Interview with Mickey Welsh and Kathy Stoner

Interview by Karin Forno with Mickey Welsh and Kathy Stoner, March 16, 2021

Mickey: Kathy is at work. She will join us shortly. She's been working remotely at our office, so we kept our office. I'm so glad we kept that office because she's been working remotely almost this whole time since the pandemic started.

Hearing all the civil restraining order cases is not a small job, so it slops over into free time.

Can you tell us some of the background of how you came to St. Mary’s?

Mickey: We moved to Pacific Grove in 1979 and we had not been going to church or anything; our son was only six years old. We were working for law firms at the time. We didn't yet have our practice together. Around 1986 or 87 was when we realized we would like to find some kind of spiritual community. Before that I just experienced spirituality in the wilderness, in the woods, by the ocean and in my own ways. We looked at and went to different churches, different kinds of churches, different denominations, and we went to St. Mary's. Thanks to Melinda Manlin and Michael--they were going there and we asked them about it. We went there on Christmas Eve, which of course is one of the most beautiful services of the whole liturgical year or ever. And we found ourselves going back.

I believe it was mostly the beauty of the church, the beauty of the surroundings, the liturgy, the ritual, but a lot of it was Dwight Edward's presence. His loving message, the message we heard every week, was how loved we were, and he exemplified that.  It was a wonderful thing to experience and to emulate. I was drawn back to it for that reason. Of course, I swore I would never get involved in the political, management or administrative ends of the church, but within a couple of years I was on the vestry and a lector and all the things that you do because they ask you to do it.

Kathy: I would say a lot of the same things. I was raised Catholic. I was in an Irish Catholic family. I was the oldest of seven kids and went to Catholic schools almost all my childhood from fifth grade on and there were pretty well-educated kinds of Catholics in my background.

But I got disillusioned with the church the more I found out about church history and the institutions and some of the awful things that have been done in the name of the church. And it was during the Vietnam War, and the local parish priest was denouncing anyone who protested the war.. I also didn't feel like there was much place for women in the Catholic Church. So for a lot of reasons, I stopped going to church and then halfway throughcollege Mickey and I met in law school and we both found a lot of spiritual connection in nature. After a few years, we started feeling like there was something missing in terms of having a spiritual community. Since we were both raised Christian, we focused on some area of Christianity, although we also did check out the Unitarian Church, which seemed more like a meeting than a church. Liturgy was important to me and St. Mary’s was a good fit. I think what Mickey described in terms of the draw of St. Mary's was important. It also was wonderful to be able to sing again in a low-pressure way because I had sung in college, but then didn't have time to join any sort of group. It was nice to be in the choir.

Mickey: One thing that was a draw for me to St Mary's is that I was really dedicated to and felt a spiritual connection to my work for civil liberties and social justice. And I talked to Dwight about church being inconsistent with the American Civil Liberties Union in people's views, not in my view. Many religious people are involved in ACLU as I have been and still am. He called that my ministry. He said, you have a ministry doing that work. And I just thought that was such a wonderful thing to say to a new person. He didn't even know me when he saw how spiritually connected I was to that work and honored that. That was another acknowledgment I received at St. Mary's early on.

How has the pandemic affected your day-to-day life?

Kathy: In the beginning, obviously, for everybody, including us, our world became smaller, with way less interaction with other people, practically none.

That's kind of continued, and so it went for a while. We used to have somebody helping clean our house and that stopped completely for a while. We stopped doing any shopping at stores. We were ordering online and that kind of thing, cooking, planning our meals more, so we would sit down and figure out a grocery list and work it around meal planning and try to minimize any sort of shopping. A lot of things like that sort of turned inward and simpler. I'm still working, but it's all remote, it's been all remote ever since the shutdown. Once I'm fully vaccinated, I'll be going back to court. But for now, everything I do is remote. One nice thing is I'm not commuting at all, not driving the car to work. I walk to work almost all the time because we have an office space that we can use for our remote work that's separate from here.  We've been playing music together. Mickey took up the fiddle when she retired, the Celtic fiddle, and I started working on the guitar, which I hadn't played in a long time. It’s nice to accompany her so we can play music together in that way.

Mickey: On a different level, it changed my day-to-day interactions with everyone. My community became me and Kathy.  I'm lucky to be in a community with another person. I know so many people that are not. I began avoiding people by necessity. My nature is to say hello to everybody I see on the rec trail, have everybody pet my dog, even strangers, and certainly to get together with friends, be in close communication and hug people. That absolutely came to a full stop. It was rather a significant change for me even to go walking and avoid people instead of going toward people--to not look at people anymore or to look at people wearing masks. That was a total change of my approach to even being in my environment.

