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Each person on the planet arrived here at birth and will one day depart. Loss and change are inevitable aspects of life. When someone we love dies, we need to create a new sense of normal as we grieve their death and celebrate their life.
Although it was not something kept hidden from me as a child, as I have crossed the threshold into the seventh decade of my life, it has become an ever-more-present reality. Friends and family members have passed with increasing regularity. My husband and both parents have made their transitions in the past 20 years. With each respective transition, I have wondered, “Is today the day I say goodbye to that loved one?” In each case, eventually, the answer is yes. I have a friend who has just entered hospice after a nearly two-year go-around with breast cancer, so saying goodbye is even a more active consideration for me.
In conversation with her over the weekend, she described the experience as internal, and the sense I got was that it felt like she was folding in on herself like a burrito. What if the inside is filled with experience and emotion and memory and when we are close to death, we get to explore it, since we are not so busy with the day to day stuff of life? At the moment when we cross over to whatever awaits us, does the burrito unroll to reveal what lies within?
Tom Robbins, author of Jitterbug Perfume—which I have come to see as a tribute to life, death, and the Beyond—offers:
“At birth, we emerge from dream soup.
At death, we sink back into dream soup.
In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land.
Life is a portage.”
Each time someone has died, I have felt raw, aching, longing, and then blended the feelings in as if I were mixing cake batter. The grief was a mix of love, sadness, and gratitude.
Sometimes, I rushed to ice the cake, not always waiting for it to bake; wanting it to look pretty. It would then collapse in on itself and get all mushy. I would want to hide it all the more since it didn’t appear presentable. The cycle continued. I would steel myself against potential loss as I held back getting involved with people since I reasoned that they too would disappear. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they remained. Unpredictably.
In an attempt to protect my heart, I weakened it. Hearts are both fragile and resilient. I am proof positive of that; after surviving a heart attack, I am certain that shutting down emotionally was a contributing factor in the collapse of an artery. That’s one reason that I consider grief as a hole in the heart that I have attempted to fill with activity and busyness, so as not to contemplate that gap.
I have shared the words, “Everyone we know and love will one day die or leave us or we will die or leave them. Everyone is on loan to us, so appreciate them now.” Sometimes they feel like floppy platitudes that don’t stand solid. Sometimes they aren’t much comfort. They are, however Truth with a capital T.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock