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“Am I dying?!?”

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I didn’t mean to frighten the man sitting on the hospital bed in the hospital room, when I opened the door. I was just there to do a good deed. I intended to visit with him for a few minutes, maybe say a prayer – if that’s what he wanted, and then I intended to make a mark next to the room number on the census sheet in my hand, to return it to my volunteer supervisor, a kind man with a calm manner.

All I said as I opened the door, was: “I’m a chaplain…” The man who sat on the bed was dressed in street clothes, probably waiting to be discharged that day. His back was to me. As I opened the door, I didn’t know what to expect. Sometimes the patient was in bed, actually asleep with the hospital sounds ringing loudly down the halls and into the room. Sometimes, there were doctors present, circled around the bed, speaking softly to the patient. Sometimes, a family member sat at the bedside. I could see the sheets and pillow stacked in a corner on the window seat, and I knew they’d spent the night in the room with the patient. I approached each room tentatively; an introvert, greeting strangers was not easy for me, although I had had the volunteer gig for a few years. When I entered, I always asked if they would like a prayer. Some did; some did not. In the Bay Area, it was common to receive a “no” to my offer.

Before COVID hit us all with a slam and locked down hospitals and businesses all over the country, I’d volunteered for a few years. I liked the gig, then. I was able to walk from home to Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, a nice walk of about 5 long city blocks. And I’d met a good friend, Cherynne, who was also a volunteer chaplain, a Jewish woman who read to each patient she visited from the Psalms. She and I had lunch together a few times. After COVID shut us down, she and I had met in Alameda to walk along the shore of San Francisco Bay, a nice outing for us and for her dog. I would miss her soon, when she sold her house in Alameda and moved to Bellingham, Washington, during the pandemic.

I was shocked that day, when the patient with his back to the door answered my “I’m a volunteer chaplain” with his fear-filled question: “am I dying!?” I think I answered him, meekly, quietly explaining that I visited everyone on the floor. I think I did; I’m not sure. The patient was shocked. I was shocked. A few minutes later, when I made my way to the nurse’s station, his nurse told me that I shouldn’t walk into rooms with closed doors. That’s not what my training as a volunteer had taught me. And I made sure I asked about that when I told my volunteer supervisor about the event. He listened quietly and nodded. Then he told me that it was ok to go into rooms whose patient had asked that the door be closed. Oh well.

I liked the chaplain gig well enough. I did it for a few years before COVID hit us all and forbid many things, including hospital visits by folks who were not patients. Sometimes, I’d say a prayer. Sometimes, after I’d said a prayer, the patient would continue to offer prayer. Some folks knew how to pray much longer than I did. Sometimes, I’d chat for a few moments with a patient who was sitting up in bed, and leave the room without a prayer. Sometimes, I’d leave a small Bible or a pamphlet that I’d picked up in the volunteer room. I liked the racial and ethnic diversity I encountered at Kaiser; it helped me to stay connected to the community, the community I often related to when I’d been Pastor in downtown Oakland for many years.

I liked the chaplain gig well enough, but it didn’t come easily to me. I preferred the pastor role I’d left behind at retirement. I preferred that role because I had a relationship with the person I was visiting. As their pastor, I could sit and talk for a few minutes, say a prayer, bring greetings from the folks at church. As a volunteer chaplain, I was “cold calling,” a role that did not come easily to me, a role that I ended soon after my encounter with the man whose face I never saw, but who made a memory for me.

Quan Yin, quietly praying in my yard photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 9/2026

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Aretha, Diane, Dolly, Gloria

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I wasn’t on a first name basis with them, but each of these women – Aretha, Diane, Dolly, Gloria – were important to my life. Of course I knew their names. Even if they didn’t know mine.

My heart longs some times for those long, humid days of summer. I was in my college years, studying at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, on the East Side of Milwaukee. By some act of grace I had my parents’ car – a 1967 Chevy BelAir Coupe – for the day, as long as I showed up at the gate of A.O.Smith at 3:30 pm to pick up Dad from work. I had some money of my own – enough to pay tuition for each semester, enough to buy books, and my own room at home. Suzie had moved out early, getting married as soon as she graduated from high school. I had some money of my own, and time of my own, too.

