Day: November 16, 2017

Tafsela is 22 years old. She came here a little more than a year ago from Afghanistan.

I met her Wednesday at the RISSE refugee and immigrant center in Albany.

She agreed to have her picture taken and to talk about her  incredible life. She tells her story without expression or emotion, as so many of the refugees do.

She is part of a new series I have undertaken on the blog called “You Belong Here,” inspired by a quilt of the same name I saw in the office of Francis Sendago, the operations director of RISSE.

For me, refugees and immigrants are a seminal part of America, and they are under siege by fearful people and feckless politicians. I wish to show them as they are. They are us, they are our DNA.

I met and photographed five different immigrants and refugees, they are all students in RISSE’s writing and literacy classes. I will post their portraits over the next few days. Today, I wanted to concentrate on Tafsela, an eager and conscientious new resident of America.

I am eager to show people the true faces and spirits of refugees and immigrants. They are no danger to us, not a single refugee has committed an act of terror. They are not here to take our jobs or harm us, they are no threat to us. They appreciate America in a way only refugees can.

Most of RISSE’s students are refugees, and refugees only come here to escape persecution, horror, violence or a natural catastrophe.

They are deserving of our love and compassion – that is the true American soul.

“I love it here very much,” Tafsela told me. “Here, I am free.” The statement sent chills down my spine, many of us forget or never know what it is like to not be free. She knows.

She said it was very, very different for her in Afghanistan. Here, she says she will freely make her own decisions about life. It was the only time she showed real emotion, and great relief.

She is grateful for every day here. She has worked hard to master English.

I can’t imagine a more American sentiment than wanting to be free.

Tafsela is  the mother of a four-year-old son, who lives with her in the Albany area. The father did not come to America.

She was compelled into a forced marriage by her family when she was 14. I am not at liberty to say what happened afterwards, but it was chilling for me to hear, and she managed to get herself and her son to America. It was not easy, she is polite and soft-spoken, but I sense a soul of steel.

I think she has come to America at just the right time, no one could understand the women’s revolution better than Tafsela, she understands oppression in a particular way.

Tafsela intends to become a doctor, she plans to go to medical school. She has applied for a cleaning job at the Albany Medical Center, her first stop on the ladder towards becoming a doctor. Perhaps she can do better. Or perhaps that is the right place to start, not for me to say.

Tafsela seems quite poised and determined and looking into those eyes, I have no doubt she will make it. She is intelligent and well-spoken, she has worked hard to learn English and she knows it well. She is now working on her writing skills. I can almost picture her in a doctor’s office or a hospital.

She is impressive. Life for a single mother looking for work in upstate New York is not simple.

She is not discouraged and does not complain.

Tafsela is very grateful to be here. She belongs here. (If anyone in the Capital Region of New York is looking for a trusted and reliable employee, and is reading this, please contact Francis Sengabo, Risse’s co-founder. I can vouch for her, and so can he.  Help in this would be appreciated.)

It is almost certain that she would not be admitted to America today.

Francis Sengabo’s e-mail is [email protected], his phone is 518 505-1737, his address is RISSE, 715 Morris Street, Albany, N.Y., 12208.

Life is challenging Tafsela in America, she is very much on her own.

She has a car, but Francis told me she can’t afford the insurance so that she can drive.

She had a job cleaning rooms at a Best Western hotel, but she was laid off recently. She carries a letter of recommendation from the hotel manager who went to some trouble to explain that the reason for Tafsela lost her job was that this is the slow season for the hospitality industry.

As our conversation began to wind down – I had to get back to the farm – Francis wondered if any of the blog readers might help with her car insurance. I said that wouldn’t be necessary. I told Tafsela about the Army Of Good and she smiled, but was puzzled, i think.

I wrote her a check for $176, the amount she needs for her car insurance. Winter is approaching, and transportation is vital, for life, for her son, for work.

I am grateful to be back talking to the refugees and the immigrants. I am eager to try and capture something of their lives and show them what the soul of America truly is.

And it was a tonic to meet Tafsela just hours after learning of the death of Connie, who lived in the Mansion. This year I have learned that my response to conflict and sadness is to find ways to do good. it works.

