Whitney, the woman I wrote about in the last blog, passed away over the weekend ... she has been on my mind along with her two daughters and her husband. I remember her coming to a Heartworks meeting with her daughters last year to sell the bracelets they were making to raise money for Breast Cancer Research. They call it "Sisters for a Cure" and the bracelets are beautifully made out of soda can tabs. The girls spoke at the meeting while Whitney stood behind them, stroking their hair while they spoke.
I remember thinking that even though I barely knew this woman, and I don't know what it feels like to have cancer, I knew how she felt about those two little girls. I feel the same about mine. It made me love her. Love her girls and love the fact that 40 women were being reminded of how fragile life is ... how quickly it can change ... and how on any given day it can be our turn to set up chemotherapy treatments and have to depend on other people for meals, rides and play dates for our kids.
This is what I love about Heartworks ... how it sucks the ego, image and pretense right out of everything. The night these two girls stood up to tell us their story about having a mom sick with cancer, and why they make their bracelets, there was not one woman in that audience thinking about the shoes they had on, what their hair looked like or what size jeans they were wearing.
Simply put, Heartworks cuts through the crap and gets to what is important. It snaps us out of the false reality we can all so easily dwell in if gone unchecked ... the false reality of "that will never happen to me" and that if we love people enough, they will never die.
I stand by the door and watch women come into the meetings. I watch them blot newly applied lipgloss as they step into the house. I watch some of them keep their coats on to cover their "muffin top" or their "not hip enough" outfit. I watch how their eyes wonder around, surveying the house, taking in the decor and comparing it to their own. And at the end of the meeting, I look at them again, after witnessing someone like Whitney, living day to day in the true reality of the unknown with her two little girls hanging on to every moment they have with their mom. I notice that as the same women leave, the shine on their lips has dulled, their coats are now being carried, and the only place their eyes are wondering is to other women to hug goodbye until next month.
Without the willingness to get real, we miss the true connection that we all so deeply crave. Illness has a way of forcing us to get real. Heartworks has a way of helping us to sit with it. Shiny lips, muffin top and all.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Blowing My Nose While Walking My Talk
I have a ritual that I do every morning before I get out of bed. I reach over and feel my husband's shoulder move up and down, up and down, up and down as he breathes. I thank God for this movement, for the warmth of his body under the covers. I know we have another day together to raise our girls and I smile before I even open my eyes. Then I move my feet under the covers and become consciously aware of the warmth and comfort of my bed. Next, I envision all the people waking up on the street somewhere outside the picturesque town that I live in, cold and dirty and alone. I force my mind to picture them waking up without a soul in the world caring that they are awake or asleep. In my mind's eye, I surround them with the light of God and pray that someone will walk past them and offer them a cup of coffee or breakfast.
This morning I did not do my ritual. My nose was too stuffed up, my head was pounding and my hacking cough was going to wake my girls us waaay to early. So I lay in bed and felt sorry for myself for having this annoying cold for four days and now we were looking at day five. I waited until the last minute to wake up my oldest daughter and then jumped back in bed as she made her way into the bathroom. At breakfast she asked me why my face was blotchy and why I had two fleeces on over my pajamas. I told her I was still sick and I had the chills. When she and her sister left for school and my little one was content with the bag of pretzels she requested for breakfast, I climbed back in bed for a morning of mindless TV. The mess in the kitchen, piles of laundry and unmade beds made me sigh with sense of feeling burdened. I climbed back into bed and zoned out to reruns of "Beverly Hills 90210" thinking back to college and watching this in my dorm room without a care in the world. "Those were the days" I thought to myself.
Then I checked my Heartworks email account and the gift of awareness was handed to me as it so often is when it comes to Heartworks. There was an email written about Whitney, a woman who has been living with cancer for a few years and I have gotten to know through Heartworks. The update this morning was that she has been in the hospital all week and is really struggling, She has painful sores in her mouth and throat that are keeping her from being able to eat. She is in a lot of pain and her family is struggling because her daughters want to visit her, but she is in such tough shape they don't know if it's the right thing to do. I thought about her lying there in the hospital bed with those sores in her mouth. I thought about my stuffy nose. I thought about her daughters being at school yesterday and the Valentine's Day parties in their classrooms. I spent my afternoon at one and watched my 3rd grader rummage through her bag of valentines. I realized I had forgotten to be grateful for this. I thought about what Whitney would give to be up and walking around, clearing the breakfast dishes and doing the laundry and making beds. I turned off the TV just as the gang was arriving at the Peach Pit. I got my ass in the shower and thanked God for the warm water and the ability to stand up. I washed the dishes and said "Thank you" out loud as I rinsed each one. I threw in a load of laundry with a smile on my face, made the beds and read my youngest daughter a book I find dreadfully boring, but is one of her favorites.
