Yesterday, I walked a part of the Sonoma coast—one of the most beautiful and dramatic places in the world—and could not, for the life of me, relax. My mind was on auto-pilot with what-ifs and worst-case scenarios. It’s like I arrived at vacation and the only thing my mind had scheduled for our itinerary was “hand-wringing.” There were tick checks every time a long blade of grass touched my leg and frequent bag checks for fear that I might lose my keys or drop my new iPhone which had been an early gift for my birthday. There were the sadly ordinary split-second safety assessments a woman makes when she passes a man on the street—or the trail. And then there were the frequent safety checks against nature: always being careful to stay back from the edge of the cliffs, never going too far out onto the rocks for fear of sleeper waves. I found myself worrying that I was tired enough I might fall asleep and accidentally roll down the rock face or wondering what would I do if I saw someone else get knocked off a rock and swept out to sea if I did not have phone service in this remote place. I caught myself in a state of near-constant vigilance. Even thinking the word “vigilance,” I had the image of “vigil ants,” constantly busy with the work of being vigilant. 

This might be the expected adjustment one makes when they have spent much of the last year, along with everyone else, evaluating the mortal danger inherent in the most mundane tasks of life during a pandemic. And it might be a sign of the post-pandemic mental wear and tear I am experiencing at work. A few weeks ago, my hospice agency invited clinicians from all the disciplines to sit together and talk about this last year as part of a COVID-19 story-telling project they were developing. Usually one to have stories to share, I found myself unable to remember almost anything from the last year. I could not remember faces or names or any of the hundreds of conversations I had with patients or their loved ones. Instead, it felt like something profound had been cut out of my memory. In nearly 15 years of hospice work, I had never witnessed the depth and breadth of grief and suffering as I did in one year. It was ubiquitous. Yet, I could remember almost none of it in specific. One of our nurse practitioners offered that it felt like a “blur” for her, too, to try to remember the last 14 months which, to my great relief, normalized my experience. As a hospice chaplain, I worked far back from the frontlines of COVID-19 yet I was still feeling the effects of living and working under pandemic stress to the point that I was struggling to remember or make sense of the last year. Rather, trying to remember felt like waking up from a bad dream, how the feeling of a nightmare will stay with you but you can’t remember the details.  

This Saturday also marked the third year of my father’s death. And I have gotten in the practice of taking off the week between the anniversary of his death and my birthday to tend to my grief and contemplate my own life. I have lived with depression and anxiety long enough to know that “muscling through” is not a good strategy for me and taking time away is essential, as are therapy and Wellbutrin. Perhaps the idea of “vacation” is a bit misleading for what this time means to me. But having the privilege of PTO is one that I do not take for granted. And taking time away from the roles and responsibilities of work is something I should do more often, as indicated by the fact that I have not taken more than a few days off of work to do anything but grieve in nearly four years.

Sitting out on a high rock overlooking the Pacific Ocean yesterday, I realized that I was not going to be able to will myself to relax or let go of my anxiety right then. There was not going to be a magic movie moment of peace and resolution to match the magical landscape. Having made more mental space away from my daily life—which has recently included an enormous amount of checking out of life through Netflix and Instagram reels—I was faced with the reality of how constant my anxiety is right now. Something is moving through me that I cannot control or stop. Like the slow unwinding of a knotted ball of yarn, I can only work through one knot at a time instead of thinking I can attack the whole mess at once. I decided I need to accept this is the way things are for me right now and to offer self-compassion where I can’t offer solutions. 

All I could do to care for myself just then was to keep walking, to simply pay attention to my steps and my breath. I remembered a visit I had with a patient just a couple of weeks ago. He had been feeling discouraged, losing hope for his life. When we focused on those feelings, it seemed to intensify them without relief. He began to fall asleep on his couch and I thought I would need to say my good-byes, feeling as though I had not helped at all. Instead, he opened his eyes and asked if I would like to walk out in his garden. Carrying his portable oxygen tank, he slowly guided me to his backyard and, like a proud papa, began to introduce me to every flower and tree he had planted over the years. As he did so, his energy began to return. As he connected to what gave him joy, he began to radiate a kind of peace or contentment that had not been available to him just a short time before as we were focused on all that he is in process of losing right now. 

Inside the house, his son was tending to the bread they had been baking together before I arrived. As my patient was showing me the flowers in his garden, we reached a place in his backyard where the bread and the flowers existed together. “I can smell the bread and the flowers at the same time,” he said. When I stopped to notice the same, the mix of fragrances was unmistakably bread and flowers. I realized I had never perhaps been so conscious of two scents at the same time. We stood there quietly for a long moment simply breathing in the mix. Nothing had changed in his life yet he had found a source of peace within it. I was honored to share in the moment and felt peace arising within me as well. Before I said my good-byes a short time later, my patient asked if we could hug. It was a sign of where we are in the pandemic now that I could say yes. But as he had never asked for a hug in the handful of visits we had shared prior to this day, it also felt like a confirmation that we had shared in something intimate and true. 

“Stop and smell the flowers” is an unfortunately cliched piece of advice. But it was transformed for me that day in my patient’s backyard. “Smell the bread and the flowers” became my new commitment. And I turned to it yesterday as I walked along the coast full with all of my inner noise. I began to pay attention to the smells around me, the salt and the sunscreen, the flowers and the rocks. I could not always discern one scent, much less two. But it became something for my mind to turn towards instead of focusing on the persistent feelings of grief and anxiety that buzz through my brain like wasps in their hive. I would not say that the wasps were quieted by the practice. But I was able to see their hive in perspective as part of something bigger. The buzzing hive could be a part of the landscape, not the world itself. And with that change in perspective, there was a little more space for discovering something beautiful or new.

I woke up this morning feeling low levels of dread and anxiety. My mental hive is busy again. But in talking with a lot of people this last year, it seems that is true for most of us right now. Collectively, we are all doing deep grief work of some kind. It is both personal and existential in nature. Perhaps yours is more acute than mine, perhaps this last year is something that haunts you in vivid detail and that you only wish could be a “blur.” Perhaps isolation is something you do not know how to emerge from because you have been wearing an emotional carapace for so long to simply get through your day that you do not know how to do anything but stay inside. The world is chaotic and dangerous and ill in ways that cannot nor should not be trivialized. It is a scary time without an end in sight. There is no way out of this knotted mess, only a tending to each knot as we are able, hopefully with a little more compassion for other and ourselves as we work through each one. If we can lean into those places that give true rest, reveal beauty, and remind us of the simple joys of being alive and having a sensory relationship to the world, then perhaps we will find the endurance to keep going, to be part of the healing potential of this difficult time. If sharing my truth might help normalize something for you—as my nurse practitioner colleague did for me by sharing hers, I hope this helps in some way. My hunch is that however depressed and anxious we are that we won’t help ourselves by keeping it to ourselves. And if you have an opportunity to smell both the bread and the flowers, in whatever way that might be available to you right now, I hope you will find a resting place there, if only for a moment, to keep going.