Author: marciaznelson

For a Better Future

The Wall of Death at Auschwitz, where people were shot. Photo taken by my cousin.

Today, Jan. 27, 2025, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and this year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. I visited there in 2011 while visiting my family in Tarnow, Poland, about an hour’s drive from what is now a memorial site and museum. I learned a lot there.

I learned that the first people deported to the camp were Poles taken from a prison in Tarnow in June 1940. They were not criminals but political prisoners — those who might have given the Nazis trouble. Considering that my dad emigrated from Tarnow to America in 1939 when he was 19 years old, it is at least conceivable that he could have been among the first sent to the Nazis’ largest death camp. The museum gives a number of 1.1 million people killed at the camp; others put it higher. Because the Nazis burned records of their crimes before they abandoned their killing grounds to avoid capture, the number of those murdered is an estimate.

I learned that Auschwitz-Birkenau was enlarged over the period of the war to accommodate more killing. The original Auschwitz, which was developed from Polish barracks, became too small to hold more than 20,000 or so prisoners, so in 1941 the Nazis built Birkenau (“Auschwitz II”). Most of what the museum calls “the apparatus of mass extermination” was in Birkenau. There’s more: “Auschwitz III” included sub-camps in the area for forced labor and farming.

Auschwitzes I, II, and III were surrounded by barbed wire to isolate and conceal activity within. Additional adjacent areas, administered and patrolled by camp personnel, included homes and support facilities. This adjoining area was “the zone of interest,” dramatized in the 2023 film of the same name.

Not all of the camp survived intact. I learned that a resistance movement within the camp staged what is known as the Sonderkommando Revolt on Oct. 6, 1944. Resisters destroyed one of the camp’s crematoriums. Women who worked in a Nazi munitions factory had smuggled out gunpowder to make explosives. One of them was Rosa Robota, She and three other women were hanged on Jan. 6, 1945, for their role in the revolt. Auschwitz was liberated just three weeks later.

People leave the memorial museum looking subdued, quiet. After we left, no one in our party — my cousins, my firstborn, and me —could speak for at least half an hour.

The theme of this year’s International Holocaust Memorial Day is “For a Better Future.” The future depends on a clear-eyed understanding of the past. I read somewhere in researching this piece that when you learn about the Holocaust you are obliged to tell others.

Now I have told you.

Busy Hands

I wonder how many hands Jimmy Carter shook over the course of his 100 years. I encountered him twice. The first time was via an interview for Publishers Weekly, where I worked in 2012. It was by phone, so no handshakes could be exchanged. The subject was two religious books he was authoring, one of which was a Bible: NIV, Lessons from Life Bible: Personal Reflections with Jimmy Carter. He told me he drew from his Sunday school lessons to develop the commentary he wrote, and we talked about prayer and faith. The interview is archived behind a paywall, so I’ll cite some of my favorite remarks by Carter. When I asked him if he had a favorite biblical passage or story, he said he liked the Gospel of John because it was emotional. Then he added, “I also like ‘Be ye kind to one another, forgiving one another.’” (Eph. 4:32). He also talked about his difficulties with praying: “It has been hard for me to pray. I prayed more when I was president than any other time. I prayed more the year the hostages were held by Iranians than at any other time. I think that’s the most fervently and frequently that I prayed.” Carter was 87 that year.

In 2015, I had to get up pretty early in the morning to report on a book signing at the Seminary Coop Bookstore in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. The Secret Service expected the press to show up at 7:30 a.m. for a noon signing; they were checking the premises early. The press included three middle schoolers from a program for talented students from families with limited economic means. These kids had done their homework on Carter, and were given the privilege of being first in a very long line when Carter arrived punctually at noon. I ended up not with an interview but a blog post which included a picture of three smart middle schoolers quizzing the former president, who was then 90. I also got a signed copy of A Full Life, a memoir that is one of 32 books he wrote.

Rest in power, Mr. President.

Sala de emergencia/emergency room

I hope I’m not too late to celebrate National Nurses Week. While its origin may lie in an economic desire to give nurses balloons and fancy cupcakes instead of the pay raises they richly deserve, this paean to these expert caregivers comes from the heart, not a card rack.