Those were days of luxury, although I didn’t know it then. I was a few years off from graduating. I was free – in a way I would never be free again. After my summer class at the University, I’d take the long way home, driving south along the shore of Lake Michigan, WNOV playing “sweet soul music” on the radio, turned up, and me – singing along.

I loved that soul music. And I knew all the words. And a favorite of mine was Aretha Franklin. She’ll always be a favorite; sometimes when I’m working in the kitchen, I’ll prop my iPad up to the wall and play old albums. And I’ll sing along, just like I did on those languid summer days in Milwaukee. Aretha had been in my life forever – it seemed to me.

We were guests of my long time friend Joanne – I’d meet Joanne a few years later in the Social Security Office in Green Bay – when news came on tv that Aretha had died. “Oh…” I let out a small groan. I watched the news clips, Aretha’s familiar face and sweet soul music on the screen. Her death felt like a personal loss to me, a slice of my own story, my own journey, dying along with her. I had particular images of her in mind; I’d read that she arrived at each performance of her long career with her purse, which she placed on the top of the piano – to make sure she’d get paid.

I won’t forget you, Aretha.

*

And there was Diane. I’d admired Diane Keaton since her breakout role in “The Godfather.” In my college years, I’d made a spring break trip to New York City, and my friend Vicki and I had second row seats to see “Hair” on Broadway. As part of the cast who threw off their clothes in the final scene of the production, Diane Keaton had come into public view – completely.

I kept up with Diane’s career. The Internet made that possible. I read about her private life; after a long life with various partners, she’d adopted two children of her own and she’d apparently taken to buying up real estate. Like so many admirers, I knew about these things.

I won’t forget you, either, Diane.

*

Dolly. Dolly Parton was admired – not only for her music, but for her big heart. To me, Dolly had a real, true presence. She never forgot where she had come from, from a poor family in the South, and a life she’d left behind when fame caught up with her. From time to time, I’ll watch her sing “Islands in the Stream” on youtube. Her glowing presence shows up, even years after she recorded the song. Her glowing, kind, generous, loving presence. I loved to read about Dolly’s life, how she gave books to kids who wouldn’t have a book. I watched again an interview with Barbara Walters, the differences between the two women visceral on the screen.

Dolly, Dolly, we miss you so.

*

Gloria. Gloria Steinem. From the time I purchased my first copy of Ms. Magazine while living in Green Bay, I’d known about Gloria and the others – the women who spoke up, the women who wrote, the women who lived their feminism. I admired them. I wanted to be them. In my own small way, I tried to leave my own imprint at work, where I worked among men who had not had a woman share their position, their rank, at work. Gloria’s work spoke to me. Her path opened the way for me – and millions of other women – to “raise their consciousness” – to become aware of the second-rate citizenship the women of the world lived – still live.

I knew then that my name would not change – ever – if/when I married. The idea that I’d have to have a partner who accepted that without question did not rise in me, although that’s the way life worked itself out.
Gloria’s work and Gloria’s voice gave me courage to face my life alone, to begin to trust myself, to see myself and other women in a new way. What I learned from Gloria’s modeling has never left me. I expect that how I live out my life has been shaped by Gloria and the others who had the courage to see things the way they were and to say: NO!

My own feminism is gentler now. I don’t know if Gloria’s feminism came to have a gentler edge. I expect that life’s unfolding brought something to her own journey, as it has to mine.

Thank you, Gloria. Thank you.

***

As I write, faces and feelings come to my mind about all the years that have passed since these women came into my life. And just like that – it seems – they are gone.

***

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Moving – again

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I’ll always count the North Side of Milwaukee as my home. When folks ask where I’m from, I tell them: “Milwaukee.” And that was my home until I left Milwaukee to start my first job after college, when I trained in Minneapolis and was sent to Green Bay, Wisconsin as my first assignment in the Social Security Administration.

