The final Goodbye

In the past year a college friend dropped over dead at age 48 of a massive heart attack, another friend of mine as they say "woke up dead one morning".   Right now as I write another friend of mine lays dying, a dying that came about so quickly only a half dozen people got to speak with her before she slipped into a morphine coma.  She went to the emergency room with what she thought was pnemonia and after some imaging was diagnosed with a huge aggressive cancerous mass in one lung.  The doctors said it was too late to do anything and ordered hospice - even so it was shocking that by three weeks later she was in a coma.

These collective experiences have found me once again reflecting upon our collective relationship to death.  We all know we will die and that every person we know will die.  Most of us try not to think about either fact very much.  I think more people die slowly with some warning, than people who die suddenly - and thus we assume that there will be some time, some warning around dying, some chance to say goodbye.   Those who are elderly live with different odds and assumptions, but most Americans I think assume you have to go past 65 before your chances of dying become very great.  And yet none of the people I mention were close to 65, and lots of people of all ages die every day.

I have heard it said and believe it to be true that death serves to place a useful limit on life.  It serves to make us make choices, to value our time and our days, to prioritize and to value what we choose.  If we lived forever would there be a terrible epidemics of procrastination?  Would people ever create deadlines?  Would people feel their choices mattered or were important?  Would we ever forgive others?  Would we work at our relationships?  So I know my death enhances my life and my relationships, and yet it seems impossible to live in the present with a simultaneous awareness of some approaching ending.  So we weave back and forth between a now that is all and a future that is finite.

In that crazy weaving how do we honor our relationships.  I think I do a pretty good job of telling people I appreciate them, or that I like them, or thank you for things.  But this is not the same thing as coming to completion with somone.   Have you ever talked to someone when you knew it would be your last conversation?  (Which I guess is to say have you ever said goodbye to someone dying - its just that in long distant relationships sometimes we say goodbye to an ill person and we suspect we will not speak again, but we don't know for sure.)  What is important to say in that last conversation?  I love you, this is what you have meant to me, thank you for being in my life, cross over without pain.  So that is fairly clear if we get to say goodbye - but what if we don't?

So many people live without really feeling their importance.  What I have always loved about the movie:  "It's a Wonderful Life" is the beautiful way we are shown the small common acts a man does and takes for granted that touch everyone he knows and actually change the world.   We don't get to have angels to show us these things - only our friends and family.   So how do we hold that mirror up to others and help them see their life as George Bailey did?

Does it matter if a soul dies without knowing these things?  I suppose on some cosmic level they come to know it all at the moment that the join the Great ALL.  I like to imagine that in some great review of the events of their life, that like George Bailey they will both see the events that were significant that they took for granted, as well as hurts they may have inflicted and discounted, that they will see both the themes, the highlights and lowpoints,  that some meaning can emerge from this lofty perspective that perhaps eluded them during this life.  I hope that they also can see into hearts were words did not illuminate- that they can see again or perhaps for the first time how deeply they were loved by all those who loved them -see for the first time where they made a difference when they did not know they did.

Years ago I had a practice on friends birthdays of writing them a card saying that I took the opportunity of their birth to say how glad I was that they lived.  I would tell them the traits I saw they had and what they brought to my life.  People loved these birthday cards and even started to continue the tradition with others they knew.  However, after a few years I started to feel like I was just writing the same things each year (after all people's most precious traits really don't change they endure over time.)  So I fell out of the habit.  I think now that was a mistake.   I think perhaps with a little less emphasis on traits and a little more emphasis on this is what you have meant to me this year that the sudden deaths will not feel like a conversation abrupty ended without the final goodbye. I think I have a lot of birthday cards to write this year.