On Living and Dying II

Thousands of people died in the world yesterday. And in my neck of the woods, we count one of those thousands among our own. His name was Dave, and his surname, I don't even know. He was older, in his seventies probably, and collapsed from a heart attack mid-day. All of the afternoon employees were arriving to fire trucks and ambulances and the morning employees were still there too, some of whom stood outside the front of the store watching EMTs pump Dave's bare chest up and down for over far too many minutes. I was inside, making salads and trying to keep my employees inside and away from whatever appeared to be going on outside, we would find out soon enough. Accidents and emergencies have happened at other jobs before and as a manager, as much as curiosity can kill me, I feel it my job to keep the waters as smooth as possible and keep my own employees away from the storm. I was helping a customer when she told me an employee had collapsed. Ouch... all of a sudden worry set in and it all felt too close to home. A flash of panic ran through my body. It would be okay I told myself, somebody was just probably dehydrated and fainted or something. And so I went back to making my salads but not too long after one of my employees came into the deli after having taken a break, tears streaming down her face and eyes as wide as any I'd ever seen, she came up to me and simply said,"Dave died," and didn't blink. I could see her groping the world around her for some sort of understanding and comprehension as to what was happening; it was look I have felt deep inside of me a million times over and a feeling and experience, that of death, that I knew often defied explanation. I tried to stay calm, I asked her what she was talking about and then across from me at another prep table, a cook began to sob, audibly. She bent over on the counter and deep wails of pain came to her. She began talking quickly in Spanish, stopping to heave her body over and over into as much as a fetal position one can be in while still standing. I couldn't understand exactly what she was saying except I think, that she had talked with him that earlier that day. It was an awful scene and everyone was standing around in shock. As the leader of this group, I felt like I should do something, anything... but didn't know what that something should be. I told my employees to leave the floor, to sit down and take some time and I rushed upstairs to try to find  employees who were arriving for their closing shifts and break the news but I was too late. Upstairs in the break room I found a dozen people sitting in complete silence, looks of terror and shock and sorrow on their faces, redness and tears in their eyes. And in that moment, the world fell silent, another angel was getting his wings.

I drove home thinking about how deep the loss of a life sinks into us and can forever linger in our souls. When I got home I hugged my dog as my boss called to let me know that although he had a faint pulse when the ambulance left the store and there was talk  that maybe he hadn't died, she choked over her words as she said, "I just wanted to let you know, that Dave didn't make it." She was on her way home from work when she got a phone call that Dave had indeed died and that his wife was at the store. She was on her way back. She was supposed to go to the Blazers game with myself and several other managers and said she didn't have it in her to call them all and asked if I would spread the news. Of course I would. And so I hung up the phone and I sat on my couch in shock, opened itunes on my computer, and put on some Taize chanting, music that feels the very closest to holy noise to me. I sat silent, breathing deeply in and out, and listened to beautiful voices sing Alleluia and somehow amid it all, Shumba knew the world's axis had just shifted slightly too far off kilter, sitting next to me, his head leaning gently on my lap. Here it was again, the familiar song of death beating in my heart. At this point in my life, I know it well. And I felt eerily calm. I felt myself worrying about my boss, my employees who probably watched Dave die, and about one of our employees who held his hand as he left the world and about what painful memories if this experience may stamp inside her being. I hope that over time she can see her important part in the way that Dave left the world as a privilege, offering comfort and community to someone in their last moments. I thought about Dave's wife, about the children he may or may not have, I thought about knowing that deep shock and the unbearable grief that follows the moment when someone dies all too well and wishing I could absorb all of it into my being before it sets into his family and my peers insides. 

I suppose in the end, its the one surest and truest fact of life, that all people die; its the singular thing that each of us on this planet share in common. And for the past seven years in my life, death and the grief it leaves behind has often times been the heartbeat that weaves one moment and day and week into the next moments. Once you have experienced death as many of us have, it lives inside of you. Depending on the trauma of the death, upon how we were related or if we were related at all to the person who died, grief can weigh heavy and numbingly painful, or it can be a short, sweet, reflective sorrow that sits inside of us momentarily before we return back to our lives. Either way, it touches us all and it makes us remember the value and importance and perhaps more than all else, the fragility of life. It makes us remember our humanness and that as much as we would like to pretend sometimes, none of us are immortal; that we are share one very important flaw; that we will also die. 

