Seraphim Rose and the Church that Never Was

 

Seraphim Rose and the Church that Never Was

I have been re-reading Damascene's Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, and I find it once again encouraging/pushing me towards a much more serious Christian practice. I had for a moment or two last night a vision of trying to rebuild Holy Britain--and did those feet +Our Lady of Glastonbury+Our Lady of Walsingham--in the contemporary Disunited States. I found what seemed to be a wonderful Church of St. Brendan on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic. But it was a computer rendering.

Which makes me wonder how much of Seraphim's work was about recreating a Russia that was if not computer-generated, largely memory-generated. I do indeed think that it existed, but whether that kind of Christianity is what might save North America, I'm not sure. I do love the feel of St. Herman's however, and there are many biographies of recent/contemporary saints in that tradition, and that living connection is what seems to be missing in Holy Britain. The closest I can think of at once is Michael Ramsey. Memory is probably a better guide than computer simulation.

So. Here i sit, at my little flickering screen in a tin can on the edge of nowhere, with rain falling on the roof as I drink another cup of instant coffee and probably think of things much too high for me. I can't help but feel great remorse for a life spent erratically, a life with a scattered vision. Can I do more now than just say 'Lord Jesus Christ, son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner'? That is of course what I must always say. But what might be the answer in my old age.

Continuity and Change: Two Coronations

 Early on a June morning when I was six years old, I watched a bit of history, although I did not begin to grasp all that was happening at that time.  With a few hundred other children and adults, I sat in the auditorium of West School and watched the Coronation of the Queen of England by televison broadcast.  If I remember correctly, there were two television sets, one  towards each end of the stage, and I sat at the front of the left side. I don't know whether I knew what England was, or a Queen, but television was a new magic.  The only one I had seen before belonged to my grandparents, and they treated it with a great deal of awe and ceremony, But their set showed no programs early in the morning, and the broadcasts it did receive, from about three in the afternoon until ten or ten thirty in the evening, were from New York via Memphis, not from London. I could hardly see the screen, and I'm not sure if I even heard any of the music.  I have a vague memory that an Elgar march that had been played at my promotion ceremony a week or so before was also played for the Queen, but that might be some sort of Mandela effect.

This morning, I slept until a comfortable hour, made coffee, and watched the Coronation of a King of England on a tablet computer on my desk.  I did not get up at five, but just scrolled back to the beginning of the BBC broadcast.  I had no trouble seeing.  I could zoom in on details, and ask Google to identify the music playing.  Such an experience, which I would not have imagined seventy years ago, is something we now can do anywhere at any time.  

It has become commonplace to describe the many changes that have happened during the Second Elizabethan Era, so commonplace that I suspect a six-year-old watching the Coronation this morning might have found no magic in it at all.  But I want to focus on the continuity of the Coronation, of the Monarchy, a continuity which in many ways was both illustrated and orchestrated by Elizabeth, and which will become increasingly hard to maintain during the reign of her son, who one must admit is pretty brave to keep the name of Charles.  In our lust for the next new thing, for what we so blithely call 'real change', we often overlook the value of continuity.  It is continuity which allows the changes of our lives to merely batter and confuse us rather than destroy us entirely.

Let me share with you my view of the current era.  I suggest that we are still living in the long tail of World War I.  To simplify the situation, consider that at the beginning of that War, there were three great empires whose heads were grandchildren of Queen Victoria.

By the Armistice of that war--which was certainly not its end--the Czar of Russia was dead, the Kaiser of Germany was under garden arrest in Belgium, and only the King of England still had a head with a crown.  I would further suggest that it is the odd, rather unplanned, usually rather messy, British Constitution which allowed that survival.  I need hardly relate the various governmental atrocities which have followed in Russia and in Germany.

Shortly after the Second Act of the Great War, as the Empire seemed to be crumbling, a young woman became the Queen, and I and millions of other people who were young in 1953 watched her career as one of the few continuous acts of our lives.  U. S. presidents came and went, the French put on their seasonal riots, Russia seemed to rise out of the ashes of the USSR to try to become an empire again, and Germany, well, at least the fat lady hasn't sung yet.  Perhaps the most amazing development is that the British Empire has been the Commonwealth, to which the Queen was deeply devoted.  Think for a moment what a rare way of viewing the world the Commonwealth is.  It is an optimistic sort of realism that recognizes that we are all in this together, that our wealth, our health, is indeed common.  