Now, when I return to Milwaukee for a visit to family or old friends, I skirt that part of the city, although I long to return again. I’d like drive down the streets I walked every morning on my way to school. But Milwaukee is a city that has suffered from its own racism, and after being deliberately bumped from behind in a rented car at a corner on the North Side, I don’t want to return again. I remember the days of Father Groppi marching from my neighborhood to the South Side of Milwaukee, across a viaduct, during civil rights days. Milwaukee was and is very racially segregated. The people have a right to be angry, but I no longer have a need to prove that I can do certain things.

Over the course of my childhood, my parents rented flats on the North Side. As an infant, I was taken home from Mercy Hospital to 9 and Juneau Avenue on the near north side, and over the years, we lived on many other streets – Ring Street, where I started school at La Follette Grade School, 2 short blocks away, 28 and Center, Medford Avenue at 26 street, which ran parallel to Fond du Lac Avenue, a major artery, and then a flat on 49 Street South of Burleigh, across the street from St. Joe’s Hospital School of Nursing. From there, I walked to Washington High School. And that’s where we lived when I graduated from High School and began university at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, on the East Side.

A city kid, I was familiar with buses and took them everywhere, until I got my driver’s license at 17. Then, I shared the Bel Air coupe with my parents – after Mom had driven Dad to work at A.O. Smith on Capital Drive – when I needed it to get to classes at UW-M.

When I was growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the streets were still lined with majestic maple and elm trees until Dutch Elm disease cleared out the elms. And except for the months of winter, the trees met magically overhead across streets. For all its simplicity and even modesty, the streets were beautiful then. In the winter time, children – myself included – walked all the way to school along the top of snowbanks formed when city trucks shoveled the snow onto the narrow strip of concrete that marked the edge of the sidewalk. We’d climb the snowbank at the end of a block and walk clear along the top to the other end, which marked an alley or street.

But we moved a lot. I think it’s tough on a kid to move to another home, another school. And I think it was especially tough because my mother, who shouldered most of the responsibility for finding a place and for setting the move into motion, was anxious, always, about our safety. We always moved to a beautiful upper flat in a building that we called a “flat.” Another family lived below us; below the first floor was a full basement and above the upper flat was a full attic. Our flat was always beautiful because Mom preferred that the wooden frames around windows and doors not be painted over. And those flats – built some time after 1900 – had small rooms with a tiny inner hall with cupboards and where the doors to two bedrooms and the bathroom gathered together. We’d move when Mom had some beef with the landlord, the landlord, the person Daddy called, “Boss,” with a smile.

I shared a room with my little sister, Suzie, and until my brother Ronnie moved away to be married, and we always had a place with three bedrooms. Those old flats had a pantry with a window, cupboards on two sides. At Medford Avenue, the place had a lovely butler pantry.

We’d move when Mom was angry at the landlord for some reason, or we’d move when Mom wanted us to study at a different public school. In memory, it is always Mom who made the decision. I expect that’s accurate. Dad was a hard working, strong, union man, but he left the decisions to my mother. And if anyone could carry out what was needed, it was Mom. When Suzie was still in the stroller, I have a memory of walking in the neighborhood when Mom spotted a “for rent” sign on a house, and when she left me at the curb with my baby sister in her stroller. Mom marched angrily down the steps after the woman who answered the door spotted us waiting on the sidewalk and told Mom they didn’t rent to families with children.

I expect I felt a kind of shame at the simplicity, the poverty of those places. Once, walking to school with my friend Nancy, who lived down the street from me with her grandparents, on Medford Avenue, asked me why my parents rented their house. She had a way of saying things that are better left unsaid, I think. I don’t remember my answer, but I remember how I felt. I didn’t know the answer to her question. Now, I think that my parents had both grown up poor, although both were hard workers, and Dad was grateful to have landed a union job in the steel mill after the War. It would have been too big a stretch for them to own their own place. That was that.

In the summers, my family sat together on the front porch of our upper flat – wherever it was – after supper. Sometimes, Daddy would make popcorn, and we’d pass around the big round dish, taking big handfuls of the treat. As the sky grew dark, fireflies would pop into the night, and once or twice, a bat flew from the eves of the windows over the attic, into the night, and back again.