It also comes from experience. I’m a retired hospital chaplain who used to work nights, which meant I saw serious trauma patients and heart attack victims, many of them getting chest compressions as they were wheeled in. Full disclosure: I’m married to a retired pediatric nurse. But my most recent experience was different. I sat for eight hours in an emergency room with my retired nurse, who was in need of emergency attention.

Anyone unaware of the depth and variety of human suffering or in need of a refresher course should spend a few hours in the waiting area of a hospital emergency room. The sick come stumbling in. They’re not steady, but the pace of their arrival is. They are greeted by calm intake clerks and patient care technicians and nurses who assess them, sorting the more from the less sick because there are only so many rooms in the ER and so many staff and tests take a while to order and perform and diagnosis takes another while and the ambulances are bringing in more patients via another entrance. We are only seeing the walking wounded.

My husband is one of the less sick, so our wait is long but at least we’re in the right place if he gets worse and thank God he doesn’t have kidney stones like that lady and it makes sense to attend immediately in the gentleman who slides out of his wheelchair as he moans from back and leg pain and his wife stands next to him in sharp-voiced distress as four staff load him carefully onto a gurney.

“It’s always like this,” a patient care tech whom I know tells me. I worked within the emergency room on the wheel-in side. I spent little time on the walk-in admissions and assessment side, where the undifferentiated afflicted are triaged according to need of immediate attention. Seeing this stream of mobile sick people is eye- and heart-opening. I remember my own coping mechanism for responding to other people’s pain: these people are in the right place, they will get the care they need.

I do what I used to do: I pray silently for the people I am sitting among, the kidney stone lady and the man in pain. But I also pray silently for the staff, as they ask the same screening questions over and over, sometimes loudly to the aged or drowsy. Intake staff need machines to interpret different languages, triage nurses are calling other departments to schedule diagnostic tests, they’re keeping track of who needs what where when. It can take a long time to find your nurse but the nurse knows you and finds your information quickly and knows just who to talk to. “I’ll be back in five minutes” in an emergency room inevitably means 15 minutes, but the answer will come.

This is a workplace that sets the standard for “fast-paced.” Everybody wears athletic shoes. It’s rare to find a gray-haired staffer, though the ranks include some long-timers. Most of the staff look like they spend their days off in the health club keeping their 30-to-35-old bodies in prime condition. Only the doctors look a little more weathered.

Eventually my husband is given a bed in the emergency room, but after a lengthy initial wait we don’t stay there long. Tests and assessment have found nothing life-threatening, and there’s a follow-up test scheduled in three days. Day shift has been replaced by night staff. Nobody walks into an emergency room at night if they can wait until the next day, so the pace is different, with fewer but sicker, can’t-wait-until-tomorrow patients.

I told someone that nurses were my heroes. I may be prejudiced, but one definition of hero is someone who saves lives, which happens every day in hospitals.

Blessings and gratitude.

Words matter

Dear President Trump,

This is the first and last time I will call you by that title. For four years I have steadfastly felt that you are not my president. I did not vote for you, nor do I agree with any of your actions (except for the Great American Outdoors Act, which strengthens national parks). But as your administration comes to a close — and I pray fervently it will be sooner than Jan. 20 — I will desist from my stubbornness and acknowledge reality, just as you did in finally conceding that Joe Biden will become president and you will leave office.

You made it clear you are not going peacefully. Two of my fellow Americans died on January 6, 2021, as a direct result of the violent mob action you incited. We have laws that regulate what we can and can’t say in different circumstances. I yell at the television when I’m unhappy about some event I see on the news. But I don’t yell in space I share with other Americans — public space. Yelling tends to fan flames of anger. You have managed to do that without yelling. You have great rhetorical gifts. Americans can see, and judge, the use to which you put them.

As many have noted this week, words matter. They are not “just talk.” They can promote anger and fuel destructive, even seditious, action. They can inspire and fuel constructive or selfless action. We have four years of evidence of how you used your words to energize the worse angels of our nature. You could have followed the model of inaugural address set by Abraham Lincoln, who said in 1861 on the eve of the Civil War: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” You have consistently made different choices in your words, and some of your ardent supporters came to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, hoping for a second Civil War, making it a phrase and meme trending on social media.

