That's my pond. Circled is a baby fish, born to the white big fish you see on the left, whom we named "Jimmyhoffa" because she hides so well.  And so does baby, whom I had not spotted at all until Aaron came over for the first time last night and he spotted the little guy right away.  He said "I dreamt there'd be a baby, and there he is".  The endless baby thing.  If I had to call it at this point, both getting back together and him leaving me again in basically the same manner feel inevitable. I don't know what to name that feeling, which is very close to the feeling I have about my mortality - a kind of granite-weighted acceptance, shot through with joy and sorrow.

So, I won this grant for 100k to work for 2 years with a team of 5 people, 2 of us from the school (my dean and myself) and 3 from the local largest retirement/assisted/nursing/palliative complex to develop a curriculum to teach care staff how to add ‘spiritual wellbeing’ to the types of wellbeing they were responsible for providing, specifically to the imminently dying population of their residents.  I have no idea how to do that, of course.  But meh, neither does anybody else, so … in the end, if we succeed, I become an expert (i.e. a consultant) for this work, might go to palliative care facilities regularly, who knows.  But we have to succeed first. 

The basic parameters of the project is this: survey staff about what they know/think about spirituality now, teach them some higher level of attunement to spiritual wellbeing, then study the resident populations to see if it has beneficial effect (fewer anxiety attacks, for instance, fewer stress illnesses, etc). 

Okay, so first task: survey what they currently think.  This has to be a quick survey, not some long abstract thing, as they’re subject to just 20 minute training sessions at the longest.  Plus, and I didn’t think about this ahead of time, they read/write at a 4^th grade level overall.  This is what they RN leaders inform me of as I’m trying to write a 5-question format.  Some of the CNA’s are higher functioning than that, but I can’t bet on it.  So I can’t ask “Your spirituality impacts your work?” then give them a likert scale because the word “impact” is above the 4^th grade reading level.  Go ahead, try to find a synonym….Five questions took me days of going round and round about it.  It just strikes me as very odd work, a strange challenge, of taking my Spirituality in Lit course, wherein I throw everything from Emerson to Ginsberg at my students, and getting it into APPLICATION terms and then making those terms accessible to people who are way smarter than I am about all aspects of dying and/but who can’t read hardly.  When I’m not obsessing over my own personal life, I’m obsessing more and more over this project.  So let’s introduce the cast of the team, whose names I have to conceal due to IRB restrictions:

Reverend – she’s a Unitarian, apx 70 years old, formerly a nurse this is her second career and second marriage, both of which she’s been in/going for about 15 years.  Mid-meeting one day, she took a call from her ex-husband, their son was in jail again, about which she sighs and says “he converted to Islam, but apparently Allah isn’t getting his back”

Nurse – she is responsible for adding the care planning codes for spiritual wellbeing into the current system used, so that there are “diagnoses” and then “treatments indicated” for them.  She has a LONG list of everything that could be wrong with you spiritually, such as purposeless hopelessness loneliness etc, which all look like one word to me: Shitty.  Then a short list of symptoms including things like listlessness, to which I added about 25 symptoms that I myself had exhibited in the last few months (that cracked her up, but she took notes just the same).  We haven't written treatments yet.  But her first suggestion was “needs a gin&tonic”

Baptist Lady – she’s an RN leader for CNA’s and another kind of layperson-reverend as well, of the sings in church powerful black woman in the room variety.   She will be overseeing how the CNA’s get talked to, trained, and evaluated.  She is quiet and demurely imposing - she some kind of scares the shit out of me.

DeanJ – he’s my boss, to the extent that I recognize authority, which is not at all except by brute necessity.  He’s a philosophy PhD who hates philosophers for all the reasons he can’t help but be, such as snooty smart and disapproving constantly (reminds me of Ex, a bit, which is fine since I always liked Ex at WORK, just not at home at all).  I think we’ve actually become authentically friendly at this point.  I’m so “what the fuck ever” about everything now, like if your hair ain’t on fire I probably won’t bat an eyelash, which in the arena of academic hysteria is welcome.  I’m back to being work-yoda, basically, by virtue not of meditation and mindfulness so much as by the brute force of life having beaten me into a pulpy stillness.  DeanJ is in charge of measurement, will be running the stats and numbers on the results, etc.  He drinks half a dozen diet mountain dews a day and loves caffeinated play with excel spreadsheets.

We spend umpteen go-rounds on 5 simple questions, then to celebrate finishing the initial survey, we go to the in-house dog show, wherein the staff brings their dogs in and dresses them up in dog fashion outfits (tutu’s and Sherlock Holmes get ups, etc), and then walks them around the “run way” which is walking around the room stopping at each parked wheelchair and wagging tail at each elderly resident.  There is one old man there, so like my grandfather, so fucking happy to be entertained by the littlest shit, and every time a dog comes around to him, he shouts out “well will ya look at that?! Isn’t that WONDERFUL??!!” By the time he’s done it the 5^th time, I’m crying.