Life changes in the instant.

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity.

by Joan Didion, “The Year of Magical Thinking.”

I am still asking myself– even after almost a year since Sally died–why we never talk about death until it is in front of us. I think some of the truth lies in Joan’s short phrase–uncertainty, fear and perhaps not wanting self-pity. We have no idea when our time is and we are afraid to talk to others about what it looks like when we experience it closely. You can sit with a dying friend the whole day in her last hours and try to comfort and care and still not know that when you walk out of the room, she will breathe her last breath. This is the nature of dying. We can never predict it; and we always hold onto hope. Living is what we know best. Dying is what we avoid most.

Joan Didion says that the second year after a person’s death is quite different than the first. Grieving takes an about turn toward moving back to one’s own life and beginning to live into it as much as possible.

Waves come in and wash over me and then go back out. It seems a never-ending circle. As T.S. Eliot wrote: “in the end is my beginning”–both a circular and a spiritual journey.

Solomon’s book of Wisdom 3: 1-9 makes the most sense in my times of despair which come and go:

The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them. They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead; and their passing away was thought an affliction and their going forth from us, utter destruction. But they are in peace.

From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of imaginary lines
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute
Listening to others, considering well what they say
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself from the holds that would hold me
I inhale great draughts of space
The East and the West are mine, and the North and the South are mine

I am larger, better than I thought
I did not know I held so much goodness

All seems beautiful to me on
All seems beautiful to me
I can repeat over and over to men and women

You have done such good to me, I would do the same to you
You have done such good to me, I would do the same to you
You have done such good to me, I would do the same to you

I will recruit for myself and you as I go
I will scatter myself among men and women as I go (All seems beautiful to me)
I will toss (All seems beautiful to me) a new gladness and roughness among them (All seems beautiful to me)
All seems beautiful to me
Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me
Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me

I