Paradoxes and Perspectives: On Nursing, Grief, and Grace

What if the biggest truths in life are found in the smallest moments?

In this episode of Piece of Work, I do something a little different.

I share excerpts from the final chapters of my memoir, written during the earliest days of COVID, when I was in nursing school, working at the hospital, navigating faith, grief, breast cancer recovery, and the strange paradoxes of being alive in such a fragile world.

This is an episode about:

• the tension of living between two faith traditions
• caring for dying patients and grieving families
• the sacred and heartbreaking work of nursing
• how birth and death can exist side by side
• and the quiet, ordinary moments that shape who we become

It’s also about perspective.

About how two people can look at the same set of facts and see something completely different. About how life is rarely either/or. And about how resilience is often built not in grand dramatic moments, but in the small things — a hand held, a breath taken, a shift in perspective, a little more love.

If you’ve ever felt torn between worlds, overwhelmed by grief, or hungry for meaning in the middle of ordinary life, this one is for you.

🎧 In this episode, I read from:

Paradoxes

and

Final Breaths and Other Small Things

from my memoir Piece of Work.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Welcome back to Peace of Work Podcast. I'm Danielle Tantone. And wow, it's been a week in my part of the world. I work at the hospital. I work full-time as a nurse. And we just self-schedule. So for the last several months, I've been mostly working Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and then I'm off Wednesday through Saturday. And by off, that means I'm not working at the hospital, but I'm doing all these other things, such as this podcast and taking care of my kids and writing and everything else. But I wanted to be off the previous weekend. So I thought rather than taking time off, I'm just gonna push my shifts toward the end of the week. So I scheduled myself Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, six in a row, which is no joke. People work six days in a row all the time out there in all these other jobs. And you think, and what's the big deal? Six days in a row, it's not that big of a deal. But 12-hour shifts, six in a row, with all of the physical. I walk like 11 or 12,000 steps usually when I'm at the hospital. And it's emotional and it really taxes your brain. I've had some pretty intense situations at work in this week and in other weeks. But anyway, I ended up getting called off today. Sometimes when there's a low census, there were two of us scheduled and they didn't need two of us in postpartum. So I ended up having a surprise day off. I did four in a row and then today's my day off. But I've just been reflecting a little bit about nursing, all the different jobs and all the different roles that I play and you know what I'm even doing in this life and what my goals even are. I've been looking into where I want to go with my business, with my coaching business, with my writing business, with my podcast. And in the past, I had let this podcast sit on the shelf while I pursued other things and I came back to it. And it's really a joy to record and get this opportunity to share my voice with the world. I've actually really enjoyed being very much more intentional and deliberate and consistent with this podcast. But I'm just swirling around with all these thoughts. And in some ways, there's this dream that maybe my coaching business can surpass the income that I get from my nursing work, my nursing job, and eventually I could quit my job if I want and just work 100% from home and 100% for myself and have way more impact, inspiration, and income, frankly. But the whenever I think about that, that what do I really want? And whenever I do spend a couple days at the hospital, I realize I don't actually want that, at least not anytime soon. I actually really love my job at the hospital, and I really am so blessed to be able to coach moms through childbirth, breastfeeding, and being a mom. And I I really do use this resilience coaching in my job at work, whether it's teaching them how to change a diaper swaddle a baby or telling them that it's okay to cry and it's okay to need some sleep and it's okay to put their own oxygen mask on first. All this to say that I'm just really blessed by where I'm at in my life, even though in some ways I still feel like I'm in chaos in the in the middle of so many different things. So this week on the podcast, I thought I'd do something a little different. I was discussing with a friend about Jews and Christians and what they believe and you know what Jews think of Jesus. And I was like, well, Jews don't really think about Jesus. Like he's not really part of it. And then I was like, I wrote about this in my book, and so I found the chapter from my book toward the very end where I talk about paradoxes, and it happens that particular section took place exactly this time of year, right before Easter and Passover, and right in the middle of COVID, so it was about six years ago. And I just thought I would maybe share that with you guys. It's the end of my book, so it's after this long journey of going through marriage and divorce and infidelity and all these things that I kind of work through in my book and learning about resilience and faith and going through all this, and then I go through breast cancer, and then there's