The Heartworks emails continued to show up on my screen throughout the day ... A prayer request for a 4-year-old with cancer, a mom living in poverty, just across town who needs bottles for her baby being born next week, an opportunity to send a care package to a soldier at Walter Reed Medical Center, recovering from having his limbs blown off in Afghanistan. I sucked on my cough drops, took aspirin and drank orange juice. With every story emailed to me, my fever felt like it was subsiding. When someone is sick, people often ask me "What can I do?" I usually give them an answer they are not expecting: "Live your life today to the best of your ability. Take nothing for granted and be grateful for even the most mundane and boring tasks. Do this as a way to honor all the people who would love to be doing what you would tend to complain about today." This morning I had to walk my own talk and it saved me from missing a day of living in gratitude for my health, my family and my piles of dirty laundry.Thank you God; thank you, Whitney; thank you, Heartworks.
This morning I did not do my ritual. My nose was too stuffed up, my head was pounding and my hacking cough was going to wake my girls us waaay to early. So I lay in bed and felt sorry for myself for having this annoying cold for four days and now we were looking at day five. I waited until the last minute to wake up my oldest daughter and then jumped back in bed as she made her way into the bathroom. At breakfast she asked me why my face was blotchy and why I had two fleeces on over my pajamas. I told her I was still sick and I had the chills. When she and her sister left for school and my little one was content with the bag of pretzels she requested for breakfast, I climbed back in bed for a morning of mindless TV. The mess in the kitchen, piles of laundry and unmade beds made me sigh with sense of feeling burdened. I climbed back into bed and zoned out to reruns of "Beverly Hills 90210" thinking back to college and watching this in my dorm room without a care in the world. "Those were the days" I thought to myself.
Then I checked my Heartworks email account and the gift of awareness was handed to me as it so often is when it comes to Heartworks. There was an email written about Whitney, a woman who has been living with cancer for a few years and I have gotten to know through Heartworks. The update this morning was that she has been in the hospital all week and is really struggling, She has painful sores in her mouth and throat that are keeping her from being able to eat. She is in a lot of pain and her family is struggling because her daughters want to visit her, but she is in such tough shape they don't know if it's the right thing to do. I thought about her lying there in the hospital bed with those sores in her mouth. I thought about my stuffy nose. I thought about her daughters being at school yesterday and the Valentine's Day parties in their classrooms. I spent my afternoon at one and watched my 3rd grader rummage through her bag of valentines. I realized I had forgotten to be grateful for this. I thought about what Whitney would give to be up and walking around, clearing the breakfast dishes and doing the laundry and making beds. I turned off the TV just as the gang was arriving at the Peach Pit. I got my ass in the shower and thanked God for the warm water and the ability to stand up. I washed the dishes and said "Thank you" out loud as I rinsed each one. I threw in a load of laundry with a smile on my face, made the beds and read my youngest daughter a book I find dreadfully boring, but is one of her favorites.
The Heartworks emails continued to show up on my screen throughout the day ... A prayer request for a 4-year-old with cancer, a mom living in poverty, just across town who needs bottles for her baby being born next week, an opportunity to send a care package to a soldier at Walter Reed Medical Center, recovering from having his limbs blown off in Afghanistan. I sucked on my cough drops, took aspirin and drank orange juice. With every story emailed to me, my fever felt like it was subsiding. When someone is sick, people often ask me "What can I do?" I usually give them an answer they are not expecting: "Live your life today to the best of your ability. Take nothing for granted and be grateful for even the most mundane and boring tasks. Do this as a way to honor all the people who would love to be doing what you would tend to complain about today." This morning I had to walk my own talk and it saved me from missing a day of living in gratitude for my health, my family and my piles of dirty laundry.Thank you God; thank you, Whitney; thank you, Heartworks.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Heartworks of Bernardsville
Hi! Welcome to our Heartworks blog! I'm Megan McDowell and in 2004 I founded an Acts of Kindness group for women called "Heartworks" in my hometown of Bernardsville. Our mission is to continue on the acts of kindness that sustained so many families in the weeks, months and years following the events of Sept. 11, 2001. We meet the first Tuesday of every month and reach out to anyone we hear of that could use a kind act due to illness, accidents, natural disaster or unexpected trauma. My brother-in-law, John Farrell, was killed in the terrorist attacks and I have vowed to spend the rest of my life paying forward what has been done for our family since that day.
Our group has 30-40 women at each monthly meeting and over 150 women on our e-mail contact list. Our focus is on living our own lives as consciously as we can while reaching out to other people when we can do something to help them. Through practicing gratitude, receiving and giving we choose to focus on the fact that we are blessed to have homes, health and live in a safe town.
Heartworks is about the life lessons that come from service and consciousness and is a way for local women to feel more connected to each other on a deeper level than usual. There are currently six other Heartworks groups in existence and the goal is to make them as widespread as Oprah's Book Clubs.
Thanks for reading and please visit our website http://www.njheartworks.org/ for more information.
Our group has 30-40 women at each monthly meeting and over 150 women on our e-mail contact list. Our focus is on living our own lives as consciously as we can while reaching out to other people when we can do something to help them. Through practicing gratitude, receiving and giving we choose to focus on the fact that we are blessed to have homes, health and live in a safe town.
Heartworks is about the life lessons that come from service and consciousness and is a way for local women to feel more connected to each other on a deeper level than usual. There are currently six other Heartworks groups in existence and the goal is to make them as widespread as Oprah's Book Clubs.
Thanks for reading and please visit our website http://www.njheartworks.org/ for more information.
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