging to paper is my besetting sin.  Clutching books to my bosom when someone suggests getting rid of a few brings on heart palpitations.  Books are friends on whose  margins  I have jotted notes and comments to the authors.  To get rid of  books  would be like saying, “Be gone, old friend, I have no  need of you.”  

De-cluttering is a task my age-people are encouraged to do, especially things.   If we don’t do it, someone else will do it when we’re gone.  Yet clutter—any kind-- whether things,  paper, even ideas, beliefs, pet words and phrases, or habits --  can bar  the  soul’s forward movement  even as the body declines with age.  And so I take my yellow pad and make a new list of what needs de-cluttering:

FAT FILE NO. 1 FEARS: Fears easily accumulate from childhood on up and  over-stuff the shelves of the  spirit. New ones are added each decade: fear of making left turns in heavy  traffic,  fear of the new pain in my left hip,  of parallel parking (I never learned that), fear of the  old twinge  in my right hip,  fear of forgetting to take a medication or  to make a payment on time, of  throwing out a document I should have kept.  Fear of the long night, lying awake hour after hour.  That  file has love handles, saddle bags, flaps, and overhangs, and more.   

OBESE FILE NO. 2 UNEXAMINED THEORIES AND BELIEFS:  Over time  certain favorite  beliefs find a stronger and firmer lodging spot in our thinking.  They start in early life with a  comment, sermon,  movie, article, maybe even a conversation,  and get stuck—firmly.  Protective fences and armaments are added with the years to make sure they aren’t dislodged accidentally.   These pet theologies find a comfy hiding place and are never pulled out into the light of day and from  protective safekeeping to be examined in the light of new evidence.  And eventually they take over the inner being and leave no room for new thinking, or better thinking,  about our set-in-cement  interpretations of favorite Bible passages.  And become the main issues in elections.

FAT  FILE NO. 3 GRUDGES:  I have been teaching writing personal or family histories for decades now and find that some of those wonderful people in my age category store grudges about events that  may  have only brushed past them in childhood  and  have now become  monsters still bothering them.  Preachers, teachers, parents, siblings,  business partners and many more--someone gave them a  sharp blow – and keeps giving it in memory, year after year.

OVERWEIGHT FILE NO. 4 PET WORDS AND PHRASES:   I cringe when someone calls me “young lady.”  I shudder when someone  with  an obviously  impoverished word bank who has never met me before calls me “honey” or,  even worse,  “hon.”   I  grow weary when TV interviewers  say, “Tell me a little bit about how  you felt.”  Why not  “a lot”?    Or  when  people on Antiques Roadshow respond to an evaluation of their cherished item with “Wow.”  Some say they weren’t going to say that word, and then do anyway.  And why bother to interview athletes?  I have yet to hear one say something significant.  It’s “like” and “you know.” Well,  you know.

So though I may not be a thing-hoarder,  I keep asking  myself, “What in the filing cabinet of my soul  is whole cloth that holds my inner being together and should be hoarded and what is wrapping paper and ribbon?” 

Jesus talked about not hoarding treasures that  get destroyed by rust or are eaten by moths.    Someone  who followed him  wrote  about another kind of hoarding—filling our minds with what is pure, just,  lovely, gracious, excellent, worthy of praise.  

What would a TV show about this kind of hoarding be like? Or a home?  Boxes full of  praises. Shelves full of love.   Files full of grace and forgiveness.  Cupboards stuffed with justice.  There’d be no room for, like,  my fat files of fears... you know.