this Herodactas chapter that happens right in the middle of COVID when I'm going through nursing school and I'm working at the hospital. And I just thought you might find it poignant and applicable to your life as well. Take a listen. Let me know what you think. Chapter 25, Paradoxes 2020 Coronavirus Time. The timing of the completion of my breast cancer surgical adventure on February 25th, just weeks before hospitals everywhere canceled any non-emergent procedures to preserve PPE and brace themselves for the onslaught of COVID-19, is providential and a huge blessing as far as I'm concerned. A few weeks after my second surgery, back from the spring break trip to Disneyland, we were able to squeeze in just before the park closed in definitely. Grace dubs this era coronavirus time. Everyone is home for an extended spring break, life slows down just a bit, and there's lots of togetherness, baking and hiking and playing outside. March in Arizona is glorious, and it's nice having the girls home to enjoy it. I tell them, this is how summer is in other places where you don't have to stay inside to avoid the heat. In April, I return to work at the hospital and everything is different. I'm afloat CNA now, so I go to different hospitals depending on the need. At first, I'm annoyed that my first day back I'll only be a patient sitter for a non-COVID patient. I want to fight coronavirus on the front lines. But I don't get to choose where I go or what I do. I take what I'm given. And sometimes just sitting and being with someone, listening to them and talking to them, is the most important thing you can do. I know my family will be happy to hear I'll be in just one room all day, rather than exposed to all those germs. I resolve to make it a great day, to bring love, joy, and light into that room and to make a difference in that patient's life. The hospital's halls are paradoxically empty and suddenly everyone's wearing masks. The last time I worked, just six weeks ago, you weren't even allowed to wear a mask outside a patient room, and even then, we only wore them for specific disease processes. I walk into the room, not quite knowing what to expect. The night sitter stands up from his perch on the couch by the window and walks over to greet me and give me report. He's comfort care only, so the nurses don't even really need his vitals. Just check his oxygen saturations every now and then. Comfort care only. That means he's dying. There is nothing they can do to save him. I glance over. He looks so young, and in the dim early morning light, he looks healthy. What's going on with him? I ask. Liver failure. You'll be able to see how jaundiced he is when it's lighter in here. Oh, I say, my heart breaking just a little. I've lost three precious and so very young friends to liver failure over the last few years. I feel an immediate connection to the patient who's about my age and could have been a friend. I feel a sense of gravity and honor in my job. I am the very lowest of healthcare providers in the hospital, but I'll be the one who will care for this patient most closely today, to see his progress, even if any progress moves him away from life rather than toward it. When the nurse comes back to check on him a while later, she tells me she's never cared for a comfort care patient. This is normally an orthoflor. Her usual patients are recovering from knee or hip surgery, not dying of liver failure. But everything's different in coronavirus time. With elective surgeries canceled, an orthoflora takes on all different kinds of patients. I spend two days with that patient and his parents, learning about his life and being there with them as they prepare for his death. It's a meaningful experience I won't soon forget. A few days later, I awake in the middle of the night with a tightness in my belly, a heaviness in my chest. I've been working on identifying negative emotions and sitting with them for a while, rather than simply trying to stuff them or numb them. I ask my body what's wrong, why I feel this way. I take some deep, cleansing breaths. This week has been tough, draining. Two emotionally wrought 12-hour shifts in that one little hospital room caring for a dying patient in the middle of a pandemic. Though his illness had nothing to do with COVID-19, it was juxtaposed against its backdrop, which has become all-encompassing, especially at the hospital. But as I sit with my emotion and feel my heartache in the wee hours of the morning, I realize my insomnia and stress have more to do with a different juxtaposition, one which is always poignant to me personally but feels even more so this year. Easter and Passover, Christianity and Judaism. Social distancing and virtual services have made it easier for the two sides of my faith to collide in a way that isn't nearly as harmonious as I wish it were. It's Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter. Yesterday was Good Friday. But it's also Passover, the Jewish holiday which commemorates the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. As both a Jew and a Christian, the rich shared symbolism of the two holidays to me is too obvious to deny. The Passover story gods perfect foreshadowing of the Easter story. They are intimately related and inseparable. In French, even the word for the two holidays is almost identical. Almost but not quite. The subtle differences themselves strikingly symbolic and utterly interesting to me, a bit of a linguistic nerd. Easter is Pâques P A Q U E S. Passover is P A Q