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"The giving of love is an education in itself." - Eleanor Roosevelt

Thanks to Louise L. Hay, I can tell myself, "I love you, Sheela," and not flinch. Too much. In the beginning, I looked into my own eyes staring back at me from the mirror, and I literally felt the self hate coming toward me. I had to sit down and consider just why I hated myself so?

But after telling myself "I love you, Sheela. I really do," those feelings have shifted, evaporated, and are not the ocean they once were, but instead a lake, a manageable lake, being drained.

Being able to give love to one's self is as good as it gets. If you aren't in love with yourself, you won't be able to love anyone else. Now that I can see myself as a loving person, other changes have begun. I am giving on several levels and letting go of the terror of fear and worry. Even as I just typed those words, I found myself starting to chew on a fingernail (or what is left of one).

It goes deep this notion of self hatred.

"It's all about love," my father told me the morning after he passed. So why should I separate myself from love and enter into the land of fear, so far from the light and depth of love?

It seems to be an Earthly problem. I read that we leave stress when we die. Time to die now. Time to live because I do love you, Sheela. I really do.

Giving me this, I know I will succeed and give back.

Yesterday during one of my Memoir workshops, a writer's husband walked in and we convinced him to stay and to participate. He oozed gentleness and good energy. And because there was a new writer in the group in addition to him, I asked everyone to introduce themselves. When it was the husband's turn, he told us of being the first born child to his parents who then divorced when he was three. He went to live with his mother, he said, who married a man who was poor. As a couple, his mother and this new man proceeded to have half a dozen children. I watched this lovely man's face turn somber as he looked at the table. He was not thin, nor overweight; he was just right with a round face, bald head, and enormous smile. But we could tell his story was a troubled one. "I was skin and bones," he said, "and always hungry."

But by 12, his father, he told us, had found him, and was able to convince him to return with him and to live with them as he had just remarried. And he did and grew healthier and found himself interested in school and subjects such as history, social studies, and more. But he said what he learned the most was that in those dark years he was blessed by girls, girls who noticed he didn't pull their hair to get their attention, and so they invited him home to eat dinners with them, and there he would walk into rooms with food from one end of the table to the other.

"I couldn't believe it," he told us, "food everywhere on those tables."

And when our workshop was over for the day, he walked with me out the door. "You know, I always feel like I owe women so much," he said. "I owe them to be kind, gentle, and to help because they helped me so much in my youth. I have been told," he said, smiling, "I am a feminist."

Yes, you are, kind sir.

Yes you are.

My younger daughter who just graduated from college finds free time to be frustrating. She likes the structure of school and work and the weekends can make her a bit distraught. "Find routine in your off time," I advised, telling myself as well. She and I are very similar, so whatever I tell her, I'm shooting it right back to me.

So much time I have let drain away while watching TV or biting my nails or doing both for way too long of the day (and night). Franklin Roosevelt once said, “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.” I told my older daughter recently that I knew I was being taught patience these past few years. There is a strong movement when patience and action connect. Erase fear from the equation and you have electricity.

Now I sit and wait patiently for my imagination to light up. I do not force it nor do I ignore it. I wait in a quiet room and when it is time, the words come. They need not be perfect, just visible. I then can see what lies in hiding, what has been waiting for me to wake up to and to act upon.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Franz Kafka: "You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait. You need not even wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."

This summer my goal is to finish "The Year of the Brown Running Shoes." It will be through routine and listening in which I will accomplish this magnificent task.

On my mirror in the living room, written in black eyeliner pencil are the words, "The only way to overcome fear is to walk right through it." I apologize. I don't remember who said it, but it is a strong concept.

This summer I will finish "The Year(s) of the Brown Shoes." I will show you how I've walked through fear.

Right through it.

Spent Sunday touring Boston with my daughter and my sister. It was so nice. We went on a 45-minute cruise around the Harbor, walked through the North End, and finished up on Newberry Street, drinking Chai bubble tea and splitting two slices of cheesecake. We hailed a cab, insisted the cabbie turn off the radio until we realized he was listening to the Celtics who in the next six minutes won the National Championship!