Kathy: We were lucky. In the summer of 2020, our son and his family, his three kids and his wife, who live in Santa Cruz, were at the end stage of a remodel, but it was running late and they had to move out of their rental. We have a friend here who you may know, Patricia Johnston, and her father had recently died. She has a house here, her father's house, and she lives in Denver.  She and her wife Nina stayed here sometimes. But once the shutdown happened, they weren't using the house, so they offered to let Joseph and his family stay in that house. They were isolated for a period of time. Our community got bigger because of them. After not getting close to them for months, we had kind of a pandemic holiday, for about eight weeks in the summer, which was just such a treat. It was really hard to say goodbye when they left again.

Mickey:We were lucky to have made up in part for canceling our trip to Ireland.

Kathy: We were planning to take the grandkids and their parents to Ireland for a three week trip around the West Coast. It was really sorrowful to have to give that up, so I'm glad we had that time with them in PG.

How have your feelings or your experiences changed throughout the course of the pandemic? I'm wondering if you can trace a course to how they changed, because things have been so different at different stages in the pandemic.

Mickey:At the beginning we were in shock like so many people. At one point a few days in, around March 18th or 19th, I wrote that my constant anxiety had transformed into a dull terror. I would wake up at night and it would be similar to how I felt when my father was dying, it just seemed like something horrible was hanging right over my head. That, I realized, contributed to a way that I began to feel whenever I did go walking. I would get so angry when I saw somebody without a mask. One time I saw a young man, when they had roped off Lovers Point, and he was removing the tape. I said, I wish you wouldn't do that. They might close the whole Rec Trail. He said angrily, mind your own business. I said, this is my business, I live here. He said to me. I live here, too, and I don't give a damn. He didn't say damn. He said the F word, and all I could say was, I'm so sorry to hear you say that.  I'm telling you this because that was a turning point for me. And I realized that I couldn't keep walking and living being so angry with other people, regardless of what they were doing. So at that point, which was pretty early on in the pandemic time, I actually started a practice of, when I was walking, trying to maintain empathy and blessing and a feeling of compassion towards every other person, whether they were wearing a mask or not, while still avoiding them. And I can't say I was 100 percent successful at it, but it was certainly better for me to just focus on how I am rather than how other people are in the pandemic. I think that has served me well. I've gone through the stages of grief. I think when I realized it was grief I was feeling, after the loss of the quality of my life, that through that practice and some other practices I came to a place of a greater acceptance and a reduction of panic and fear. I've come to more of a peace with the pandemic. At the same time, of course, I love experiencing more assurance that maybe we really won't get it. Maybe we really won't die. So that's been a great development in the last couple of months.

Kathy: It's been a lot of the stages of grief kind of jumbled up, but certainly shock at the beginning. I had just lost my mother a year and a half before. I could see that I was doing some of the same things that I did then in terms of how I responded to the shock. My initial response to the grief was to just get as busy as I could, planning things, and of course work was especially busy because we were all trying to figure out how we were going to hear cases during the shutdown and triaging which cases should get heard, which cases could be put off, how we were going to deal technologically with hearing cases and that kind of thing--on top of planning meals and thinking about how it was probably inevitable we were going to get sick at the beginning. We were laying in Gatorade and ginger ale and soup and all the things you might need if you got sick and couldn't go to the store and you really had to feed yourself and you couldn't cook. I did that. I did a lot of that busy stuff you do when you get busy to avoid grieving. As time went on, after not too long, I realized to some extent there was a silver lining for me because I'm an introvert and it's exhausting sometimes to have all the social interactions that I feel obligated to have. It was kind of a relief. You know, in some ways, [I thought], I get a little introvert’s holiday here. It won't last forever, but I'm going to enjoy it to some extent. But as time went on, I started feeling pretty lonely. I'm going to work and I'm the only person there. Even though I'm pretty isolated when I'm working in the court, just because we all have our own work to do--a lot of things that you have to concentrate on, it's a lot more lonely if there's nobody else in the building. I then started realizing there are some social interactions I need. I was grieving the loss of that. Overlaying it are all the feelings that I have been trying to pay attention to about aging and becoming more aware of my own mortality, and this sort of heightened it because it seems like it's a whole year now and it's a whole year of life that doesn't come back completely. I feel like I'm probably going to need months before I understand exactly what's happened to me emotionally. It’s sort of jumbled right now. I don't feel like I'm very coherent about it.

How have you stayed involved with St. Mary's during the pandemic?