E, singular. Many of my Christian friends are fascinated by my Jewish background. They love hearing the details of the Passover Seder that the Jews have celebrated for thousands of years. They immediately recognize the history of the Easter story and the symbols that correspond directly to the tenets of the Christian faith. It helps give context to what Jesus, a Jew, would have been celebrating during the Last Supper and the significance of what was happening in Jerusalem leading up to his execution on the cross. But for my family and friends who are Jewish and not Christian, it's not that way at all. They see it as putting a Christian slant on something that happened thousands of years before Jesus was even born. A festival that Jesus may have celebrated as a Jew, but that had absolutely nothing to do with the story of his life, death, and supposed resurrection. And I'm caught in the middle between two sides of a coin, both of which I see and understand so clearly. I usually bite my tongue and refrain from tying the two holidays and faiths together at my family's Passover Saver, out of deep respect and empathy for my mom. Her heart was broken when I became a Christian 16 years ago, but she loves me anyway and supports me even when it hurts her. I generally keep my mouth shut about anything Christian when I'm around my family, even avoiding mentioning church or Bible study too much. I compartmentalize for their sake, though for me there is no compartmentalization. The other night, our church did an online Passover Seder led by another member of our church who was raised Jewish and became a believer later in life. It was on Facebook Live and I joined the broadcast a few minutes late, on my way home from work. I had almost forgotten about it and I texted Mike to see if he and the kids were watching. He said, yes, and your mom is too. I felt a wave of hope and happiness that she was watching. I desperately want her to be able to see my perspective, even if she never adopts it as her own. But when I asked her the next day what she thought of the service, she said she only watched a few minutes. She was turned off by the suggestion that the items on the Seder plate could have had a double meaning, that the Passover story could have signified even more than what the Jews had been celebrating for thousands of years. She told me that the fact that Christians could look at these Jewish symbols at her holiday as having a Christian significance offended her. At first I was sad and even a little angry when she told me she was offended. How could you be offended by hearing someone's perspective that is different from your own? By listening to someone else's beliefs, I asked her. You taught me to be open-minded and tolerant of others. She didn't really have an answer for me. But I soon understood that this is personal. She feels robbed, like Christians have stolen what was hers and tried to make it their own, both the holiday and her daughter. Mike, who loves to loquaciously discuss anything and everything, came up with a perfect metaphor as he tried to decipher and describe what made her feel that way. Imagine you write a book. It's a memoir, your life story. You write it and you publish it and it's done, read and studied by millions of people around the world. Then someone else comes around and writes another book, but they don't call it another book. They call it the second half of your book, your very own life story. And they try to call the whole thing their book, our book, one whole book. They say that everything you wrote in your book points to what is in their book. But no, that was your book. They stole your book. They added on to your book, which was already written, complete, and they made up a whole new story, separate from anything you intended, but eerily tied to references in your book, which would be easy to do since your book was already written. All they had to do was read it and write their new book to fit the references. Wow. I can feel the pain, betrayal, and even anger that would incite at such a visceral level. If I had written my memoir and then someone else tried to add on to it and call the whole thing their own, I would be furious. That's outright plagiarism. I feel that. And yet, I still believe the whole Bible, Old Testament and New, really is God's book, written by men but breathed to life by God Himself. But I can't make my people see it that way, no matter how hard I try. And that makes me feel all tangled up inside, torn between two worlds more diametrically opposed than I'd like to believe. I'm both fully Jewish and fully Christian, an oxymoron and an impossibility, a paradox. I have so much to celebrate this week. My ancestors exodus from slavery in Egypt, and Jesus is sacrificing himself for me. But my joy is shrouded by pain. Maybe joy is always clouded by pain, and we are always surrounded by paradoxes, especially during a pandemic. The following week, my mom and I don't all the PPE, gowns, N95 masks, face shields and gloves. We enter the war zone of the assisted living facility, where her brother, my uncle Howie, has lived for several years. By the time we get there, he can no longer talk, though I can tell he has things to say. I don't know if he wants to whisper a somber goodbye, an expression of pain, or one of his trademark corny jokes, but I see him still in there. I know he can hear us and knows we love him. He has COVID, and we have been granted a final visit. I hold his hand, help his caretakers move him into an