Words matter. I was provoked to thought today by the words of two very different writers. One is Roxane Gay, whose provocative eloquence on the pages of the New York Times I often don’t agree with. But today she said, in response to the commonly expressed sentiment that what we saw on January 6, 2021, is not America. “This has always been America,” she wrote. She’s right. The evidence is in our history books. Go to the lynching memorial in Montgomery, Ala., to begin to understand what angry white people have done in the past to their fellow Americans who were black. For some, the past isn’t even the past, and the first Civil War still isn’t over. So Confederate flags, the ultimate political symbol of American division and homicidal hatred, came to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Words matter, and they are a gift. Roxane Gay, who is black, has the gift of being able to remind us of ugly truths rooted in our past and alive in our present. Gabby Giffords, who is white, has the gift of reminding us of more ugly truths: that hatred is eternally willing to take up arms and shoot to kill, as it did when the former congressional representative was wounded and six died on January 11, 2011. Giffords has worked for 10 years to get her life back, and her words back. She has consistently acted for gun control and regulation, using words and actions. This stood out in her eloquent words today about the current American mood: “People are scared, and they’re angry.”

Yes. I’m scared, and I’m angry. You, sir, were supposed to provide leadership, not self-serving sedition. You have been president of a Divided States of America, that division being encouraged by your words. Those words have mattered.

I’m inspired by the words written in a different spirit by both Gay and Giffords. They suggest to me what to do with my fear and my anger. Those emotions aren’t going to go away, but they needn’t express themselves by breaking down the doors of the U.S. Capitol. My gift throughout my life has also been words. One of the things I learned in the pastoral education that prepared me to be a hospital chaplain is a tool against fear: faith. The peers I spend time with have been known to say: Courage is fear that has said its prayers, a motivating sentiment first articulated by an obscure poet. I get up every morning, as do Gay and Giffords, after saying my prayers.

I will say once more: words matter. Some prayers can channel anger into words. People of faith have a deep tradition of doing that, a tradition that newly elected Sen. Raphael Warnock may also bring to the U.S. Senate floor. The tradition is prophetic anger, and it is eloquently modeled in the Bible, a trove of stories about a people making bad choices repeatedly, flouting guidelines they have been given for conduct, and following lots of false idols.

Mr. President, I pray for you:

May you receive what you have given.

May the memories of what you have done follow you to the end of your days.

May God deal with you according to your deserts.

May justice roll down like waters.

Amen.

Memorial garden

After more shifts than usual last week doing hospital chaplaincy, I have a few days off. I woke to spring sunshine and went for a walk in Nelson Woods — the woodland that adjoins our house. Last year I began a memorial garden there. The space is where I lay rocks or pine cones or other natural objects in my own ritual to honor patients whose deaths have particularly affected me. When I do that, I also symbolically release them. I turn the burden of sorrow into the blessing of memory.

Mind you, I no longer remember all the names except the most recent ones or the ones that really stand out. I do remember RB, who was my age, grew up in my Chicago neighborhood, and whose cousin I knew. That patient inspired me to begin this garden. Another stone is for R, who died in the pediatric emergency room on a night when I had to respond to three children’s deaths.

Today I lay a snail shell I happened to find in the woods to memorialize a patient who died of Covid-19, the first such death I handled. Many will remember that person, who functioned in a large network of people. Now I am a part of that group who mourn their passing.

I have never forgotten John Donne’s famous reflection that “any man’s death diminishes me” since I first read Donne decades ago. He wrote that in 1624 after recovering from an illness that was affecting fellow Londoners. As a chaplain who regularly meets people at the end of their lives, as well as their families, I am regularly diminished. Yet I have also learned that I am not called to cry for every single person. The psychological skill of boundary-setting has been challenging for me, a lifelong bleeding-heart liberal, but life-saving.

I can only read so many stories about people dying of Covid-19. I want those who have died to be mourned rightly by those with whose lives they are intertwined. But I also have my own business to attend to. In the hospital, I am called to another patient whenever the pager rings.

