walking the sacred spiral
walking the sacred spiral
Today I got two phone calls within seven minutes. One was from my brother and the other from my cousin. Both had called to tell me that one of my sisters-in-law had died.
My widowed brother was married to her for over fifty years, and though she had had health challenges all her life, and not been at all well this past year, her death has come as a shock to him.
His adult children are with him. The rest of us, his three siblings, are loving them all from some distance away, and waiting to hear what the plans are for services for her.
I am surprised, after nearly 30 years in ministry, that death–the transition of a soul from the body temple into the unseen realms–still takes my breath away, especially when this transition happens to a family member. I feel sad for my brother, who can hardly remember life without her, and now must go on alone.
I know the ongoingness of Life. I’m not frightened by the transition. I have seen it up close more often than most, and I have felt the freed presence of the person who is no longer residing in the vehicle which served that spirit as home during their lifetime.
I know we can still communicate, after a fashion. And I know that the loss of the loved one’s physical presence: the touch, the voice, the shared life together, is a mighty one.
I cannot feel sad for my sister-in-law, now freed from a physical vehicle that could not serve her spirit adequately. But there is no question that today, for those dearest to her, something has changed in a permanent way. There will always be a space in their lives where her absence is felt.
Her space will not be filled. This is not a bad thing. Her absence will become its own presence in their lives. Eventually her children will remember her without feeling the pulling loss of the grief of absence. I don’t know if that will be possible for my brother.
For those of us who are not yet old, but are past our middle years, death makes us think. How do we want to leave our lives? What state do we want to leave things in for our children and our spouses or partners to handle? What personal growth is left for us to pursue? What awarenesses to grow into? What forgiveness or healing to be done? What amends to make? In what ways do we want to be ready? (Whatever that means.)
Today I want to finish my article with something that Will Smith said in 2008 on Oprah:
“There is such a concept of loss. Loss and how we react to loss. We think of things in a straight line: birth-life-death. That’s not really how it works. You take those ends and you bend it into a circle so it’s birth-life-death-rebirth.
So you have to be prepared when you lose something–when you go through a divorce, when your mother dies, when you lose your house–you have to understand that nature has it no other way. There is a rebirth.
The death is painful. It doesn’t change the pain of the death. But you gotta stay awake and stay focused for what’s the rebirth that God is about to offer you.”
Thanks for the reminder, Will. I couldn’t have said it any better myself.
In the Circle of Life Again
Tuesday, September 16, 2014