Kathy McGregor: The art of healing

Desmond Tutu said: "Do your little bit of good where you are. It is those little bits of good put all together that overwhelm the world."

Whether Kathy McGregor of Fayetteville is familiar with that quote or not, the hospice nurse and executive director of the Prison Stories Project has been embodying the sentiment for most of her life. She has cared for the sick, dying and homeless; fought for workers' rights for nurses; served multiple churches in the capacity of parish nurse; and now, spends her free time giving a voice to the incarcerated.

But if the previous paragraph put into mind a picture of an old-fashioned, stodgy, stereotypical do-gooder, it should be banished immediately. McGregor is no prudish, pursed-mouth puritan. She tells raucously funny stories, loves jazz and the blues, is a singer and songwriter, and, on occasion, even uses decidedly blue language.

Raised in chaos

Born in Montgomery, Ala., as the second-oldest child of four, McGregor's family moved to Memphis, Tenn., when she was still an infant.

"'I was born in Alabama and raised in Tennessee, and if you don't want my peaches, don't shake my tree,'" she sings, laughing. "That's a blues song, and I get to say it!"

After that levity, however, McGregor is guarded in speaking of her early years of life.

"It wasn't a good childhood, and I don't have a lot of memory of it. I don't remember Christmases or birthdays. Nothing. Since you're a kid, you just kind of disappear."

McGregor says her parents divorced when she was young, and her mother -- who suffered from mental illness -- was left with four children for whom to care.

"It was the 1950s, you know," McGregor says simply. "They just didn't have the tools to handle it."

"'What tradition were you raised in?' I asked Kathy," says longtime friend Elaine Blanchard, who met McGregor at church. "I thought she would say Catholic, Baptist or Lutheran. 'Chaos,' she responded. We still laugh about that. It is painfully funny and real. The chaos has shaped Kathy into a woman who can lead others toward the ordered waters of sanity."

McGregor married and had her first child young, at 18. She says she did a lot of searching for herself during these years.

"You know, kids who have abusive, tumultuous upbringings often will self-abuse, later," she says quietly. "And so I did. I'm not ashamed of that, to say that at all. And a huge part of me doesn't know why I'm not dead or in prison myself.

"But when I look back on my life, the things I was doing were always moving me more towards the light, instead of the darkness. You go one way or the other."

McGregor is certain storytelling is one thing that put her on that path to the light. A friend photographed the birth of McGregor's youngest child, Sarah, skipping the annual Jonesborough, Tenn., Storytelling Festival.

"My friend said, 'I missed the National Storytelling Festival for this, so next year, you have to go with me, so you can see how much I care about you,'" McGregor recalls, laughing. "So, in 1981, I went to the festival, and from the moment I got out of the car and walked into downtown Jonesborough, it was like a great big huge puzzle piece plugged into the missing parts of my childhood and my life. It was like, 'Yeah. This is what will save me.' Because I saw the power of story to heal.

"It felt like the safest place on earth. Everybody there was just gathered to listen. And, in my life, I had never felt listened to. I had never had that demonstrated to me. I learned how to listen, and then I had this overwhelming desire to be heard."

From that point forward, storytelling was a permanent part of McGregor's life, and, for a time, she used the skill in various positions with the Memphis Arts Council. After a few years working with a civil rights law firm -- a job that she credits for giving her a strong social justice foundation -- McGregor went back to school to become a nurse, a choice prompted by the very different birth experiences of her three children. The first two were born while McGregor was under anesthetic, but for her last child, she had a midwife.

"So it was almost like I woke up about my body," she says. "I felt really inspired to work for women's reproductive rights. I wanted to have a stronger voice, so I decided to go to nursing school."

When her initial plan to be a midwife required a year on the pediatric floor at St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, McGregor felt her calling shift.

"I just felt my heart open and really resonate with kids with life-threatening diseases," she says. "And I felt a real affinity for kids at the end of life. It was like, well, yeah ... This.

"And so I became a different kind of midwife."

Caring health care

Soon, McGregor was recruited for her "sticking skills" to a pediatric home-infusion therapy company. At first, she made home visits to children who were sick and -- sometimes -- dying. Before long, she was making home visits to sick and dying adults as well. She became known as somone who preferred working with the disenfranchised.

"I had a patient ... one day he was telling me about how he had a bunch of kids -- he lived in a shack, and all of them lived together, a very loving, wonderful family. They only have one car, he was driving an adult child to work, and he saw a rabbit run out in front of the car. He swerved the car to hit the rabbit, so they could eat it. A state trooper happened to see him and arrested him and threw him in jail for killing a rabbit out of season.

