On Living and Dying

Death came knocking on the door to a house in Chapel Hill, North Carolina today. Inside a woman of 61 left this place due to liver failure, a side effect of cancer which she had been fighting for six years and which having originally started in her breast, had spread to her hips, lungs, and lymph nodes. Around ten this morning, with her the recently estranged husband of several decades, her twenty eight year old daughter and other family members by her side, she bowed out of this life with undeniable grace.

Elizabeth Edwards was originally known to the public for being the steadfast wife of  good looking southern Senator who would later become a presidential and then vice presidential candidate. During this time she also became known for fighting breast cancer as she campaigned for her husband and for being eternally optimistic and yet honest about her disease. In more recent years her family was made famous again in the press after it was discovered that her husband John had an affair and then a child with another woman. Although dying of cancer, Elizabeth left her husband but said in a television interview not too long ago that she would not bad-mouth him despite his infidelity to her because he was the father of her children and that she wanted them to still love and respect him just as they always had. Many years ago Elizabeth and John lost one of the two children they had at the time at the tender age of fifteen in a car accident. Knowing what strength I have gained and wisdom has been absorbed through and toughened my skin and my resolve to be in the world since the death of my mom, I wonder if having lost her son earlier in life and carrying on with her head held high in his honor and memory helped her fight her six year battle with cancer in such an astoundingly brave and lucid way. I would venture to guess that she will continue to be admired for her frankness and for living as fully as she could all the way up until today.

Just about the time Elizabeth Edwards was taking her last breath today I was at work wondering where one of my employees was after she had not shown up for work or called to say she was sick or running late. I called her and got no answer, leaving a message. A few hours later still no word and at this point I figured if she had slept through her alarm earlier, surely she would have awoken by now. Soon after another store manager approached and told me that this employee, who is normally exceptionally reliable, had called in tears, her grandmother having fallen yesterday and the employee had quickly driven to Bend to be with her. I learned later today that this employee is very close with her grandmother, her mom's mom and that the fall was bad. As I sat with one of my assistant managers training her on schedule writing we talked about this employee and she said to me, "You know she had to make the decision to pull her mom off of life support." I asked if her mother had been sick and she said  no, that she had been critically injured in a car accident. My assistant doesn't know that I lost my own mother the same way and I tried as hard as I might to not let the shock and sadness register on my face. All of a sudden, with one sentence I found myself relating to this employee in a whole other way. I have never known anyone under forty five or fifty who has lost their mother and feel quite isolated sometimes around my friends who see and talk with and talk about their moms often. It's a reality that most people my age haven't had to live or deal with yet. And so my well of compassion for other folks, other daughters in particular, who suddenly find themselves motherless at a young age, runs deep.

Speaking about the death of her son in a speech once several years ago, Elizabeth Edwards said that often times people don't want to ask about those you have lost because they worry it will make you sad. She told the audience that these people are already sad and know very well in most moments of their lives that their loved one is gone. By us asking people about their lost loved one, we are showing reverence for the fact that they themselves are still here. I hope that even though people know the public image of Elizabeth Edwards and what they have read about her in her own memoirs and in the media, people will always ask her children to tell them about her as a way of witnessing the loss they have experienced, the love they still have for this person, and as a way of acknowledging their survival and still presence in the world. Out of the people in my life who never know my mom, very few have asked about her. I believe only one has asked her name. I will never forget exactly where I was, driving on the highway with a newer friend in the passenger seat by my side, when she asked me to tell her about my mom and about how she had died. This was only a few years ago. In the five years before that, nobody had dared and I of course, hadn't volunteered. I will love this friend until the end of all time for braving the possible discomfort she might experience or create to get to know the thing that has happened in my life that is dearest to my heart and that most of the people in my life never address with me.