Mickey:  We've gone to the Zoom services. We have not stayed for the coffee hour and there are various reasons for that, not that we don't want to. We are zoomed out. I'm teaching on Zoom, I still teach at Monterey College of Law, and teaching on Zoom, meeting with students on Zoom, doing everything on Zoom, makes me not want to be on Zoom on Sunday for longer than the service. So we stayed in touch through the service and I've remained on committees. I'm on the Personnel Committee and the reentry committee and then recently I got on the vestry. I connect with people that way and with Kristine. It's good to get to know Kristine a little better during the pandemic because I think she's done a remarkable job all alone. I mean, not alone, she's had much help from you [Karin] and everybody, but she's still the point person for everything that happens at St. Mary's. But there's another aspect. In my heart, it’s in my consciousness that St Mary's, eternal St. Mary's, is there to go back to, but it's also still there in spirit. At Christmas time, Kristine asked if we would come in and ring the church bells. That was the first time we had been inside St. Mary's since the pandemic started. She gave us a key. There was no one else there. It was Christmas Day and it was just so moving. We were moved to tears and we sat there and sang with our masks on, only the two of us. We sang O Come All Ye Faithful because somebody had to sing it on Christmas Day. It was so wonderful to be there. But it's a presence. St. Mary's is a presence in my life that I cherish.

Kathy: We both have gone to the Zoom worship, but not the coffee hours, partly because for me, one of the most important things about church is, actually, the liturgy itself and the physical experience of the liturgy when it can happen. Even the photos that you - Karin -take where you've obviously changed the date and that kind of thing, just keeps it connected, gives it continuity. And going to a coffee hour after that, to me, cuts off the connection that I feel, the spiritual kind of grounding that I feel. That's partly the reason. Also, I do all my work on Zoom. I've been enjoying the book groups on Zoom though. That's another thing that I find helpful and grounding.

Mickey: Celtoids is one of my connections, and I feel like Celtoids connects people to St. Mary's and I'm one, and it's been on Zoom all this time until once or few times before and then back again. Now Celtoids is meeting in the freezing cold courtyard again.

What has St. Mary's  meant to you during this time beyond practical involvement?

Mickey: There's just something enduring about it that's been a comfort. While everything is subject to immediate change by sickness and death and all the anxiety that's around us, it's been a presence we can count on, a symbol of the larger presence that we find in the sacred and in God.

Kathy: It's a way to just come back to center, be grounded, be connected to greater realities, spiritual realities.

How do you imagine St. Mary's in the future, which future is almost upon us, and do you think the pandemic will have changed us permanently?

Kathy: I have no idea what the future holds. Really no idea. I mean, I could think of some little things that might be different, like I imagine communion is always going to be different.  Some logistical things. But beyond that, who knows who's going to be there, how much of it is going to be at the church and how much of it might be centered beyond the physical church? I'm very curious about that. I imagine nothing will be exactly the same.

Mickey: I know Kristine is new herself, so whatever her vision is for St. Mary's has been put on hold for a while because we really haven't been able to add or change much of anything except to accommodate the pandemic. So I think it's an exciting time in that way also.

It might be an opportunity to move forward in ways that would be good for St. Mary's without so much resistance from the past, because a lot of that has at least temporarily fallen away.

What habits or practices, either spiritual or otherwise, have been important to you during this time?

Kathy:We've really nurtured our little community of two.

We make a point of spending a little time just sitting, having coffee in the morning, Then, when we both come home in the evening, sitting and syncing up with each other and just reflecting a little bit. We started reading a daily spiritual reading that comes  in the email from a priest named Richard Rohr, who has a place called the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We do that every morning.

I think that's been really good for us.

We do a lot of walking, together and separately, and with the dog. We have regular dog walks in the woods with another couple and a friend, so there's five of us. We always wear masks and stay distant, but we bring our dogs and the dogs know each other. We do that two or three times a week. So there's these routines that just have become really important during the pandemic because so much else is up in the air and disrupted and anxiety ridden. Those have all been important. I did a lot of puzzles and I have found in the last couple of months that I'm no longer interested in doing puzzles. I'm not quite sure why. I'm spending more time playing guitar with Mickey. I think the puzzles were a way of harnessing my anxiety and focusing me and I don't feel like I need it quite as much.

Mickey: Music playing. I took up fiddle. I played violin as a child, but I had not played in many, many years. Jackie helped me get a fiddle when I retired and it's been a wonderful practice, literally. When I was a kid, I used to play when I was upset or when I was angry, I would just pick up my violin and play. I do that same thing with the fiddle. But I really must say the spiritual practice of committing to reading the Richard Rohr reflection every morning and talking about it and ending with his last prayer, the one that starts, “Oh, great love, thank you for living and loving through us,” is a wonderful statement to make every morning and to remember.

