Separations - Necessary Evils?: A Memoir

By Liso Makarius Starrett D. Min.

The book describes examples of separations as an opportunity for transformation and healing. These include early experiences from the authors personal life, such as missing her absent father as a four year old, and how she found a way to cope; once she moved to the United States she pursued a personal search for meaning, mostly spiritual, in unexpected places: during a vision quest, the World Trade Center after September 11, a bungee jump in New Zealand, learning & teaching how to walk a Labyrinth, becoming a Spiritual Director, Skydiving, serving as an auxiliary mounted police officer in New Yorks Central Park, becoming a pilot.

Later, her personal experiences and training helped her understand and connect with patients, who shared their lives during visits. As a chaplain, the author learned quickly that one cannot easily fix other peoples problems but can walk alongside them in their longing to heal and perhaps even discover their own spiritual potential.

From these experiences, the readers learn that there are surprising benefits to facing physical, mental, emotional or spiritual distress in life. They may also discover the possibility to heal and even to reach a higher spiritual level when they understand, they are not alone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491747766

Liso Makarius Starrett D. Min.

Dr. Liso Starrett has been a Board Certified Chaplain for over ten years. She grew up in Austria and earned degrees from the University of Vienna, Sorbonne in Paris, Union Theological Seminary (Columbia University) and Wisdom University in the United States. She continues to work with patients in hospice, psychiatric care and general hospital situations in the New York City area. She remains close to her two little grandsons who live in Colorado as well as with her brother’s families in Austria.

Book preview

SEPARATIONS - NECESSARY EVILS?

Copyright © 2014 Liso Makarius Starrett, D. Min., BCC.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-4775-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-4776-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number:  2014917128

iUniverse rev. date:  11/06/2014

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

I.   FORMATIVE YEARS

My First Separation

Wind Caught Deeply

My Journey

Covenant Retreat

Reflections on My Experiences as a Chaplain

Reflection about Dying and Death

II.   INTERACTIONS WITH PATIENTS ON HOSPICE

Discovering Hospice

My First Hospice Patient

Maria

Accompanying Parents Letting Go of a Grown-up Child

Losing an Unborn Child

Autumn

A Middle Aged Woman on Chemotherapy

A Hospice Patient

BB Dying

III.   INTERACTIONS WITH PATIENTS IN PSYCHIATRIC UNITS

Helping a Suicidal Teenager Find Purpose in Life

At the Edge

God Loves Me

A Separation Avoided

Forgiveness

RJ Finds Hope

IV.   FAMILY RELATIONS AND PARTINGS

Shooting Stars

My Family

Family Togetherness

Family Partings

Pushkin, Beloved Family Dog Moving On

Only Son Moving Out

Leaving one of my Chaplain’s Jobs.

Separation during a Retreat in Brazil

V.   WORLD TRADE CENTER – AFTERMATH

My Personal Experience

I Feel Compelled To Add An After-Word.

Facing death – finding God

Closing Ceremonies at Ground Zero

Post Scriptum

VI.   THE MYSTICAL – CLOSER AND CLEARER

An Inner Experience

Journey with Tiger

A Past Life Regression

The New York Blizzard of 2003

Could this be Memorial Day?

VII.   SACRED SPACE – HOLY GROUND

Scriptures

The Original Garden

Patients’ Sacred Space

To Bare the Soul

Encountering God in the Fourth Dimension

My Vision Quest

The Labyrinth

Ubiquitous fog

Greetings to Sister Sun

Wie wär’s mit einem Gebet? (How about a prayer?)

My Credo

VIII.   CONCLUSION

Summary

Final Thoughts

Comments on Hermann Hesse’s Stufen

New Insights

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote some one hundred years ago:

APPENDICES

Appendix I: Definitions of Mystical Experiences

Appendix II: Defining Necessary Evil

About the Author

DEDICATED TO MY BELOVED AUNT "TANTE GRETE"

MARGARETE von HEIDER

(1908-1997)

She initiated my compassion and understanding of others.

I did not say good-bye before she died − a lasting regret …

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Christopher J. Carter, Ph. D. for his editorial help.

With appreciation to Alan H. Burden for his suggestions & technical assistance.

Much love and gratitude to my family and friends for supporting me in this endeavor.

Foreword

Heart, take leave and be healed are challenging words. Broken hearts usually want to stay, hoping to put broken pieces together or find what was lost. Liso Starrett, experienced caregiver and spiritual adventurer, has learned a surprising secret. Leaving – moving forward and reflecting backward – is the secret to healing. Quite often, it also brings spiritual growth and transformation.