Consider for amoment the array of flags lining the Mall upon which the marble statue of Victoria cast its stoney eyes as her great-great-grandson was crowned.  The sun never sets on the British Commonwealth, and it is, in my humble estimation, an achievement far greater than any previous empire or secret treaty organization.

And yet, there are many who want to abolish the Crown.  It's a new century, a new time, a new day.  Well, of course it is.  Every day is a new day, as they always have been. It is easy to fall into the gloom of Macbeth, and say that 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, /Creeps in this petty pace from dy to day,/ To the last syllable of recorded time, /And all our yesterdays have lighted fools /The way to dusty death.' 

And yet, among the mortal fools that so often strut upon the stage, it seems a better tale at least to strive for something more like Camelot, fleeting as that is.  It is reported by the polls and the tabloids that the young are mostly the ones calling for the disolution of the monarchy.   As an old man who was once young, perhaps my greatest wisdom is the recognition that what seemed to me wise as a youth was foolish, and that should I live long enough, what seems wise to me now will probably seem foolish.  I am grateful that my parents and their generation, confused as they were by the maestrom of change in which they found themselves, tried to pass on some continuity to me and my generation, that they in a sometimes small way were serving the future. That even as they encouraged me in the freedom to explore the new, the changes, they also tried to provide some sort of rootedness in not just the time of the moment but in a continuis stream into which we are dropped, much as Joyce describes, a 'riverrun, past Eve and Adam's,' so that we might enjoy the 'swerve of shore to bend of bay' so that it may bring us by a commodius vicius of recirculation back', if not to Howth Castle, at least to some familiar shore, one that perhaps we shall know for the first time.

So I was encouraged by the beginning of the second Coronation, when the King is challenged by a fourteen-year-old boy who says, more or less, what are you doing here, old man?, and the old man answers, I have come to serve you.  Call me a cock-eyed optimist, and I certainly recognize that the ceremony today in Westminster Abbey was a carefully orchestrated advertisement for Himself, but there was a recognition of what continuity is for and why we need it more than we need change.  Or perhaps it is that we need to struggle to maintain continuity, because change seems to be self-generating.

I mentioned Charle's bravery--or  wisdom--in keeping the name Charles, because I tend first to think of Charles I.  But of course there was also Charles II, who was not only restored to the throne but who also oversaw the beginning of the restoration of London after the Great Fire, during which he acted heroicly carrying buckets of water to fight the flames of destruction.  A statue of Charles II overlooks the turning point of the Royal Procession between Palace and Abbey.  

How Long, O Lord?

 

It is very early in the morning of the shortest day of the year, and  I am awake with my second cup of coffee.  My nearest neighbors are a flock of assorted birds, and their assertive rooster woke me, and my moving activated my 'smart watch' which told me that it was nearly time for Legacy Icons to stream Morning Prayer, so I thought, why not?  Television church always seems a bit odd to me, but it's an odd time and it has been another odd year.

So, I boil water and light a candle and hear psalms and troparia and a story of yet another virgin who wa martyred rather than let herself be defiled and a sermon about Elias and his prayers for drought and rain.  I am still a little punch drunk from having watched what has become my favourite Christmas movie,  Alfonso Cuarcon's adaptation of P. D. James' Children of Men.  I had first watched the movie in 2007, when it was first released on DVD.  Remember DVD;s.  They were a miracle that arrived soon after the radio.  I recommended it this year to a friend to watch as  the perfect movie for the Feast of the Holy Innocents, but he thought he might have to work that night, so we watched it on the Fourth Sunday of Advent.  When first I saw it, in bucolic Eureka Springs, the Seige of Seattle seemed like a fiction, and the Plague that had occupied the Earth by 2027 did, too.  Now, not so much.