How have you dealt with the uncertainty that's been such a big part of this whole time in our lives?

Mickey: At times, I think I've tried to get a grip on it by controlling other things. That doesn't work.

I think trying to be in it, to be in the unknown, to be in the uncertainty and to accept that and to make sure that I'm staying present with it, has been important. I found that I have so many more dreams that I remember--so many vivid dreams and so many visitations from people living and dead that come in my dreams. And it might not be a significant dream in terms of what happens, but even my horse that I had as a child came and lay down beside me. When I woke up, I felt such a sense of comfort from that horse and I hadn't even seen or thought of that horse in years.

Kathy: Similar to Mickey, I have realized it's sort of a paradox, accepting uncertainty and not trying to control things, to change them, but also realizing because everything's so uncertain, there are things I want to make sure I have in order, like finishing up our estate plan, which had sort of been back burner for a long time. That's one of the things I did and it came out of an acceptance of the uncertainty that we could be dead at any time and I wouldn't have taken care of it, and that's not very responsible.

I've let go of a lot of emotions of being afraid of what might happen or planning what to do if something happens. I mean, I'm Murphy's niece. My Uncle Edward Murphy was the inventor of Murphy's Law. His experience as an engineer and dealing with aeronautics became Murphy's Law. I grew up with that attitude as part of my family background: you had to think of and  plan for all possible negative  contingencies. I've had a chance to disabuse myself of being able to do a whole lot of that.

What would you most like to do that you're not doing now or not doing yet?

Mickey: Just about everything.

Kathy: I can't wait to sing again. In person with other people.

I was really looking forward to more traveling, especially after I retire, which won't be too much longer, and now it's lost a little of its luster. And I don't know where I'll be with that once things open up. I think I'm much more aware that you can get sick while you're on an airplane or on a cruise ship or in another country and your whole life can be turned upside down. I really was blissfully ignorant of that before. So I'm looking forward to some kind of traveling, but it might be much more localized.

Mickey:  We might have to get a camper like everyone else.

What about this time has surprised you the most, either positively or negatively?

Mickey:I'll just start out with negatively, I was surprised at my own selfishness and lack of compassion at the beginning of the pandemic. [My response was] “you need to care about me, you need to wear a mask, otherwise you're putting me in danger”. I was surprised by having that response. I guess I shouldn't have been. But I did, and then most recently, my response has been, “hey, wait a minute, it's my turn for a vaccine, why don't I get the vaccine?”, even though on every other level, politically, morally, ethically, I believe it should be distributed in the places where the pandemic is the worst and to people who are most likely to be affected by it and actually get it. But [I’ve still thought] “but hey, when's my turn?” So I still have a tendency to have those feelings, have to face them and address them. I think that's probably a good thing. But a negative thing that I learned about myself is that I'm fully capable of being selfish and self-centered.

Kathy:It's like the whole thing has been a discovery. I'm still the same person. Nothing about my warts and foibles and everything is really different. However, I've reacted to stress this time some other ways [than in the past]. I don't know that there's been anything that's really surprised me, except when I look at the response of the larger community in our country and in our state.  I am surprised that people got so easily polarized, and that people didn't come together and do the things that were both common sense and being advocated for, like masks and things. That still sort of surprises me that people are ignoring a lot of the public health recommendations that everybody says you should be doing.

 What's been the most difficult thing about the pandemic for you?

Mickey: Without putting anything on a list, not being able to be around the grandkids and hug them. We were with them often; we would see them every week or every two weeks at the least. And we were very close to them. We would hear about what was happening in their lives. They would just talk. Now when we see them with everybody wearing masks and [we’re] sitting outside in somebody's yard, they don't do that. There were times when we'd be walking alone with one of the three of them, and they would just start talking about what's going on with them. Not even on a deep, heartfelt level a lot of the time. But still, that is missing. It’s been missing for a year of their young lives. They're 13 and 15 now. We hope we can get that back sometime, now that they're getting older. That hasn't happened for so long.

Kathy: I agree, and I would add, sort of up there, is just having to be so self-protective. Having to put up a barrier between myself and just about everybody else.

 Has anything been positive for you from the pandemic?

Mickey: Yes, there are many things. I think a deepening in our relationship after so many years, decades, has been a shift from having to spend so much time isolated with each other. That has been remarkable and who knew how that was going to pan out, whether we would decide to live in separate parts of the house or something or not. Instead, I think it deepened our relationship and brought us to be closer and more spiritually connected than ever before. So that's probably been the most wonderful thing that's happened; that and I really appreciate seeing the compassion and kindness of everybody who has been that way around me.