The next day my daughter graduated summa cum laude. We ate at the bar of an Italian restaurant, stopped for gelato, and laughed until we choked for air when we realized the cab we had hailed was lacking in padding underneath my sister's portion of the backseat. Three to five inches lower than us, we were the three bears, my daughter the tallest, me in the middle, and her the baby! "My gelato is mush!" she screamed heaving with laughter. "Hoist it out the window!" I said, flinging my arm backwards to show her how, and we laughed all the way back to my daughter's home.

Today I rode out of Boston, reliving it all. Normally I go home blue for my girl. This time it was doubled. Sis is back home, as am I, and my daughter is having dinner with other graduates. I'm sitting here seeing that liquid Pistachio gelato sloshing in the paper cup held by my sister belting out belly laughs over the obvious proportional differences in our seating arrangements.

When we got out of the cab, my daughter stayed, saying she'd pay for the ride. Sis and I watched her slide down into the flat as a pancake portion, and my sister and I stood there blustering with chortles of joy - as one darling young woman entered the educated workforce - and two mamas staggered back toward childish mirth.

Overcoming Fear: Learning to Live and to Die
A Tribute to Nancy Lee Hastings, Sister, Daughter, Wife,
Mother, Grandmother, and Friend

No matter what we go through or don’t
the moment of sleep, connects to the divine.
You, Mother, have been always in the center,
the eye of the needle. the lap of love.
I watch the circular fan above us and know soon your motor will stop,
but your spirit, I see you, Mother, the one who wanted
to overcome fear,
has.
--Upon Watching You Sleep
Sheela Wolford
April 12, 2010
Born at home on October 26, 1929 in Hotchkiss, Colorado, Lil’ Nan emerged on her first day of Earth as a blue baby. Today, she would have been referred to as a “premie” but in 1929, the method used to keep her warm and safe involved the inside of an oven door to support the infant’s survival methods. Her parents, Violet and Darrell Powell asked the family physician to name their fourth baby. “Nancy is a good name,” he said, and Nancy it was. Two more children would follow much later, but for a long while it would be Lil’ Nan as the youngest child.
Nancy Lee also was born a few days before the Great Depression. Her life – a big part of it – was spent on a budget and when there wasn’t enough money, she and her birth family ate from God’s land whether it was from the Victory Vegetable Garden or the rabbits shot and skinned by her brother, Dean as they walked the region’s deserts.
Nancy grew up in Moab with her sister, Helen Dorothy, and brothers: Keith, Dean, Fred, and Jerry. It is no secret how much she loved Utah’s Canyonlands, where she hiked with her family and later with her own husband and four children.
As a teen, she studied and took her education to heart and at her high school graduation, served as Valedictorian. But no one explained to Lil’ Nan that someone of her ilk had the right to be exposed to the greatest of colleges and universities. Instead, she climbed aboard a Greyhound bus at the age of 17, headed for Salt Lake to attend Henager Business School where she hoped to become an administrative assistant. Destiny, though, is a funny creature, and had other plans for the Moab girl whose legs once were so skinny, she lifted weights and was featured in a muscle magazine. Yes, destiny muscled up to Nancy’s humble dreams and instead produced a handsome young Air Force man, eyeing her from the other side of a public pool in Salt Lake where she was sunbathing and swimming with her girlfriends. Three dates later, Nancy and Frederick Reed Hastings would marry on September 17, 1950 with wry Destiny smiling in the background like a Chesire cat.
And whatever would befall or bless Reed and Nancy, they would withstand together. Early in her marriage, she’d experience three miscarriages before becoming a mother to Steven Bradford, Sheela Doreen, James Darrell, and Sandra Lee.
Nancy once said she felt most content while breastfeeding her babies. If only life could have provided such peace to her as that. But, again, Destiny fished around for a few obstacles and produced head injuries for Reed, and a benign tumor under her skull for Nancy when at 51, Lil’ Nan became handicapped, legally blind, and paralyzed on her left side.
Do you think it stopped her? Think again.