*
Was it hard on me, to move again and again as a child? I have never considered that. It was hard on me, I think, to see – to feel – the anxiety that filled the air that I breathed as a child. Like most kids, I didn’t know what I lacked, although as a child, I noticed the differences in social class of my teachers and the other kids, once I got to Junior High.

My long life has passed since I lived in those humble, crowded flats. Jeff and I own a beautiful Craftsman House in Oakland, a house that is the same vintage as those flats.

That’s where I am from.

Sturgeon Moon over San Francisco,
August, 2026, photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert

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“All great and precious things are lonely”. – John Steinbeck

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I see what is beauty to me:
A few warm days in spring,
the smell of lilacs in the house,
the wetness that comes at night,
red sunsets.
Loneliness.
“Beauty to me,” from Moments, Mary Elyn Bahlert, published, 2026

I am not often lonely. But I have known loneliness, hard and deep loneliness. In my twenties, I worked in my first professional position, finally moving into public relations in both the Social Security Administration and the Food and Drug Administration. I had good friends. I lived in Milwaukee, where I’d grown up; I knew Milwaukee well, and I liked the life I had there. But I was lonely.

I was lonely, and it hurt. Some times, I’d come home after a day at work to my one bedroom apartment, furnished with furniture from the 1940’s, books lining the full bookshelves. This was the 1970’s; this was in the time before the Internet. Sometimes, in my loneliness, I’d call a good friend – a friend I’d called more than once that week – and chat for a time, until something else called to her to attend to. Was she lonely, too? I never told her I was lonely, and I never heard her talk about loneliness. But I was lonely.

During those years, I began to learn about the ministry. I’d been drawn to ministry since my late teens, when the thought arrived on its own, one day: I could be a minister. I had not seen or heard of such a thing as a woman minister; in the Lutheran Church in which I’d been confirmed, women were not allowed to speak in church. That – among other things – did not sit well with me. I started to learn about the ministry by reading books I’d borrowed from the library. I read about denominations. Until my mid-twenties, I did not find a church in which to connect. I began my learning in my own particular, introverted way.

And then, I did do some searching. I’d attend a church service at some congregation. More than once, as the unknown person – and as an unmarried, un-partnered woman – I’d be ignored. That was enough for me to not return. In my searching, I was led to visit a United Methodist Church across from the University I’d attended, on the East Side of Milwaukee. There, a kind older woman – Verdell de Yarman – looked right at me, asked if this was my first time at Kenwood United Methodist Church, and, after church, walked with me to the coffee fellowship, where she introduced me to the Rev. Harvey Stower. And it was Harvey who warmly invited me in, the way he warmly invited everyone in, to a circle of young people. And it was Harvey who asked me one day if I ever thought about seminary. And I told Harvey that I did – often – but that I just didn’t talk about it. After all, I had never seen a woman minister (although they did exist!).

I was grateful for Harvey and the community that formed around him. That community became important to my life in the years that followed. I’m always grateful.

The loneliness remained, until the mysterious and wonderful day I met Jeff Kunkel, my husband. In our marriage, I have not been lonely. I’ve heard about people who are lonely in their marriage. How hard that must be. Jeff is my true companion, my life partner.

As I reflect now on those times, many years ago, I look back at the quote of John Steinbeck that serves as the title of this blog post. I expect that Steinbeck knew loneliness, that he knew loneliness well enough to have clearly described it. And although he did not write of loneliness as I have – as a painful companion, a companion that brings tears and a complete emptiness into the mix – I expect he knew that of loneliness, also.

When I was a pastor, I spoke of loneliness in one sermon. And I have not forgotten: after worship, as people greeted me and sometimes commented on what they had heard (which is not always what I thought I had said!), a young woman shyly said to me: “thank you for talking about loneliness.”