Gus is not allowed on the furniture, and you can see how that is working out. Gus is the Prince Of Bedlam, we all inhabit his kingdom. Like a cat, he always seems to know where the sun is. He knows how to run, play, love and rest.

(A number of people have messaged to ask if it is appropriate to send flowers to the Mansion to honor Connie, and the aging process and the other residents in their mourning. I think it would be lovely to send some small floral arrangements to Connie, it would connect the Mansion to the outside world and recognize the great struggle of the elderly to live in love, comfort and dignity. The Mansion is all about that, and so was Connie. If you wish, you can send flowers to honor Connie, c/o The Mansion, 11 S. Union Street, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. Small displays, perhaps. The residents are being told about Connie’s death this morning.)

Maria and Red and I went to Connie’s room to think about our experience with her and say goodbye. She is no longer really there, but her blue chair is, the reclining lift  chair  you bought her but which she never got to see.

We stood and sat quietly for a bit, and I reflect on my time and work with her and some thoughts about death. I started doing hospice work more than a decade ago with Izzy and Lenore, and have continued this work with Red, and hopefully, with Gus.

I have seen many people die during this time – everyone, really, except for some of the Mansion deaths, and have thought a lot about mortality and what I have learned.

Death is sad, almost always, but it is not only sad, and Connie’s death spoke of that.

Connie always controlled her idea of death. She moved out of her son’s home when she saw or felt – that she was becoming a burden and an intrusion.

She was careful to make sure no extraordinary measures were taken to keep her alive.

In her final year, she committed herself to renewing her knitting skills, making caps for sick and newborn children, scarves and sweaters for kidney patients, fellow residents and Mansion aides.

She was always available to the other residents to talk, listen to their concerns, and she had a wonderful way of kidding with the staff, yet loving them. She was especially close to Kelly, the night supervisor, they had the most honest and direct relationship.

Death is not always a tragedy. In Connie’s case, it was liberating. She told me and Maria that she was prepared to go. She had the idea that God would summon her when he was ready for her, and she fully accepted that. She did not wish to be a great cost to anyone, or to keep up what she came to see as a charade that she would miraculously get better.

“I am costing the world too much,” she told me one afternoon. I did not have any kind of response. That is for her to decide.

In her final weeks, almost every part of her body began to fail, although her spirit and awareness never faltered. But step by step, she had to give up all of the things that made this year so special for her. She could not walk, eat, knit or read. She could not read all of her letters, nor answer them.

Two vertebrae in her back fractured, and she was in constant pain. It was obvious medicine had nothing else to offer her. She suffered from congestive heart failure and emphysema. She was not a complainer but a stoic and survivor. She tried to walk, but could barely breathe afterward. Like all of us, she need more than that to justify her life to herself.

Connie was a fighter, but there are times when fighting is not the answer, acceptance is.

In the last months, she could not undertake the fiber work with Maria that was so exciting for them both, nor could she make it to the farm. She did not wish to further burden her children, who she thought of so often.

I am not religious in the way that Connie is, and God does not talk to me, my own sense of that was that Connie decided it was time, the quality and content of her life was simply disappearing.

So her death was sad, but was also liberating. More and more, I see that the elderly need support in their own decisions about how to die. There was much admirable about Connie – her intelligence, strength, love and courage.

Her death was just as admirable as her life. I think it was she who decided to go to God, not the other way around. And once having decided, she just went.

I felt sadness today, but also relief. The last year of Connie’s life was quite beautiful and uplifting. I was so grateful to see a life end in that way. No more pain for Connie.

I have learned also to look forward, not back. Lots more work for me and Red to do.

I want to let you know that Connie Martell died last night in Saratoga Springs hospital, she was comfortable and with her family. Morgan Jones from the Mansion called me early this morning, and I appreciated that, her family requested that Maria and I be told right away, and I am grateful for that as well.

This photo is the last one I took of Connie, in the Samaritan Hospital in Troy, N.Y. this past Sunday.

First, I am thinking of all you good people out there who gave Connie one of the best and most meaningful years of her life this past year. I will not ever forget the yarn, books, cards, letters, needles and patterns that came to her in a river and transformed her life. Thank you.

