Davison Index

Life impact is measured in love

The VIEW from here


 

 

I am on the phone with my sister Susie while driving to work. We are carefully choosing our words because she’s already done her makeup for the day and doesn’t want to cry. After 35 years behind the chair as a hairstylist, she is switching careers to become a care companion for the elderly, a process that has required much prayer, thought, exploration, and tears.

Our bodies will tell us when a change needs to be made, and hers has begged her for a few years. For those who believe that hair styling isn’t a strenuous occupation, try holding your arms out in front of you for 12 hours a day while standing on a tiled floor. Multiply that by 35 years, and you’ll realize why even Moses required his friends to hold up his arms as he lifted them to God.

As Susie’s transition neared, her clients – some of whom she’s been with for her entire career – streamed in with words expressing gratitude, tears spilling onto faces, hearts overflowing with love. “Leaving my job is the nicest thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said, her voice thick with emotion. And I thought of how fortunate she was – and how fortunate any of us are when we are leaving spaces and people with whom we have spent so much of our wild and precious lives – to hear what it’s meant for us to be known.

“I am blessed, even though I feel like that is an overused term. I feel it,” she said. I am 100-percent certain her clients would say the same thing in light of her.

Susie is a wonderful stylist who can make anyone beautiful, but the thing that compelled her clients to keep their appointments was the chance to be in her presence. She listened. Cared. Loved. When her elderly clients couldn’t leave their homes because of the fear of Covid, she went to them. When they neared the end of their lives, she visited them, making them beautiful if only for their own enjoyment. She attended their weddings and baby showers and funerals. She laughed with them and cried with them and carefully listened to them as they told the stories of their lives, and they did the same for her.

As I pull into work, I think about what it means to know people like Susie, people who may not be family, but whose friendship and attentiveness have made them feel that way. I think about the people who comprise our communities who give of themselves in extraordinary ways. The ones who seem to embody the words of the poet Mary Oliver. “They stay in my mind, these beautiful people, or anyway beautiful people to me, of which there are so many. You, and you, and you, whom I had the fortune to meet, or maybe missed. Love, love, love, it was the core of my life, from which, of course, comes the word for the heart.”

Susie challenges me to listen closer and love deeper. To make the world more beautiful in whatever way I am gifted. To repeat the stories that make people laugh. To ask the questions that let people know they are appreciated and loved, and to know these are the most essential elements of what it means to have a successful, enjoyable career. When I consider Susie’s example, I find myself celebrating, lifting my own arms in praise.

Eileen Button teaches at Mott Community College and serves patrons at the Genesee District Library. She can be reached at button.eileen@gmail.com.