Clocking in 800 miles of swimming for therapy, and endless walks around her block, Nancy worked her frozen muscles as diligently as she had lifted weights to improve the calves of her lean legs. She and Reed volunteered at rehab hospitals to encourage those trapped in their bodies to continue to work to break free and move again. She rose two hours early on Sunday mornings to dress, put on her panty hose, apply lipstick and force a dress over rigid arms and petulant shoulders who made it hard for her to prepare for church. But she did it because she wanted to worship.
But let’s back it up a bit. Let’s go back to when Reed retired from the Air Force in 1965, after taking his Nancy to Germany and a tour of Europe and later with their four children to the forests of Alaska, lakes of Michigan, and cattle yards of Nebraska only to retire in El Paso, Texas because he loved the sunshine and his mother was recently widowed and living there, too. On December of ’65, in her new home on 9804 Album Avenue, Nancy took a towel and flung it upon her concrete patio and sunbathed, leaving the snowdrifts and winter boots of Michigan behind.
Now let’s see what you might not know about Nancy besides that she was a medical secretary for nearly 15 years at William Beaumont Army Medical Center and before that, a top drawer stay at home mom for 13 years.
Whether she was scrubbing the floors, typing in her wizard way in her Beaumont office, sunbathing by Lake Huron, sewing for her daughters, her home, and herself, or making lamps from diamond wood, Nancy Lee put her all into each project whether at home, office or church.
Ahhh, church. Nancy and her religion.
It was back in Alaska in the late 50s when she and Reed fell in love with salvation. Every baby born to them could be seen a few days old in church whether on a Sunday morning, afternoon or Wednesday evening at Bible Study. Most of you have probably been lucky enough to have heard her recite chapters of the Bible from memory. But no matter how much she knew about the Bible, no matter how much she professed to have faith, to want it, near the end of her life, Nancy worried about being good enough to cross over. How many of us feel that way, too?
Now she knows she is, was, and always will be secure in love: pure, boundless and free. She struggled with this, day and night a prisoner in her hospital bed, but just as we know, she realized everyone is welcome in her father’s house.
For while Nancy Lee Powell Hastings was having children, attending church, being a wife, secretary, seamstress, and honor student at UTEP, she was living and doing her fair share of worrying and stressing, but nonetheless living. And at the end of her life, she knew the truth. Maybe she’d had one too many fretful days or an angry moment and 30 years of being disabled, yet to know Nancy was to know her determination, routine, hope, forgiveness, and search for salvation.
In that order.
Before my mother passed, she and I spoke and I asked her to come to me in a dream and to tell me what her experience was like in crossing over and what it is like where she is now?
“I sure will,” she said, “if I can.” I also asked her to drop coins in front of us, her children and grandchildren: Robert Darrell, Leila Sandra, Sarah Nancy, Sienna Marie, Kenneth David, Jared Douglas, and Victoria Quinn.
“Where will I get them?” she asked.
“You’ll know,” I said.
“I sure will,” she said.
So to all of you, I suggest you start watching for those coins. I asked for pennies. “Quarters,” said my mother, and recently before passing instructed my sister to go to the Credit Union and get her lots of coins.
Take nothing lightly after Nancy leaves the building. Because her nearly 81 years of existence from a blue baby to eating blueberries to keep herself healthy, Lil’ Nan, is a presence we shall never forget and I – as I know you do, too – look forward with excitement to the day we see her again. I shall do as I did one night while serving as her hospice caregiver. I shall kiss her on the lips and if we kiss one – two- three times – I will tell her what I did that night, “Mom, I think we just made out.” And we will laugh again as we did then, until our bellies hurt.
I love you, Mom. We all love you.
Your passing is temporary. I will see you in my dreams. And expect a funny line or two from you, as well, just as you said that day at Sierra Medical when you looked at your cramped hospital room and said, “Well it’s not the Taj Majal, but it’s okay.”
Better than okay now, eh, Mom? I don’t want to say I told you so, but I told you so.
Look. There’s a quarter.
Te amo, Lil’ Nan. You are our love. – Love, Sheela