"And he tells me that, conversely, at Christmas, his father-in-law had walked to a little convenience store to get milk. He was hit and killed by a hit-and-run driver. And he said, 'Ain't it something, that I would do time for killing a rabbit, but no one would even go and look for who killed my father-in-law?'

"These kinds of things are typical in a racist South. But what made me so happy about where I was, and who I was taking care of, was that he said it without an ounce of malice in his voice. He was just pondering the difference with no malice at all. It's why I loved my patients so much."

McGregor tells another heartbreaking story -- this one about a little boy whose sleeve knocked the bacon grease on the stove where his grandmother was cooking into the front of his pants and scalded him.

"I didn't get him until he was sent home from the hospital, to do daily dressing changes," she remembers. "It was supposed to be sterile dressing changes, and roaches would just drop off the ceiling into the water. They couldn't help it. They had horrible landlords. And this kid was just catatonic with pain."

McGregor called the doctor to tell him the child should not have been sent home, he was still in too much pain. The grandmother took him back to the emergency room, but when McGregor saw her assignments for the next day, the child's home was still on her list. When she showed up to check on him, he wasn't there.

"I said, 'Where is he?' The grandmother said the doctor said to take him back to school and to 'stop fussing with him.'

"I drove to school, and that poor kid. He could only wear pajama bottoms, and she tried to tie a tie [as a belt] around him because his stomach was so painful. I picked him up, I carried him to my car, and I drove him straight to the hospital. I have never been so angry in all my life. And they ended up admitting him. He had to have pig-skin grafts. He should never have been home.

"Those kinds of things made me think, 'I can't not be here.'"

How did McGregor avoid falling into despair, witnessing such poverty and injustice on a daily basis?

"Righteous anger helps," she says. "Righteous anger helped up until AIDS hit."

Parish nursing

McGregor started working in her first official hospice appointment when the AIDS crisis was at its peak in the 1980s. Once again, McGregor did not hesitate in signing on to serve a segment of the population others were anxious to avoid.

"I was the designated AIDS hospice nurse for my hospice in Memphis, which was the only hospice back at that time," she remembers. "The [durable medical equipment] companies would show up in full astronaut uniforms.

"AIDS was sending young men from the East and West coast -- because all of their friends and partners had died -- back to the deep South. These men were coming home to die, and seeing the dynamic in the homes ... I mean, they left the South as a gay man for a reason. When they returned home, there was all of this spiritual conflict between them and their parents and their families. The men were too young. And it was one after another after another.

"I didn't handle it well. I suffered severe burnout. I hit a brick wall, and I could no longer work. I felt that God had called me to the work of hospice. At first, I was really mad: 'If God called me to this, then how could God let this happen to me?' I had to do a lot of inner work and inner exploration, because I had to deal first with all my anger with God."

McGregor engaged in some deep soul-searching, which brought her back to the skill that pulled her from the abyss the last time around: storytelling.

"I developed this company called 'HealThy Self,'" she says, describing a traveling seminar that helped train nurses to avoid burnout. "I used storytelling as the framework."

"And then, when all of that was done, my minster at my church in Memphis, Cheryl -- I was just kind of discerning with her one day -- and I said, 'I don't know what to do next.' She said, 'Have you ever heard of parish nursing?'"

McGregor hadn't, but, when she researched it, she realized it was right up her alley: A parish nurse is "a registered nurse specialist who encourages physical and spiritual health and wholeness by developing and leading programs within faith communities." The church agreed to send her to a seminary in St. Louis, where she was soon certified.

For a while, McGregor worked for her own congregation. Soon, her talents -- and her rare position -- made her a hot commodity among the churches in Memphis.

"We were at the tail end of the AIDS crisis -- the drug therapies were beginning to work," McGregor explains. "My church gifted me to an [African Methodist Episcopal] church on Beale Street, because they were the only black church in the city that was really dealing openly with the issue of AIDS in the black community. And they gifted me to the Catholic Charities Resettlement Program, where I worked with an African group of women who were having babies."

McGregor found the job incredibly fulfilling, but she was soon doing it in a different city. She met her second husband, who was a journalist, and the pair relocated to Washington, D.C. McGregor went back to hospice nursing temporarily before approaching the well-known Rev. Alvin O'Neal Jackson of the National City Christian Church to offer her services as a parish nurse.

Her resume and activism at this juncture in her life are nothing short of startling. In a relatively short period of time, she served as National City's parish nurse and after-school program coordinator; organized a "State of the Union Health Address" at the church, attended by hundreds, with U.S. Surgeon Gen. David Satcher as the keynote speaker; got certified by the Zen Hospice Program in California; and volunteered at Joseph's House, a hospice agency for homeless men in Washington. When her parish nurse grants ran out, she accepted a full time position there.