Morning Prayer hurries along, as is normal in Orthodox services, a practice I still find a bit odd.  Is there really a great reward in heaven for him who can read Psalm Fifty the Fastest?  And then I listen to a video of Olafur Arnalds' Morning Sessions II.  Somehow I am shocked that Arnalds has become grey-headed.  How is it possible?  How long, O Lord, have I been enjoying his music, which is certainly as effective prayer as Elias'  How is it possible that already fourteen years have passed since I first watched Childreen of Men?  How isit possible that it is already another solstice morning, another Feast of St. Thomas, which only yesterday I celebated in the snows of Santa Fe.  I t was the deep midwinter of 1991, and I was taken with all things Celtic, and so we said the ThomasMass outside, processing a deep trench in the snow around the altar of cold stone, claiming the record for the coldest mass ever celebrated  intentionally  in Santa Fe history, before breaking fast at Pasqual's.  We of course prayed for peace.  Now eveyone from that little congregation is grey-headed or lying under the snow in that church yard where we had processed..

Arnalds at the piano seems like a grown-up Schroeder and I think that every Christmas is a Charlie Brown Christmas and that the question is always How long O Lord?  How long before we childen of men lean to number our days and apply our hearts to wisdom?  How long befoe we children of men might know the things which belong unto our peace?  Still, it seems, they are hid from our eyes.  How long, O Lord?  How long?

On Being a Whited Sepulchre

 December has arrived again, and with the making of lists of biggest hits of the year.  Certainly the thing that hit me the hardest in 2021 was the corona virus.  In March I did not expect to live to December.  I didn't expect to live to April.  In April, I was still feeling pretty uncetain about my suvival, and it was the end of May before I was convinced that my survival might be a good thing.

One of the frequently asked questions on Facebook and such is, if this were the last day of yur life, what would you do?  I hardly ever consider that question seriusly, but just think that I would go on doing what I usually do.  I am, not unhappy.  I am seldom ever even grumpy--although there wass that one afternoon last week .  . . .

But over the months since March that I have come to consider bonus months of a sort, I have begun to consider that question more seriously.  And I realized that I had become a sort of whited sepulchre.  For those of you dear readers who aren't familiar with the image, it is from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, where Jesus says:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulches,which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within fullof med men's bones, and of all uncleanness.'

Now, I ain't claiming that I appeared beautiful ooutward ot other people who saw me, but I was pretty happy with my life when I looked at it.  Indeed, I was practiving all of what in traditional morality were considered the seven deadly sins of pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.  Not so noticeably that I considered myself a grievious sinner, mind you.  I wasn't as [choose a sin] as someone I knew.  Besides, these attributes which were once considered sinful--that is, damaging to our personnages, to our souls, have become in contemporary society virtues.

Part of my wake-up call,  so to speak, was the attitude my friends had towards my illnesses.  I sawy illnesses because the United States had just gone through an election, and I voted against the party most of my good liberal friends thought would be the salvation of the country.  And they spared few opportunities to tell me that they thought I must be crazy--is this gaslighting?--because I had erred from the true faith.  Well, the party of light won, and nothing they have done has made me wish that I had voted for them.  Rather, they have just reminded me of the implications of the name Lufifer.  My regret is that I voted at all.  I regret that I got distracted from working on my own thoughts and actions and lgave energy to what is basically a cock fight or a pit dog fight Then  during the months that I was so ill from the virus, those same friends who were so anxious to convince me that I was mentally ill with wrongthink almost never checked to see how I was doing in my fight with the virus.

In the long run, however, I consider having had a fight with the virus to have been a blessing, because it reminded me of what St. Paul had said about our real fight:

'we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.'

We all will die. If I had died in March, the world would still  sing the carols of the  Adventt and Christmas seasons, stay up and drink too much on New Year's Eve, complain about the cold and slush of February and hardly notice next March that I was no longer posting cat photos on Instagram or writing occasional contrary blog posts.  But . . . .(Am I making a New Year's resolution?  I don/t make those.  But this is a sort of Advent resolution, and much of the western Church considers Advent the start of a new year, so . . . .)  But I hope during the months remaining to me to pay mor atttention to how I live, to recover the order of my life that I once followed, an order or attention and prayer that was designed to keep me connected to the earth and to the seasons, to my fellow human beings and to the other creatures with whom we share this earth, and to the One who created all of us, all creatures great and small and all creatures, as Monte Pythom reminded us, 

'all , things dull and ugl, all things small ad  squat, All things rude and nasty  . . .'

We are all in this together, and I am convinced that the tradition of the Orthodox Church is correct, that what one of us does affects us all/  There my be victimless political crimes, but there are no victimless sins. And so, as is the practice at Vespers in the Orthodox Church, I ask you, my brothers ad sisters, to forgive me, for I have sinned.