“What does love look like?,” asked St Augustine.

“It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.”

What does love look like? It looks like every one of you.

Together, we  helped Connie and proved that we can make a profound difference in the lives of people if we look for good instead of anger and judgment. In a difficult world, we can lift people up, not tear them down.

Love also looks like the staff of the Mansion, who adored Connie and took the most wonderful care of her.

I do not have enough words to express my gratitude to the Army of Good. Connie appreciated you every day as she sat amid a mountain of yarn and read me your letters. She could hardly  believe your generosity at first, then came to proudly accept it.

You never once failed her, not even at the end, when she was fading and your letters and cards began to arrive at her rehabilitation center.

I went out to the barn this morning to tell Maria, and we both hugged one another and did some crying. Maria’s deepening friendship with Connie made  the relationship more meaningful. They truly came to love one another, and when we visited with Red, Connie beamed, as if she was in a cocoon of love.

It was poignant to see the two of them together. Maria would kneel down and the two would chat like sisters, Connie was open and unguarded with Maria, and the two of them planned many art projects in the future. Red would put his head in Connie’s lap, she would stroke him while she and Maria spoke.

We tried a dozen times to get Connie to the farm, but she was not physically to get there with her oxygen tubes and tanks and trouble walking. Connie fought valiantly to get better and back to the Mansion, but her condition worsened a month or so ago,  her body couldn’t come along on this trip.

We are both grateful that Connie’s pain and suffering was over, Red and I saw her body fail day by day, she could no longer eat, walk, or have a minute without pain. Her back was in agony at the end, she struggled to breathe.

Last Sunday, in the hospital in Troy, I knew I was saying goodbye.

I asked her for the very last time if there was anything I could do for her, a question i asked her so often it became a joke with us.

“Get me a new body,” she said, smiling. There was no longer anything else we could give her. She never lost that biting wit.

Connie adored Red and he returned the favor, she just lit up when she saw him, and he loved to sit by her feet and keep her company. Quite often, I would just leave him there while I did my rounds, and he was happy to be with her.

She was the Queen of the Mansion, I thought, I am sorry for the pain her loss will cause the residents and the staff.

She will be very much missed there, she was a formidable presence, and was sharp and focused right up to the end. She always knew what was going on, in her life and around her.

Last week, she told me she thought God was ready to receive her, and she was ready to go. She had no wish to stay past her time, and she was determined to shape her death. No feeding tubes for her, she told me, and she told the doctors as well.

Connie was feisty and sardonic to the end.

She loved to project her gruff exterior, but it could not mask a big heart. She told us Sunday that she had purchased a winter sweater for Gus and she wanted us to find it back in her room if she didn’t get back there.

She had hoped to knit one herself, but she could no longer knit. During the year, she made hundreds of scarves, hats, mittens and sweaters for children in hospitals, fellow residents and staffers with your wool, it gave her purpose and meaning in the last year of her life.

I loved to see her so busy knitting when I came, she had been a bit adrift before that. At night, she pored through the books and letters that you sent her.

I’ve been doing this work for some years, and I have always been careful about boundaries.

In hospice and elderly work, there is, after all, only one ultimate outcome. Getting too close is an invitation to burn out.

Connie was the first person I met at the Mansion, the first one I asked for help in supporting, the first one to be supported so consistently and thoroughly in this way. She was the mother of the Army Of Good in many ways, this work showed me how to do it.

Connie was my gateway to this mystical place in this difficult time, and she opened my heart up in many ways. She taught me the value of doing good rather than arguing about it. And your support for her gave me the confidence to go forward.

I will be honest, I am glad her suffering has ended, she told me many times recently that she was ready to go, especially if she could not return to the Mansion, which seemed more and more unlikely every day.

Maria and Red and I are going to the Mansion now to say goodbye to her room and reflect a bit on our extraordinarily relationship with her. Maria will miss her very much. Me too.

Thanks once more for helping her, and for her blue chair, which she never got to see. It will go to someone else who needs it.

Love and compassion to you. Godspeed Connie, I know you will be in a better place. This is what love looks like.