Death is so taboo. We don't talk about it, not really. The funny thing is, in one way or another it has affected all of our lives. Earlier today veterans and those who love and respect them honored the men who lost their lives at Pearl Harbor on this day so many decades ago and stood witness to their lives. Those men who lost their lives will always be revered and I hope the same can be said for Elizabeth Edwards, and for the mother of my employee who died too young too. In talking with her children about dying after word had come from her doctors that her cancer was no longer curable but only treatable, she asked her children at the dinner table to raise their hands if they weren't going to die. Of course, no hands went in the air because we are all going to die someday. It is the one and only true and solid fact of all of our lives and perhaps the one and only thing that each and every person on the face of this planet shares in common with each other. If this is indeed the case, why is it also the subject so many of us are scared to broach? Because it reminds us of our own mortality? Because really we are all dying right now and have been doing so since the day that we were born? It is only the speed at which this happens that differs from one person to the next really. I admire Elizabeth Edwards for choosing to live the fullest life she possibly could until today came just as I admire my mom for doing the same even when she didn't know death was hovering near.

Sometimes I worry that I talk about death to much here on these pages. I worry that I write inky pomes about it too often in my drawing sketchbooks. I worry that people think that I am morbid... or worse yet, that I am utterly obsessed or unable to get over the loss of my mother. The truth is, I think, that I don't talk about her much not because I don't want to but because even though I know they care about, nobody much asks and so as a way of processing my feelings, I write about it. But when I'm thinking about her I can't really say, "hey, so I was thinking about this one time when my mom did such and such or I couldn't sleep last night because I was having nightmares about the way she died." Those sort of things can be conversation killers. And so I keep her inside of me mostly, close to my heart and I write about her and about losing her here on these pages. I hope that I don't come off as morbid or unable to progress with life and I hope that for the children of Elizabeth Edwards and the spouses and children left behind by their fathers after Pearl Harbor and for my employee who unbeknownst to her, lost her mom the same way I did, that the world has and will continue to let us grieve however much and however long we want and lets us celebrate and discuss as often as we want to without passing judgement.

What lessons can we learn from the people we know and don't know who have died? How can we let their lives and in some cases, more importantly their deaths, serve as a roadmap for how we might live our own lives? What can we do to honor them in their absence and ensure that we don't take the opportunity of a death that takes a lifetime rather than only two or three or four decades for granted? How can we honor those who are gone who we may not have known but who have shaped the lives and being of those we love? What lessons can the universal experience of living and dying teach us about the interrelatedness of all people and about the interconnected web of all human kind? Tonight I poured myself an orange oil bath and I slinked down deep in the tub until only my face peeked up above the water and I thought about these questions. I laid there in silence and I watched the steam billow from the surface of the water, rolling and curling gently until it dissipated into thin air. I put my ears underneath the surface and I ran my finger down the outside of my earlobe and heard a noise like a trombone playing under the water. And then I closed my eyes. I asked the Universe, the great universal Spirit of Life to be with the family of Elizabeth Edwards, to be with my employee as she sits watch over her injured and ill grandmother, her last living link to her beloved mother, I asked that families of those lost in Pearl Harbor felt comfort and hope in the communion of each other today as they commemorated and I said a silent prayer for myself too that my life may be worthy of my mother's living and dying. That I may live in a way that would make her proud and that I don't get lazy and forget to grab ahold of opportunities that come my way and get greedy and fail to recognize all blessings offered me daily.

None of us know when it will be our turn to go. And none of us really know what is going to happen to us when we do. I hope for all of our sakes that when we are still here we feel love and that when we are gone people ask those who loved and survived us, to tell them the story of our little lives and to honor the spirit inside of us that will live on inside of our kin and friends. May we all in each of our days be able to find the courage and motivation to live in the most colorful and wildly loud ways we can muster, even with death on our shoulder as Elizabeth Edwards did. May we be courageous enough to follow our hearts and live fully our purpose, reaching always more heartily towards our dreams. And may we, in choosing every day to live so boldly, pay homage to the great cloud of witnesses who did the same before us and so bravely paved their paths and our own. In the name of all that is good and holy, namaste to you and to those you have loved who are gone. Let us always remember and honor the divinity that resided within them and that of them which remains inside of ourselves too.