Important Update:

On May 14 from the ER in Red Lodge, Montana Karen Elise Nowak Shea was given a life changing diagnosis. She is presently receiving hospital care surrounded by the expertise and support she deserves. Unsurprisingly, her first request has been that her three mares Butternut, Oakley and Annie receive continuing care. An offer of not just right-timed, but extraordinary sanctuary for “the girls” has been offered, bringing Karen profound comfort. Compensation for pre-hauling prep, transport across three time zones and good faith forward funding are needed ASAP. Kindly donate to this healing cause. Your generosity will directly benefit Butternut, Oakley and Annie; once their transition is completed, donations will go thereafter to Karen's medical bills. Please: respect Karen’s request for privacy by refraining from contacting her directly. She is entirely focused on recovery. Know that Karen feels all your love and heartfelt contributions.

A Message From Tim

I entered the hospital last Tuesday morning, June 13th, with Karen, leaving yesterday a few hours after her repose. I was there 23 hours every single day, with the 24th for a walk or get a cup of coffee, and want to share a few things from this week that changed others’ lives.


Early Wednesday morning, around 1am, Karen become fully lucid for the last time after signaling to me she wanted to go to heaven and then entered hospice early Tuesday morning. We were both weeping. She started raising her two right fingers towards her right eye and I followed her lead. We touched the corners of our eyes, lowered them towards our hearts and drew circles around them, then we pointed the two fingers towards each other. We repeated this a second time…I love you, I love you. Then we touched our fingers to the tears coming out of our eyes and conjoined our fingers. She was staring past my head. I asked her if she was seeing angels. She nodded vigorously and with a quivering hand began pointing at them all along the ceiling. I told her to follow after them and I’d be alright. She closed her eyes and went back to sleep. I’ll never forget these couple of minutes as long as I live.


Later that morning, she again opened her eyes, but less lucidly. She immediately tried to raise two fingers towards her right eye but was too weak. I lifted her arm towards her eye, then her heart, and then back down….I love you. I repeated it on my own body…I love you. I asked her if she’d seen her Mom and Dad and she nodded yes. Then she made another gesture which I did not understand. She repeated it. I asked, “my dad”? She nodded yes. The next gesture blew me away. She gestured that he was there to comfort me.


When you spend 23 hour largely uninterrupted days with another human being for 8 days straight, it leads to a certain tension. Your entire being becomes a live wire, your heart enlarges, your spirit (the absolute essence of our humanity) exceeds the limits of your body and flows out becoming an aura around it. Something happened to me that’s never happened to me in my entire life over this week, and it happened repeatedly, sometimes with the same person twice in a day in different conversations. They wept as I talked. I often had to look away recognizing in this weeping not something sentimental or emotional, but foundational, something perhaps life changing for these people. Beyond the tension I felt in the brilliance of my love for Karen, and her for I, I did not understand what was happening. But the essence of life was crystallizing in me. Not in some fake, flowery pseudo poetic “inspiration”, but in the rawness of real, authentic human being.


Karen’s last day, yesterday, I learned what this thing I did not understand was for others, twice within a couple of hours. I had been up all night in prayer and vigil. Nurses came and went. At 5am I stepped outside to stretch my legs in the hall. Two nurses came up to me and said, “Tim, we’ve never experienced anything like this week. We are in awe. The intensity of love and devotion in that room is stunning.” A couple hours later Karen stopped breathing as my head lay on her right arm repeating the Jesus Prayer for her. It had been 14 hours of uninterrupted vigil with her.  I walked outside and sat with the doctor as the shift changed. In my grief I mentioned what her staff had mentioned and said, “it warmed my heart a little, and the words felt like new blooms in scorched earth.” She looked at me and two tears in rapid succession fell from her right eye and rolled down her cheek. “Tim,” she said, “you have no idea. That’s only the beginning. What my staff saw in that room over the past week changed many of their lives. When discussing your case in meetings my staff would weep. They had never seen anything like that intensity of love before.” I had never met any of these people previously.


And so, I wish all of you, at least once in your life, to feel the intensity of a burning love that changes not just your lives, which is easy, but others’ lives witnessing it, which is very very rare and a gift from God, so nothing we can control or make of our own will. There is a famous monastic in my faith, Father Seraphim Rose. “It’s later than we think, therefore hasten to do the work of God,” he said. The last 8 weeks have taught me the poignancy of this. We need to change ourselves, not others,, sanctify time, and don’t annihilate it with evil ugliness. The world is full of the latter, and we create nothing but darkness by adding to its unfortunate cliché. I leave you with a quote from an Orthodox monastic around the year 1300. In our troubled age, full of hate, spite, lying, anger, inauthenticity, scheming, self-righteousness, judgement of others, perhaps we can go back 700 years and learn something old anew again. 


“When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn’t change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family. Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.”


Warm regards,

Tim 

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Karen
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