Liso’s book of personal revelations and stories of encounters with her patients is not long, but it will take more time than you think. Her reflections have a way of evoking your own. Perhaps it’s Liso’s style. She writes as one recounting an old memory to a trusted listener. Vivid details are recalled – a beloved dog sprawled out in the snow, tears at the leaving of the only son – and then, without obvious transition, she moves on to share an inner experience of many years ago.

You’ll be intrigued and think about doing this someday: reviewing your life and making deeper sense of it. If you do, you’ll likely have the joy and healing Liso found, sharing her thoughts and parts of her life with you. For as she says, caregivers can rarely fix things, but they can show the way and walk along.

Rev. Sarah L. Fogg, PhD, BCC

Palliative Care Chaplain

Rapid Ethics Consult Coordinator

St. John’s Riverside Hospital

Yonkers, NY

Introduction

A recent separation from my husband of over forty years prompted me to look back at my life. I reflected on the most important events and recognized a genuine purpose in most of my separation experiences.

My seminary studies and my clinical pastoral education exposed me to many different traditions – none were imposed. Therefore, while I am endorsed by a specific tradition, I do not represent a particular religious view point. I try to meet patients where they need to be and value the spiritual as an important aspect of becoming whole again.

It has proven helpful to follow the patients’ own inclinations and beliefs (or lack thereof), in order to find a place of deep understanding, hope and possible healing. Often these experiences turned into unexpected moments of grace and the possible encounter of the Holy.

I also came to realize that everyone has their own stories of separation which if explored in more depth can lead to a fuller and more meaningful life. It seems that through our innate potential for spirituality we can often find a learning aspect in personal separations.

These occurrences if consciously addressed can help us live a deeper life. It is perhaps by weaving our losses into a positive understanding of how we look at our lives that our specific situations can become not only more acceptable but at times also transformative.

FORMATIVE YEARS

My First Separation

My earliest memory of separation happened at age four or five when my father was sent to a work camp during WWII. It was the time of the bombings of Vienna (Austria) when the rest of the family moved to the country, near the Czech border, to live with my grandparents. I missed him very much. It curiously manifested in my saving sugar cubes for his return. He liked them as much as I did and they were hard to come by. On his short visits he was quite moved by my gesture and so was I. The sugar seemed to stand for the emotional bond between us. It appeared to demonstrate my capacity to maintain a continuing connection with my father while he was out of sight. It helped to soften the harsh impact of separation on each of us and affirmed the depth of our mutual affection.

The just described separation, while temporary, has brought a creative device to the fore as something that I may not have known of being capable of, otherwise, given my rather tender age. In a further reflection, it could also be considered a sacramental act as it included a small sacrifice as part of the offering. Sacraments are often described as outwardly visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace in this case a deep emotional bond.

Wind Caught Deeply

Wind caught deeply in the fir trees

Memories of walks with Pio (my father)

Fairy tale delights – childhood blessings.

Unless otherwise noted, all poems were written by the Author: Liso Makarius Starrett

My Journey

I will begin with my formative years and my need to separate from my family home. My life was pleasant as a child – it is only later, as a teenager, through my mother’s intransigent views of her expectations of me that made living at home difficult and eventually impossible: I had to leave in order to find out who I was and could be.

I left really twice – the first time to study in France and to complete my degree as a translator at the Sorbonne in Paris. It helped as a temporary fix for my problems. It was a three year sabbatical from a war zone where battles were suspended but each time I returned they inevitably resumed but did not offer a permanent solution.

The second time, I left by making the leap across the Atlantic with the help of a program called Experiment in International Living in the US. It represented another adventure that opened my eyes not only to the immense diversity of the American landscape but also to a very different life style. The hospitality I experienced, especially in the center of the country would have been difficult to imagine in Europe. There, possibly as a result of the recent war (WW II) people became suspicious of foreigners. Perhaps, living tightly together they lacked a generosity of spirit and, because they had been set in their ways for a long time, they lacked the curiosity to learn about others. In the United States, on the other hand, the mostly immigrant population had to be open to the differences of people in their adopted country as they had to be interdependent to form inner communities but also to face together dangers from the outside.

My whole being was swept up by this attitude and the surrounding landscape. The generosity of spirit manifested in my being offered rides to Yellowstone Park where buses for the general public were already winterized. Phone calls announced my arrival and while I often stayed in a YWCA, I just as often was welcome in private homes. A gift by one of my language students in Paris of a $99 - Greyhound Bus ticket valid for 99 days opened up an entirely new experience of visiting the better part of the United States. It sharpened my senses to perceive what presented itself in nature as well as what people had to share. There was, for example, a Vietnam veteran on the bus with me who talked all night about his recent war experiences. It sounded both very real and also