Always I Begin Again, Being a Slow Learner

 

My home town had a second rate college, which brought a lot of folks who might otherwise never show up in such a place but who couldn't quite manage a job in the ivy leagues.  Such folks often seemed like 'characters' to us 'normal' folk.  They tended to do things like drive Volvos and entertain strangers, and the town's gossip was juiced with stories of their activities.  One of the characters was the wife of a professor from Louisiana, up from the shores of Lake Ponchetrain to the hills of Crowley's Ridge.  I remember her name as having been Mylie, but that might be wrong.  

One day Mylie heard a knock at her door and opened it to find two nicely dressed women whom she had never seen befoe.  'Oh', she said. 'Do come in.  I've just baked some cookies and made a pot of coffee, and I'd love to share them'.  The women came in, and it is reported that the conversation centered at first around cookie recipes and then wandered to other topics, before Mylie remembered her manners.  'Oh my', she said. 'I've quite forgotten to ask you why you're here'.  'Well, we've come to ask if you're a Christian.'  'Oh my.  Of course not.  That would be much too hard, but I'd love to meet a Christian.  I've never known one.  Have you?'

Or, as Chesterton said, 'Christianity has not been tried and found lacking.  It has been tried and found difficult'.  I'm writing on the First Sunday in Advent, when the traditional epistle reading admonishes us to 'walk honestly, as in the dyay, . . . not in chambering and wantonness, . . . But put . . . on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provisions for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof.' I am enjoying a cup of coffee and listening to gentle Icelandic piano music as I write, fulfilling some of my minor lusts of the flesh.  I'd best not recount my stories of chambering mentioned earlier in the epistle. 

Now, most of the time I make no claims to be a Christian nor do I aspire to be one.  I have had episodes of such desires and claims, but they seem  much too pretentious in the long run.  I have spent some time as a fairly serious hermit, and it was actually a very pleasant life, but one that got swallowed up somehow in my desire to understand the world around me.  I was distracted not by drunkenness or chambering but by quantum physics and Google.  Nor do I find what calls itself 'the church' to be much help.  I mean, these days putting up a sign seems to make people a church, with all the attendant tax adantages thereof.  Only the strictest orthodox Christians seem to have a real claim on having 'out on Christ'.  

And yet, each Advent I back slide.  It's the music, mostly.  Each Advent I think I won't but I do listen to the music of English choirs singing the antiphons and hymns of the season, and I listen to English voices reading the ringing passages of Isaiah, which were I to quote on Facebook might get me banned for not following community standards, and I am a kid again, coming out of the west front of the church on Christmas Eve, having heard the song of the angels and now finding tthe deep mid-winter.  I want to move to Durham and live in a cave and visit the shrine of St. Cuthbert.  

Do I 'believe in one God, the father, the almighty, &tc.'?  Well, of course not.  I mean, why would the creator of the stars of night bother with one specific tribe of wandering Aramaens and one maiden in a small town on the edge of the empire.  Why did some other gods reveal themselves to the wanderers of Australia?  It makes no sense.  

And, of course I do.  Because it's a good story, because one needs a context from which to consider events, because even though  I was raised in a very watered-down part of the tradition of the western church, those bits of tradition would serve me as herms on a path to try to find the older and deeper traditions of the church, leading me (finally?--I'm not dead yet) to orthodoxy as much as one can find it these days.  

Because the image of the king, the sovereign, in today's Gospel is much more appealing than czars and presidents or congressses, all of whom seem to want to fleece their flock rather than to abide with them in the fields.  Because in today's gospel 'thy King cometh unto thee, meek' but then 'went into the temple of God, and cast out all of them that sold and bought in the temple'.  

Because I love the story of St. Seraphim and the bear, and living out here in the pretend woods I like to think I might have a similar life.  

Because I like to think that if the cousins George and Nicholas had been kings of the sort in today's Gospel, they would not have sent their soldiers into the fields of Flanders to slay one another, although of course I don't know of any king except in today's story who wouldn't act like those most christian cousins.  