Another poem I read at the same time I studied John Donne’s devotional thought was Musee des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden, written in 1938 as Europe was sliding into the global conflagration of WWII. Reflecting on the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the poet observes how in the face of a disaster — a boy falling from the sky — “dogs go on with their doggy life” and a ship at sea near the fallen figure “had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

We can mourn. We can remember. We can be diminished. We have somewhere to get to and are sailing, not always calmly, on.

Quaker query: How can I balance my diminishment with my need to sail on?

Ephemerals

When I walk on my wooded property, I keep my eyes downcast. These days I’m looking for signs of spring in the return of the ephemeral wildflowers that grow here. The ground is covered with leaf litter, and the garlic mustard is already beginning to show its persistent face here and everywhere else. But I have my eyes on spring prizes.

The spring beauties are beginning to bloom. (I actually gasp with excitement when I find one.) Their small white petals have faint pink veins. Thousands of them are on the way; these are the first hardy arrivals. B057BA76-9E6C-48A0-BAC6-351EE6A186DB We bought this wooded property almost 20 years ago because we saw woodland wildflowers, delicate spring beauties prominent among them.

I know from last spring where different species will appear, so I walk and look and find the foliage of Dutchman’s breeches. No flowers yet, just lacy foliage. I didn’t realize they were related to bleeding hearts, one of my favorite spring flowers that was an old faithful in the garden where we used to live.

The more I look, the more I see. On a narrow path that last spring was a carpet of May-apples, I see elongated mottled leaves beginning to unfurl. Maybe white trout lilies? I’ll know in a few days.

6AA16634-F618-4F97-A6AD-FA3968270EAC_4_5005_c

29D29ED2-E49D-4D46-BBE7-289F22A89790_4_5005_c

There’s a book’s worth of lessons here: Gather ye wildflowers while ye may…The present moment is all we have…Hold things lightly…Beauty will save the world.

I will continue studying.

Look closer

My home, where I am sheltering in place when I am not working at the hospital, is surrounded by woods. I have been looking for signs of spring, which is officially here. Tiny green things are emerging in the leaf litter. I have fond hopes to see a classic host of golden daffodils in the front woods, courtesy of a friend of mine who gave me a (free!) bucketful of daffodil bulbs. I planted those in October’s dark days last fall. Now I see their skinny foliage emerging — a daffodil sticking a limb out of the ground, wondering if it’s safe to come out yet.

I am also monitoring the development of three witch hazel shrubs, which we planted because our landscaper told us we’d see flowers early. She was right. Its flowers are sneaking up on us, starting as inconspicuous reddish blossoms that pop into little yellow stars, clustering on slender stems.

My woods also has a marshy spot. My husband constructed some little wooden footbridges to allow us to cross that area without getting soaked.It is a hot spot for early growth, literally.

DC263AEB-D4D9-413F-84DF-1591C6A8467D_1_201_a Skunk cabbages — which to my eyes look like mottled eggplants as they open — are awakening. They make their own heat, melting snow.

Spring is offering many small signs of arrival. One of the things I learned as a volunteer at the Morton Arboretum working on the prairie there is that the more I look, the more I see. The truth of this never fails to surprise me.

Quaker query: What are small hopeful signs I can see if I keep looking?

Are you comfortable?

These days I am sensitive to words that promote anxiety. My own fear alarm goes off every time I hear a news story about “alarming new developments” about the coronavirus. Hearing about “fears of a pandemic” makes me fearful, reading that “hospitals will be overwhelmed” overwhelms me. I am not counseling the sugarcoating of news, the passing on of platitudes, or offering dismissive assessments of the magnitude of what we face. But emotion-laden words stir emotions.

Since I work as a chaplain and my husband is a nurse, we have lots of consultations at the dinner table, at least when our schedules at the hospital let us have dinner together. Right now he is putting in writing what he’s learned over 20 years of practice about what works with his patients. He is a pediatric nurse, so his patients are children, as well as their families.

A few years back he took some training in hypnosis. One technique he explained to me that makes a lot of sense for my practice is the importance of how you say things. You can ask, for example, “Are you comfortable?” instead of “Are you in pain?” The two words “pain” and “comfort” suggest different things. By what we say, we can suggest different ways for a person to process their experience. (Yes, there is empirical evidence for this.)