McGregor's life seems to unfold like that: She appears where she's needed, when she's needed. She was at an AME church, blocks away from the White House, on Sept. 11, 2001, and she helped open the church doors to stranded city workers and victims' families. She headed down to New Orleans in August 2005 and helped in the aftermath of Katrina. When she moved back to Memphis, homesick for her Southern roots, she pitched in as the organizer for western Tennessee in the battle to keep TennCare, the state's version of Medicaid. Eventually, she would find her way to labor, organizing a nurses' union. As a registered nurse, she was a valuable asset -- she could talk to other nurses as one of them.

McGregor had spent six years as a labor organizer when her youngest daughter made a request.

"She said, 'Would you consider moving to Fayetteville? We would like to start planning a family,'" says McGregor, who was divorced by then. "I was so honored."

Prison stories

"Having her here, now that I'm raising my own daughter, means so much," says McGregor's daughter, Sarah Fortune Gill. "My mom is still just as [socially] active as she was when I was a child, if not more, and now her granddaughter gets to admire her, too."

After a bit of a rocky patch when she first started looking for nursing work in the area -- as it turns out, it can be difficult to return to the field after making a name for yourself as a union organizer -- McGregor was happy to accept a job working for the Veteran's Administration Medical Center in Fayetteville.

But one job was hardly enough to keep her busy. While talking to the Rev. Suzanne Stoner, associate rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, McGregor had the idea to follow in the footsteps of her friend, Elaine Blanchard, who had started a Prison Stories Project in Memphis.

"Because of my childhood, I have such an affinity for the underdog," McGregor says. "It seemed natural to me that I would take storytelling into prisons."

The idea was to hold writing sessions with incarcerated men and women, help them tell their stories, and then have actors perform those stories for an audience. McGregor had her hands full, with 12-hour shifts and caretaking for her mother, of whom she had taken custody. As much as she wanted to start this project, McGregor knew she couldn't do it alone -- so she started gathering professional writers and actors around her to join in her cause. Her team soon became a who's who of Northwest Arkansas artists.

"I've been completely changed by my work with Prison Stories," says Matthew Henriksen, a poet and the project's creative writing director. "We've found a way to give voice to those who have been silenced, to find a platform with an audience that truly hears their words; we found a way to go deep with the prisoners and help them unlock themselves to themselves.

"Years ago, Kathy walked into her first prison, trusting that art could help the women there. She surrounded herself with wildly talented and endlessly giving people. We aren't the same people we were before Prison Stories. Kathy made all that possible by trusting in that process and trusting in us. I've been awakened to the possibility that our small parts in this world can be significant."

The group started working with women at a correction center in the summer of 2012. After meeting for four months, the women's stories were performed both inside the correction center and at St. Paul's in front of an audience. The response -- from both inside and outside of the centers -- was overwhelmingly positive.

"My daughter -- who was a brand new mother -- came up to me right after the performance with tears in her eyes and said, 'Do you think I'm raising Iris right?'" McGregor says. "I knew right then and there that this project has the potential to be successful if my own daughter, who is the best mother in the world, is showing that she heard it: That this stuff starts very early the majority of the time."

McGregor continued to look for meaningful ways to expand the program, and soon, was performing the women's stories for the incarcerated men, and vice versa. She discovered it was an effective way for both groups to communicate with each other.

Ever willing to push herself further, McGregor soon was taking on her biggest challenge to date -- telling the stories of the men on death row. She and her team worked over the summer of 2016, making monthly visits to nine men on death row who agreed to share their stories. The project received a public performance in October to great acclaim and will be performed again at 7 p.m. Jan. 13 at 7 p.m. at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Fayetteville.

McGregor gathered hundreds of comment cards from the audience in October with messages of hope and encouragement for the prisoners and the project itself.

"One said, 'Our criminal justice professor made us come to this,'" McGregor says. "'I had put in a request to withdraw criminal justice as a major until this, and now I know exactly why I'm here.'"

With McGregor's history, there's little chance that you can predict what might be next for her. The only certain thing is that she will continue sharing her light in an impulse born out of gratitude for where she finds herself in the world.

"It seemed natural to me to give whatever it was that saved me to other women in prison," she says of the Prison Stories Project. "When I hear their stories, I don't tell them mine. That's not why I'm there. But when I hear their stories, I always hear my own stories. With most of them that are there, they had rocky abusive childhoods, and I just hear my own story.

"I feel just so grateful, and I have no idea how I ended up here at all."

NAN Profiles on 12/18/2016