“All great and precious things are lonely…”

At Walden Pond, Massachusetts, where Henry David Thoreau lived in a small cabin, relishing his alone-ness. Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 8/2026

memories, nostalgia

Those summer nights

Mary Elyn Bahlert

As a child, it seemed to me that summer was long. And as a child, the summer was not only long – but languid. That’s a word I’d use for the particular sense of summer in that humid climate. Humidity ruled summertime, until the day that gave way to a spectacular lightening storm. And then the air shook and the sky was grey and the sound of another clap of thunder after the brilliant lightening eased the languid air.

Summer evenings, my family would gather on the front porch after supper. We always had supper, except for major holidays – Christmas, Easter – supper, not dinner, which is what Jeff and I have together each late afternoon now. I’ve taken to using the word supper, sometimes, to describe the late afternoon meal we share. Each time I use the word “supper,” I notice. Over the course of our marriage, we’ve always sat together at the table at dinner-time. And we do now, too.

But we had supper at five in my family as I grew up. We always had a home-cooked meal, except for those very special Fridays when Daddy would go to George Webb to pick up hamburgers – 7 hamburgers for $ .99.
Yes, that’s it: 99 cents. Sometimes we had borscht – always a favorite for me – and other times we’d have holubtsi, stuffed cabbage, as it is known in other cultures. A good search tells me that holubtsi translates to “little pigeons.” I suppose it takes some doing, some mind-shaping, to imagine the cabbage rolls as little pigeons. I did not favor holubtsi. And so, even though I have the recipe in my mother’s own hand, with personal notes describing her preferences – I have never made holubsti.

After supper, after the dishes were washed and dried and put away, we’d gather as a family on the front porch of our upstairs flat. At one flat, I remember leaning over the porch railing on the side next to the alley to see my Grandma Markowski (Srebny) coming slowly up the alley. There were always several foldable lawn chairs on the porch, and a chaise lounge that I came to enjoy as I entered my teen years. In the 1950’s, when both my parents were still smokers, Daddy nailed an empty coffee can to the railing to use as an ashtray. But after a winter of bad colds, both he and Mom stopped smoking, and at a time when the bad effects of cigarette smoking were becoming common knowledge.

Some evenings during the summer, Mom would head back into the house to the kitchen, and we’d have drippy slices of watermelon as a treat. When Suzie and I were little, Mom gave us each a slice of bread to eat with the watermelon, to assure we would not wet our beds because we’d had watermelon slices in the evening. Mom had a few “old wives tales” that she believed, maybe even into her elder years. And those beliefs are beliefs that I have never held.

Summer evenings were still humid – even languid – in the Midwest, until a thunderstorm gathered overhead and boomed us into the house. I remember lying in bed, listening to a storm go overhead from the west to the east; we lived only a few miles from the shore of Lake Michigan, where I expect the storms were gathered up and disappeared – other weather patterns formed across states to the east.

When Daddy had his two weeks of vacation from the steel mill each summer, we’d head up to Door County for one week of the two, staying with an aunt and uncle and cousins, or renting a modest cabin for the week. Kellstrom’s in Sister Bay had a cottage to the west of the highway, on a small rise, halfway up the road. I always look up that road when I pass it along Wisconsin Highway 42. The cottage has been gone for many years now. Those modest cabins have been replaced by 4 star hotels along the whole length of the village of Sister Bay.

But there has not been anything to replace those languid summer evenings in the Midwest, for me. When I arrived to live in the Bay Area in 1981, I was surprised that the East Bay’s summers were grey with fog in summertime, fog that didn’t clear until late afternoon. Along with those hot summers, which brought their own kind of living along with the short season in Wisconsin, the humidity that plagues the Midwest often is not present here along San Francisco Bay. And we have a lot more sun now in the summertime which makes me much happier than the long grey days the sunny days have replaced.

What I miss most about summer days in the Midwest – other than my family, so many who have passed now – is the preciousness of the season. When we knew that we’d be facing a long, gray winter, each day of summer, we knew to cherish the time. We cherished the time because we understood that it was short, and that soon enough, the seasons would bring gray skies and cold winds off Lake Michigan for months.

Suzie and me, circa 1955-1956, Milwaukee.