2D32C0CB-3219-491E-9CBD-813D21E8F956

Because I’m a writer as well as a chaplain, this makes eminent sense to me. Poetry works because it says something in a unique, imagination-grabbing way. Prayer and sermons have special rhythms and images. I am always amazed when rote prayers give comfort in times of distress. The words don’t even have to be new or original.

When I talk to families as their loved ones are dying, I often talk about love. I tell them to surround this person with their love. I want love to be present in the air even as the patient’s breath fades. I recently worked with a critically ill Sikh patient whose adult child told me it was important that a recording of spiritual teachings play continuously in his room so that the patient would hear holy words as he departed from life. I asked the nurse to honor this request.

The Bible is one traditional source of words that provide strength and comfort: I will be with you always. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. From the Qur’an: God will bring a people whom He loves and who love him. These religious words have secular counterparts: Keep calm and carry on.

So when I am working, I think before I speak. No, I don’t always pick the right words. But I find I often say what I need to hear as well as what I hope will be of service.

What do you want to hear? Are you comfortable?

Today’s prayer:

“Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone…”

George Fox

Handy term

Interbeing sounds like an abstract term, but I saw it in action at the grocery store yesterday. Interbeing is a concept at the heart of the Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat’s Hanh’s teaching. It means that everything is interconnected and interdependent. Interconnection is a lot easier to see during a pandemic (the Greek root of “pandemic” means “all people,” so there’s a hint).

For the first time ever, I used one of those sanitary wipes on the shopping cart I took. I kept my gloves on to touch certain things. What somebody else touches, I touch too. What somebody else needs, I do too. The shopping cart handle connects us. So does our need for extra nonperis hable goods. So do door handles of retail shops, and the handles on sinks in public bathrooms after we have washed our hands.

This could easily become an anxious list of what we literally hold in common. But I choose to think of it as a reminder of interdependence, common goods, and common good. Somebody else’s hands were on what I use. Somebody obviously made the goods I purchase. A lot of things in daily life are hands-on: made by hands (which often operate machines that make), taken up by hands.

Interbeing is both simple and profound, one of those Zen koan things for these stay-at-home times. We’re all in this together.

Calm presence.1

I work as a chaplain in two Chicago area hospitals. A good deal of my work involves meeting people in crisis. I have the responsibility of working with patients and their family members who arrive in emergency rooms because of health crises or trauma. Sometimes the patients are unconscious, in which case I am a companion to anxious family members waiting to see their loved ones. I can’t tell the people I meet everything will be all right — because sometimes that’s not true. But I can routinely be a calm presence, listening or praying or offering a cup of cold water or some basic instruction in deep breathing, depending on what they are open to.

In these days of coronavirus pandemic with much uncertainty and collective fear and anxiety, I find I need a calm presence myself. Since I know something about how to do that, and since another important practice within chaplaincy is self-care, I have decided to be my own calm presence. I am a health care professional, but I’m not the one on the team who is responsible for providing medical information. That’s someone else’s job. I know how to find information to become better informed and less fearful, since I used to work as a journalist. But that is not my job now.

These days, I get paid to provide calm presence. I’m not sure why or how this works, but I know from experience that it helps to be calm in the presence of anxious people. Calm is contagious.

One of the things that calms me down when I get stressed on the job — I see and hear hard and sad things, and I am called to attend when patients die — is to tell myself that I have what I need. It has become a simple statement of my faith: I have been given what I need. This too I know from experience. Because I am a Christian Quaker, I believe that God has provided this. That recognition prompts gratitude, which is also a nice, calming, all-purpose tonic. Depending on the situation I am working with, I may invite people to consider something along these lines. Chaplains sometimes talk about empowering patients, and I like to suggest to people who may feel like the applecart of their world has just been overturned that they are not helpless and can find inner resources. And, there is someone to help them begin to understand and adjust to this traumatic upheaval.

I don’t know how all this pandemic pandemonium will play out, but for me it’s good to remember that I can turn on a little inner light — a central Quaker metaphor and tenet — to see more clearly and less fearfully.

Today’s prayer: Be not afraid.