Of course I will get over it.  I will make the mistake of hearing some contemporary sermon in which the highly-paid priest tries to remake Christianity in the image of his own political party.  I will see how much more excited good christians are by the Super Bowl than by the Incarnation.  I will then spend the next eleven months again as a cynic.  Cynicism is after all easily confirmed by the data.  But for a month, it will once again be my 'care and delight to prepare [myself] tp hear again the message of the angesls; in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in  a manger.'

The Things We Lost

 

Despite having followed all the CDC guidelines, and hardly ever interacting with any other human beings, I had the distinct experience of the Virus.  I  lost f March. April was a time of recovery so slow I wasn't completely convinced that it was recovery.  May was the first month when I began to feel happy that I had survived instead of wondering whether it would have been more pleasant to have died.  And even now, five months later, I am just recovering something like my pre-plague stamina,  I am still suffering from a pretty serious bout of Deep Vein Thrombosis, a condition I had avoided for nearly two years, and which I now wonder will be my new normal.

I know therefore from personal experience that the virus is not a hoax.

But.   I am writing this essay outside of a coffee shop that I once would visit nearly every morning,.  Now it is still closed for inside seating.  At the beginning of the plague year, I continued to come every morning because i wanted to support the business.  It's owned by a young  family with two children, and the place has what I suppose most succcincttly can  be called a good vibe.  The owners don'tt know when that will change.  They can't find staff for more service.  

The coffee shop is at least still open.  Many shops in my little are gone.  No more bagels with the picnic tables by the round-about with the view of the port and the mountains.  The bagel shop was one of the first to go.

I am not a bit follower of conspiracy theories, and yet . . . . It was Barach Obama's buddy Rahm Emanuel who said that no good crisis should be wasted.  And there were calls from such folk as Klaus Schwab who hoped the pandemic might be an opportunity for a reset. And it is yet to be seen whether the United States and other governments who have offered to be the 'saviors' during the crisis will be able to pay for their help.   Another round of 'free money' is going out to families with children.  I can't help but wonder what country those children will live in as adults.

Now, full disclosure of my latest status a a pariah:  I have not been vaccinated.  I don't know whether having had the virus has given me as much immunity as would result from the jab.  And I can't find any consistent data for the likely effect of the vaccine on my DVT.  I feel that there was so much disinformation from 'experts' during the early days of the plague year that I no longer am willing to believe anything they say.  

The virus probably cost Trump the election.  People made fun of him for saying things that he admitted were just guesses, or something he had heard.  It certainly didn't seem to me that such statements were very good actions for a head of state.  But the same people who made fun of Trump clung to the statements of the 'experts' who were also just guessing, but without the honesty to say so.  

I have often, during the plague year, thought of the Bastille song, The Things We Lost in the Fire.  I have no idea what the results would have been if the  'officials' had told people not to panic, bu to go on as much as possible with business as usual.  But somehow I doubt that the results would have been worse than they are now.  I suspect the economy will recover sooner than will trust in experts.

What an Odd Thing Is a Life

 

Today would have been my mother's  97th birthday, so today seems  a good time to think about her.  Of course, the memory is an odd faculty, and I can never be sure what is real and what is memorex. Besides, and this is one of the odder things about my memories of her, we had very few conversations from the time I started to school until she was a little younger than I am now. She was in failing  health and I moved back in with her to try to take care of her.  I say try, because I could see no reason she shouldn't be enjoying life and she was looking for some reason to die. 

 For about a five year period, I would go back to Jonesboro to find her not eating, and I would start cooking for her and trying to take her places, but she would say that she had some sort of deadly disease, and she wasn't afraid to die, and that she didn't want  the treatments.  She would eat less and less until she really did feel sick, and then she would decide that maybe she should get some treatment.  So, we would go to the doctor, who would say there was nothing wrong with her except that she was starving herself.  And she would start eating again, and feeling better, and start going out.  And she would tell me there was no reason for me to be there, and kick me out.  So I would go about my life, my now rather segmented life, which mostly consisted of kayaking explorations, until I got a phone call from either her or my brother asking me to return.  (I bought my first cell phone so I would be available on more or less 24 hour call.)  I think what happened is called rinse and repeat.

