The Great Work of Our Lives

...often involves reading between many close and hard-to-read lines.

Above is the closing paragraph of an article written by Chip Gaines in the Summer 2025 issue of Magnolia Journal. I had intended nothing more for myself this morning than the pleasure of some light reading, but these words led me in a different direction. Suddenly, I was wading through memories of hardship, learning, loss, and something else.

In August 2020, when I retired from teaching, which I loved, the pandemic happened and forced a reckoning. My sister Nancy was at the end of her life after a long illness. What use was a retirement dream of the future when faced with so many losses—of my precious sister, foremost—but in fact, of everything, including so many people all at once?

At the start of 2021, I began offering spiritual support to hospital patients, families, and staff. Birth, death, misery, relentless pain, the noise, the silence - reality struck hard, just as it had for me in 1979 when I'd begun work in a children's nursing home, ironically alongside my sister Nancy.

We were so young then; she was still in her teens. We were fresh out of a crappy "childhood," raised in a broken home of abuse and neglect, each of us in initial grief over the mere sight of the unspeakable afflictions affecting babies and young children. In one of my early days there, I found a linen closet to duck into where I wept uncontrollably until a nurse, Irene, found me. “It’s okay,” she said. “Cry it out. We’re all mothers here, and seeing what these kids go through affects us too. If you stay, you’ll get used to it.”

Nancy, seemingly less traumatized thanks to her buoyant good humor, encouraged me with an effective one-liner. "And we thought we had it bad!"

And so we kept showing up, working shifts together when possible, and becoming brave without realizing it. We became serious (better trained) and playful in our interactions with the children, and so it was they who moved us along in the direction of the women we eventually became.

We learned that joy is not just a feeling, but a powerful tool for healing. Joy is something other than happiness; its facets can't be counted, its depth can't be measured. It is the preferred language of children, and each deserves a full measure of it. So do we all, if we can locate the means to find it, which is the path of the risk-taking learner.

Looking back, I see that this is generally how I’ve been able to thrive through the kind of challenges we humans are destined to encounter. My teachers ended up being the ones I’d felt helpless to assist: the children. I can't speak for Nancy now, but she did live her forty-plus years after our shared experience with an enviable devotion to others that she cherished until the end.

My hopes deepened despite unforgettable sights and losses back then, and that's certainly the case, more or less, in the present. Hope can become a habit, an affirmation, or a phrase.

"And I thought I had it bad." That's a heart nudge, a signal of life fighting for itself.

Thanks to Chip Gaines, the children, Nancy, Irene, all the powers that be and ever were, for reminding me.