When I was at work yesterday and all of this was happening, I ached for my keyboard. I wanted to write, no,  I needed to write. To process. To reflect. And when I got home I knew I had to go out again and tell people that someone they knew had died. I warmed a frozen burrito in the microwave and I sat on the couch and I watched it cool as it sat, untouched and the choir inside my computer sang, "laudate, laudate," one tenor carrying the tune, acting the heartbeat for the group, for the world. I called my chef who had taken the day off, to share the news with her on her thirty sixth birthday; what a horrible thing. I put on my favorite cozy sweatshirt and a down jacket and as I climbed in my car and pulled out of the parking lot, it began to snow. Large white flakes fluttered and floated down and the world seemed to become silent. And I knew in that moment, grace was happening. Pay attention Emily. Were these feathers falling from Dave's wings as he traveled wherever it was he believed he would travel when his life ended? And did in the snow, those who knew him see at least for a moment the startling beauty that appeared on the day his body died? I will probably remember these moments for an eternity just as I can still feel the kiss my mom left on my cheek seven years ago and hours before she was killed here on the right side of my face, still slightly damp with her love today. Just as I can remember the screams that bellowed from the depth of my soul later that night and the barbeque chicken a friends mom made to try to comfort me a few days later. Just as I remember holding my dying grandmother's stiff hand and and hearing her raspy last breaths and the days after when I collected the few things left of her and threw them in a dumpster. I can still remember the two times in my life I have seen my father cry; looking at pictures of my mom a few days after she died and when he told me that my grandfather had passed several years earlier. Just as I remember planting a tree when I was 12 for a classmate who had been shot and killed after an intruder broke into his house in the middle of the night,  I remember exactly where I was and what happened the moment Princess Diana died or can recall with exactly clarity being woken up by my partner on September 11th and being glued to the television together in silence for hours and days on end. These are the moments in my life that I will remember when all other memories fade because they are the moments when everything I hold dear vibrated the hardest inside of me and grief and sadness felt like they were trying to suffocate my every breath. Strangely enough, these are also the moments I feel at times most blessed to have experienced because they have made me the person that I am. They have helped me find strength and courage and wisdom I never knew I had and they have taught me to savor life in a deeper, more meaningful way. It has been said that until one experiences death they don't really know how to live and I don't know if I believe that's fully the case... but for me it is true that death has taught me how to live more bravely and thankfully and resiliently and has helped me to recognize with greater ease and find value in the things of beauty and in the brokenness that surrounds me in every moment of my life.

Shumba slept with me in bed the entire night last night, he has never done this before. I wonder, he must have known. This morning I woke several hours before my alarm was to go off and I knew I needed to write. I am thinking about Dave's wife and wondering if she has family to surround her in these difficult moments and all those that will follow. I am thinking about Dave sitting on the couch across from me in the break room on so many mornings... about how I was always eating and on my cell phone or reading the paper and about how he just always sat there on that same cushion, never eating, rarely talking. And I feel kind of guilty that I never talked with him much, that I didn't take advantage of communing with and getting to know him and all of the people around me in my life instead of shutting myself off to the world when I'm feeling lazy or antisocial. Because on the day after his exit from our world, I find myself wishing I knew Dave even a little bit more.
Let this be a lesson to me and to all of us not to waste the moments of our lives when we could be weaving this great big interdependent web we all spin a little tighter instead of serving our own self interests in the moment and expanding the gap between ourselves an others. Because everything that happens in life presents an opportunity for learning, this is what I will take away from Dave: pay attention, and spread community. Being polite and smiling sometimes isn't enough and isn't what we're called here to do in the end. 

I'm sure Dave's friends and family will have other, much deeper, reflections in the days and weeks and years following his death. I wonder for my boss and my coworkers, for those who did and didn't know Dave well, what reflections this sadness will bring. I hope in the least bit that it will remind those one hundred and fifty so of us that we are a family of our own. That it will remind us to engage with one another in respectful and kind and genuine ways. That it will help us forget personality conflicts and help us become more united, if even momentarily. When death strikes, people usually come together in new and deeper ways and in loss, perhaps this is almost always the gift. We lost one but are reminded of the dozens and hundreds in our lives who remain. We are reminded of our own life and of its value and of its ability to connect with and impact other lives. May the love that we have for one another as a work family, be palpable in the eyes of our customers and may our kindness and love spread to them, brightening their worlds if even a miniscule amount. May they take the love we offer them in smiles and small conversations and spread it out even further into the world towards their coworkers or family or friends. In the end, we are all called here to love and not to hate, and this is perhaps one of the greatest lessons that death teaches us. May we all go into the world realizing our connection to those around us. May we in all of our days, take small moments to work on weaving the fabric of humanity a little tighter than we found it, and may we, in reflection of those we have lost, be thankful at least for the time that they had and that we had with them. And most of all, may we remember in ourselves, that we are a blessing and gift upon the world. That we, just like Dave and everyone we have loved and lost, offer gifts that nobody else can; that we are worthy and are loved, just as we are. God bless Dave.

Namaste.

January 31st
The day that I wrote the above post I arrived at work to be ushered into a grief counseling session with the other department managers in the store. We discussed how to handle our grieving and upset employees and also how we ourselves can best deal with the loss of Dave or with any other memories or feelings of loss that it brought up. My store manager shared a little more about Dave that I didn't know and it brought home to me another lesson, a bigger lesson than I originally wrote about above. Unbeknownst to many people Dave worked with, for much of his life he was a banker. The last many years of his career he was a bank president. But his entire life he had harbored a dream of bagging groceries at a supermarket and when retirement came, his opportunity after decades of wishing, arose. Dave worked only three days a week I think but as his wife put it in the days after his passing, "he loved that damn place." Apparently Dave was happy as a clam being able to chat up our customers and get to know them and help them with their groceries and he absolutely loved what he did at New Seasons. His daughter and wife shared that it brought them a small amount of comfort knowing that he died doing what he loved. Those from the store who attended Dave's memorial service were surprised to see many of our customers there too paying homage to the friend they had made as he bagged their groceries. People brought flowers and his family hung a picture near the store entrance and one man was seen praying outside at a makeshift memorial where Dave had collapsed. I suppose in the end none of us will ever truly know how many or who's lives we will touch even if we are just bagging their groceries or ushering them to a seat each Sunday morning or serving them potato salad across the lunch counter. May we all until our final breaths, just as Dave did, get out into the world and practice doing what we love as much as we are able and in doing so, spread our own joy and light out onto others. Life is short and its sweetness fleeting so why not spend our time devoted to doing something that brings us joy and then passing this on to others. Dave was worth it and by golly, so are we.

Namaste.