In retrospect, I think she would have been happier had  I just left her to starve the first time  But during those period when I was saying 'just one more bite', I learned for the first time really about her early life.  It was a much more impoverished life than I had ever imagined.  One easily forgets how recently electricity and indoor plumbing had come to rural Arkansas, or even to some of the towns.  It made sense of mother's delight in keeping the temperature at about 80 in the winter, when she wore summer dresses, and around 55 in the summer, when she piled on sweaters.  And why washing her children was almost a fetish.  She had grown up with no cooling, and wood stove for heat and cooking in the the kitchen, and baths in a tub in the back yard or the porch.

She was very romantic person, and also a sort of fatalist.  She believed that each person had one true love. For her, that person had been my father, who was two years younger than she but who had been accelerated in school.  He had a car when he was a teenager, even though it was a model T Ford, and he had seen her when she and her family first moved to Jonesboro.  He told his friend was was with him in the car as they drove past mother's house with outdoor plumbing that she was the girl he would marry.  And he did, in the midst of World War II.  He was sent to the Pacific, where he probably would have been killed during the invasion of Japan since he operated some sort of top-secret radio/radar apparatus that would direct landing ships, but the bomb saved him.  He returned to San Diego, where my mother was waiting for him in a boarding house full of navy wives, and where I was conceived in December of 1945.

As far as I know, her (their) marriage was pretty near perfect.  I never heard them argue, although she would get angry over his flying and pout for a few days.  I could hear their passionate making up through the air conditioning vents.  She found her dream house, with total climate control and a steady stream of ever-changing decor, he started a successful business, they had three sons, &tc.  Then my father managed to crash his airplane and kill himself.

Then began a very difficult time in her life, although I hardly knew of it.  She was having much more trouble with number two son, my brother who was four and a half years younger than I, and who was very disturbed by our father's death.  But she never really spoke about it, and I was off at school, thinking about my own imagined future as whatever it was I was going to be if the Vietnam War hand't entered the mix.

Oddly enough, since my mother didn't want to let anyone think that my brother was mentally ill, or perhaps because she didn't, she took a job after my youngest brother was out of the house and married off, as a recreational director at a mental health hospital.  There, her co-workers set her up with one of the staff, a man younger than she from Paragould, the town where she had been born.  There was some sort of party, and they arranged that mother and Alex would end up alone at the end of the night.  Not much later, they were married.  Alex was a much less interesting person than my father, with no hobbies that took him away on hunting trips or into the air.  It was a pretty placid affair, one that mother enjoyed after some rather tumultuous years with my brother and his problems.  Then Alex died.  

One of the reasons she had married him, she would tell me later, was that she was sure he would outlive her.  She didn't want to be widowed again.  When he died, she kept a photo of him beside her bed for just a few days, and then replaced it with one of my father.  She had divorced Alex, she told me, because he had died on her.

During the years that I was basically prolonging her death, I kept trying to find things that would amuse her.  Glenn Miller and Andrews Sisters recordings, for instance.  (She wore her hair in an Andrews Sisters style nearly until her death.)  A video player and Mickey Rooney and James Stewart movies.  And I bought a laptop and a subscription to Arkansas Net.  She was a little bit curious about the laptop.  I tried to explain the growing wonders of the world wide web to her, encouraging her to explore the world beyond her bedroom and Lazyboy.  Could she see the Officers Club in San Diego, she asked. The young Google brought up photos of a newly-restored San Diego Naval Station Officers' Club. Yes, she said.  That's it.  She remembered being surprised that Cokes cost twenty-five cents.  What else would she like to see?  Nothing. That's enough.  That't what it was like.

Mother never quite forgave me for not being a daughter, a status she had expected for her second child.  She had been very devoted to her mother and wanted a daughter who would have the same devotion to her.  She seemed a bit embarrassed that her son was shopping and cooking for her.  Eventually she hired the daughter of a friend to do those chores, and she would even occasionally go to the store with her.  But she was putting the meals, uneaten, in the garbage.  We never quite noticed how odd it was that she always took out the garbage herself, given her usual difficulties with such tasks.  We should have seen the clue.

Each bout of starving herself made her weaker, and eventually she moved into a nursing home, the only one she trusted, where she had for a while been on he staff.  Sometimes she thought she was still working and would start to run the charts and prepare meds.  One morning in February of 2003, she was in the hospital from a fairly minor procedure and the nurse brought her breakfast.  I don't think I will eat again, she said, and with those last words, turned towards the wall and died.