I’ve been thinking about the dead people in my life: my mother died in childbed two years after my birth; two still-born sisters, one before and one after me; a girl in elementary school who was taken by Kinderlähmung (“children’s paralysis” aka polio); my maternal Oma, smelling of powders laid out in an embroidered nightgown and everyone drunk too much at the wake; a golden-haired niece (one of 10 siblings) killed while playing in the street, buried in white and “gone to the angels”, replaced by a new one (so it was said) just 9 months later; my father, an ocean away, after years of thick-headed estrangement, leaving nothing in his Will but bitter sadness.
The more I think back, the more comes into focus: vague dates and blurred faces, some with feelings still attached. Who were they, I wonder, what wisdom died with them? What could I learn from their experience?
“Those deaths,” writes Raymond Tallis*, “required of him that he should learn the art of outliving, a seemingly small part of the art of living but it was a special challenge to learn how to remember and not to be paralyzed by memory, to know the size of another’s death without being diminished by it; to feel the loss but not to be eaten from within by loss; to pay tribute to the past without mortgaging the future. . . .
“Life would be impossible if the survivors did not forget the dead and living were reduced to outliving; but it would [be] hideously shallow if they forgot them too quickly or too completely.”
Who has died in your life? What might their life and death teach you? Set some time aside to be still. Let memories arise in your mind’s eye; focus on one person at a time. Ask: How did you experience the end of your life? If there’s one thing you’d like me to know . . .
*The black mirror: fragments of an obituary for life. Atlantic Books, 2015, p. 280. Image: “By the deathbed” by Edvard Munch (1893/5), oil on canvas.
Beautiful!🙏🕉👍❤️
Whew! More new stuff…..
Lagging a bit and resisting writing that third letter. Perhaps the new challenges of today will clear the way?
This is a pilgrimage of finding blockages in strange places. Thank you for being our guide, Peter!.
More stuff everywhere. One step at a time, Penny — or one letter after another until there are none left to write. What if you were to think of “challenges” and “blockages” not as obstacles, but as little detours or, in fact, the path itself.
Have courage, dear pilgrim. One foot in front of the other.
John O’Donohue, poet and philosopher who died in 2008, might tell us that “[a] glimpse at the face of your death can bring immense freedom to your life. …. If you really live your life to the full, death will never have power over you. It will never seem like a destructive, negative event. It can become, for you, the moment of release into the deepest treasures of your own nature … Anam Cara, p. 218.
I finally wrote a card to one of the people I wanted to re-connect with on Friday. Her son contacted me Sunday to say she passed that morning. I was at the beach with my 5 year old daughter when I received his message.
My daughter asked why I was so sad and crying. I told her Christina had passed away and never received our card or the picture she drew for her. She hugged me and I said how important it is to let people know you are thinking of them or love them. There is more to the story and our relationship, however my lesson in procrastination stings and now I will ask, how did you experience the end of your life? And if there’s one thing Christina would like me to know…?
I too have experienced that pain after reaching out too late, Colleen. Thank you to you and Peter for sharing your thoughts.