adjustable hospital bed provided by hospice, and sing to him, both the Hebrew prayers and a few sixties hits to make him smile. Not everyone is so lucky to see familiar faces as they breathe their last breaths these days. Hospitals and nursing homes have closed their doors to visitors in order to prevent the spread, and not all facilities allow these end of life visits. Hearing Uncle Howie struggle to breathe and not being able to do anything about it is excruciating. He's on oxygen and morphine to calm his breathing, but still his respirations come in quick, irregular, and obviously painful rasps. We clean his face and mouth, remove his dentures, help him sip drops of water from the little sponges that I asked the nursing staff to bring in for him. The hospice nurse tells us it won't be long. My mom gets the call before dawn the next morning. He's gone. My sweet uncle Howie lived a long and wonderful life. Fifty plus years more than he was expected to live after surviving a bad car accident at 25 that put him in a coma for months and left him permanently brain damaged. After grandma died in 1984, mom moved Howie here to live in Arizona. He had his own private apartment in a large group home. We'd spend hours there on weekends, mostly just hanging out while my mom made sure he was in good shape physically and emotionally. She was so amazing, his primary caretaker with so much weight on her shoulders. My mom may not be a nurse, but she showed me what it is to be one, how to take care of a person selflessly, doing the messy jobs, sacrificing time and energy for another person. She taught me how to be a good sister and a good human. And having Howie in our life, all that time we spent at a residence for disabled people, we learned to love, respect, and talk to people who were different. It gave us a compassion and an understanding that I didn't realize was unique. It's hard not to be able to mourn and celebrate Howie's life together, because I'm sure he would say that it was a wonderful life. Everything is more complicated when someone dies now. All those things you need to coordinate and take care of, even the funeral or celebration of life is affected. And there is a distinct lack of the social contact that is so very comforting to the mourning. Howie is one of the first 100 people in Arizona to die of COVID. The disease still such a mystery, not yet so politically charged, only a scary virus. We decide to honor him with a small drive up funeral at the Jewish cemetery. Only immediate family, my mom in her car, my sister and her family in their car, my dad in his, and my family in ours. The rabbi, a longtime family friend, pipes into our cars via FaceTime so we can hear her words, despite the 100 foot distance between the graveside and our cars. We emerge from the cars only briefly for a certain prayer that requires us to stand. After the short somber service, each car goes its separate way. But cousins and family friends still want to send us meals, so a few days later we spread out in the grassy common area behind my mom's condo with blankets and tables and try to keep the kids at least six feet away from their cousins as we enjoy a meal together for the first time in weeks. The week after Howie's death, I start working as a unit coordinator in labor and delivery. Most of my 12-hour ships are spent doing repetitive administrative tasks that I've never been good at, like creating patient files, answering phones, and stocking supplies. But it's worth it to get to hear those newborn cries, smell the tiny pamper swaddler's diapers. I love the thrill of donning an N95 mask and face shield to head down to the EER for the occasional OB trauma, bravely carrying the OB toolkit just in case they have to perform an emergency C-section. And the day I get to sit in on four different births, two vaginal deliveries and two C-sections, is eye-opening and life-changing. Every time I assist with a birth, I cry my own silent tears of joy as I watch that tiny head emerge and help encourage an exhausted but joyful mom to give one more push. This is definitely my kind of nursing. One day I help with a different kind of birth. The baby's heart has stopped beating and everyone knows he will be stillborn. It's heartbreaking when that tiny baby emerges and flops lifelessly onto the mattress. And though it's the first time I'm in the room for the birth of a deceased baby, we deal with IUFD, intrauterine fetal demise, with surprising regularity. As nursing assistants, it's our job to bathe and dress the babies who have died in utero, while the nurses attend to mom. We take photos of the lifeless bodies dressed in tiny colorful outfits. We carefully stamp prints of their feet and hands onto a memorial certificate and create heart-shaped ceramic molds for the parents to keep. To be honest, I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. While it's an honor and privilege to offer that closure and some mementos of an all too short life to those families, I'm not sure how much of that I would want if I was the mom. But every family is different and the hospital allows them as much time as they need with their treasured babies, something that I know was not available in years past. One morning in early June, the pandemic in full force, my first assignment of the day is to head up to the ICU to pick up a lifeless one-day old baby from his mother's bedside and bring him down to the morgue. I've been to the morgue a few times, and I've also been to one of the ICU units. But this is my first time in the COVID ICU unit, a circular pod of six or eight rooms around a central nurses station. Each room has a glass sliding door and can be monitored from outside, so the nurses don't have to go in and out so much. I don the yellow protective gown and gloves and switch out of my surgical mask for an N ninety five and face shield, and I enter the battleground. I greet the mom who speaks only Spanish. The nurse explains to her that I've come to take her baby. The tiny baby boy, no bigger than my forearm in width and length, is wrapped in a handmade blanket and lays on the bedside table in a white, coffin shaped box, with a pretty texture and a ribbon to wrap him up like the little gift that he is. But the mom wants to keep the blanket as a memento instead of burying it with her baby. So it's my job to carefully lift the baby from the box, unwrap him, and then place him back in the box. She's watching me closely. And I try to keep my hands from trembling, hoping my movements don't break any part of his perfectly formed miniature body. I take a breath and reach down gingerly. Even through my gloves, I can feel how cold the dead baby is, 24 hours after emerging lifeless from the warmth of his mother's body. After mom says her goodbyes, I pick up the little white box containing the baby boy who only knew life as a warm and cozy place inside his mother's body. I look into that woman's eyes and assure her in my broken Spanish that I will take care of her baby. I smile at her from beneath my mask, willing her to feel my love, to know that I see her. I wish I could give her a big tight hug. I've just come up from the morgue when I'm tasked with sitting as a patient companion to another woman. She hadn't known she was pregnant and doesn't want her baby. She wails about the mistakes she's made and how she can't imagine how she'll move forward now that she's pregnant with another man's baby and has no way to support them. She's too far along to get an abortion, as she'd hoped. When I accompany her to the ultrasound, she turns her head away from the screen and refuses to see her baby's heart beating healthily. But I see it. I sit there holding her hand, praying silently for her and her unborn child, trying to infuse my love and God's love into her. I tell her that I've made mistakes too, big ones, and that even if people can't forgive what she's done, life can go on and be better than ever. This baby could change her life in ways she can't even imagine. I tell her that she can still be, do, and have anything she wants, regardless of where she came from. Maybe she didn't have a mom like mine, who told her that so often she couldn't help but believe it. I have to be careful not to force my own beliefs onto her. That's not my business as a nurse. My job is to support her where she is, to empathize with her and to help her maintain her dignity. But I also always want to give people hope too. And here's what I know life can be short, or it can be long, and any life is filled with difficulties and hardships, some more than others. But life is also filled with beautiful, meaningful moments, and God can make miracles from our messes. A miracle isn't always a grand sweeping thing. Sometimes it's just the little moments, the perfect timing, the synchronicity, and the abundance of everyday life. Chapter 26 Final Breaths and Other Small Things Saturday, November 21st, 2020. My phone rings. This is Renee from Hospice of the Valley. I'm calling about your grandmother, she says. I just came to check on her. As you may know, they gave her a COVID test Thursday, and though we don't have the results back yet, she's showing all the signs, and I wouldn't be surprised if it comes back positive. Her O2Sats are 85, respirations 45, temp 103, heart rate 40, blood pressure 94 over 62. So we'd like to start comfort care, but just need consent. My own heart starts beating faster as I step into full alertness as I digest the info. She's breathing more than twice as fast as normal, yet her oxygen saturation is much lower than it should be. As a nursing student and nursing assistant eight months into this pandemic, I know she's reaching the end of her life, even before the nurse says these words. At 98 years old, she's lived a long, healthy life. Dementia has taken over her brain little by little these past several years, and it isn't much of a life now. So I feel relief more than devastation and a strong sense of duty. I have taken care of dying strangers at many different hospitals and facilities these last several months, holding their hands as they struggled to breathe, gently cleaning their faces, swabbing their mouths, changing their briefs. Sometimes I was the closest thing to family as they took their final breaths. As I've reflected on these deaths, I've thought a lot about how I'd like to be remembered when my time comes. I've only barely begun to make a dent in the great things I'd like to accomplish with my life, and sometimes I feel as if I haven't made much of a difference in the world. But there's an African proverb, many small people who in many small places do many small things can alter the face of the world. This reminds me to just be present where I am right now, to do what I can, even if it feels small, to feel all the emotions and not try to numb them. To love even the unlovable and to do the hard things, to find and create acceptance, joy, delight, and peace in the little things, to take a breath when I'm tired or overwhelmed, to notice the beauty