About 8 years ago a friend of mine very suddenly died. She had had a cough for weeks, she thought the remnants of a cold she could not shake. Finally one night in frustration she went to the emergency room to get an antibiotic. Instead she left with a referral to hospice. They had x-rayed her lungs and seen a mass too huge to be operable. It took her a week to tell everyone. It took me two weeks to recover from the shock. We made a date for me to come see her a week later. But on that date her husband called to say that she was in so much pain she had been given a heavy dose of moraine and was out of it. We rescheduled, but the same thing happened on the next date. Then they stopped taking calls. She died 6 weeks after she went to the hospital for the x-ray and I never got to say goodbye.
I was sad and shaken that she was gone so fast. I also learned. I learned that it is a myth this idea that there is some permanence to the people we know. Anyone of us could die in a car crash or have a heart attack today and be gone. The idea that we will know someone is dying, and that we will be able to rush to their side, is not true. I could have just taken that as a bitter fact, but instead I chose to make sacred that fact. I started a new Birthday tradition. I consider as I write my birthday cards to people what I would want that person to know if they, or I, did not make it to their next birthday. I consider whether there are any unfinished messages, but most especially what the appreciations and unexpressed love and gratitude are. Wayne Dyer is famous for saying "Don't die with your music in you." I would change that to be: "Let not death separate us, without our Love being fully expressed." People tell me these birthday cards are unlike any others they get - very special and precious. I knew a woman who held a living memorial for herself a year before her death (she was very slowly dying) because she said she did not know what good it would do for all the nice things to be said about her after she died! This is funny, but how true. Why do we wait until after people are dead to say those precious things?
Today is 9/11. A date I generally try to ignore because I do not like the focus on terrorism and the justification of the US's numerous wars abroad. But what touched me then and ever since is the kindness that people showed total strangers and loved ones a like on that day. Today on NPR there was an interview with the CEO of one of the companies that occupied the upper floors of tower 1 of the twin towers. This man lost 642 employees on that day and only lived himself because he was taking his son to his first day of Kindergarten. In the interview the reporter is asking him about the loss of all of his employees, and he tells her that he also lost his younger brother who was only 36, He says that his brother called his sister and she said "OH thank God, you are not there. You are safe" and he said "No, I am here. I am going to die. I have called to say goodbye to you and that I love you."
I started to cry at that point in the story, as I have for 15 years whenever I hear the numerous stories of people calling from the burning towers or from the plane that they know is about to be crashed into a building. They call their loved ones to say goodbye, as do children from schools where students with automatic weapons roam the halls killing people. I have been told that soldiers as they lay dying in battlefields call out to their mothers and wives. It is fundamental to human nature that as we face death we turn to the connect of love we have to other humans. It is as the former Prime Minster of Canada said on this death bed: "Love is the only thing which matters." For me this truth is a profoundly spiritual one as well that Love is at the core of Life.