around me, and then take another breath. It's a reminder that the smallest things are sometimes the greatest things. I hang up the phone and Mike looks at me expectantly. Nana, I say simply, it's finally time. The girls are scattered about the house, each doing their thing. We all pile into the car and head up to the group home where Nana lives, just around the corner from my sister's house. I bring the PPE I have in my nurse pack, but we decide not to go in. Instead, we visit from her bedroom window, where we can see her lying in bed with her eyes closed, breathing peacefully, clean and well groomed by her wonderful caretakers, even though they too are sick with COVID. They had only recently opened the home to visitors after being sealed up safely for months. The guest of another resident had unintentionally brought the virus in with her, and it had spread quickly among the staff and residents who live together like a family more than residents in a nursing home. At home that evening, I'm scrolling through Facebook, and I'm stunned to read a friend's post about how politicians expect us to be careful when they're out having lunches and conferences, how the death rate is so small, how this thing is nothing more than the flu, and she won't be controlled by the government. My heart races and I feel heartbroken that this is what she chooses to focus on, that each side sees the other as an enemy, that there are even two sides in this. Of course, I understand where she's coming from, but doesn't she see that we're all just figuring this out as we go along? Scientists, medical professionals, and politicians scrambling to figure out how best to control this. No one truly knows what is right here, who to believe even. And the death rate looms large in my world, regardless of percentages. I'm about to lose a second precious family member to this virus. Someone gave each of them COVID, not meaning to kill them. Maybe they thought it was just the flu. Maybe they didn't have any symptoms at all. I can't understand why everyone can't see this, why it has become a political battle instead of a worldwide rally against a common enemy. Not long ago, my teenage daughters were bickering, and I said to them, but also to myself, if we could spend half the time we currently spend trying to make our own voice be heard, listening. If we could take the time to see and hear the people we encounter, even those who are different from us, if we could seek to understand them, we might be surprised by what we learn, and perhaps the world would be a better place. There's always another side to the story, another perspective we were blind to before. Sometimes we all get caught up in our own view, our own version of the truth. There's this famous drawing that illustrates how we can get so hyper-focused by our own perspective that even looking at the same black and white picture, we can see something different from the next guy. I first encountered this exercise in Psych 101 and have since encountered it many times. My fascination with this illustration has nothing to do with the deep psychological meaning of what you see first, a young woman or an old woman. My interest lies in the fact that it really is possible to adjust your eyes to see the other side. It's hard to do. You have to step back, blur your eyes, look away for a moment, shift your perspective, and when you do, that there is more than one right way to look at the same set of black and white facts. As you change your lens, the young woman's chiseled jawline becomes the old woman's gnarly nose. The choker on her slender neck becomes the old woman's thin grimace. Her ear becomes the old woman's eye, etc. It may even be hard to go back to your old way of seeing it once you've seen the new image. Though it seems impossible, sometimes both ways of looking at something are right, even if they seem diametrically opposed to one another, and sometimes they're both wrong. Usually they're both a little bit of both, and the path is in the middle. The answer is finding a common ground, seeking to understand, and loving even when we don't feel like loving. We are all waves in the same ocean. Treating people with kindness and respect, listening more than we speak, seeking first to understand, this isn't just rainbows and unicorns. Forgiving ourselves and others when we make mistakes, treating people how they want to be treated, caring how we make them feel, and loving them as we love ourselves. This is the basis of the teachings of Jesus and every other coach or teacher I have learned from. But long before I knew about any of that, this is how I was raised. I learned this from my dad's family and their exodus from Egypt. I learned this from my mom and the way she lives every day. And I believe this is the answer to all the problems we face as a world. This is important, life-changing stuff. If I could go back and undo the hurt that I caused other people, I would. But I can't go back. I can only move forward and try to bring light and love to my world now. And having been in that place where I so desperately needed to be forgiven has built in me a tremendous capacity to love, understand, and forgive the people around me, and to move forward gracefully through my own life's battles with resilience and strength. My life is a tapestry, and I'm still weaving it. We are all a piece of work, a work in progress, and a work of art, all at the same time. We are all pieces of the Master, the great I am, no matter who we are or what we've done.