Tonight I went to the funeral prayers for a teacher who died yesterday. I had known her since I taught second grade and she the third, but we were not close friends, only colleagues. In all the years I have known her, she was a smiling presence. It was a shock when I saw her in early June to learn about the cancer. She was optimistic though she was obviously weak, and looking forward to the marriage of her eldest daughter. Now, with the school year barely begun, she is dead. She died with grace, and such courage I never knew.
How does one make sense of untimely death? I touched the books on my library shelves and pulled out Richard Adams' The Girl in a Swing. Alan, the narrator, describes the anguish and the pain of mourning his dead wife. I thought of the girls tonight, weeping for their mother, and I thought, There can be no comfort; their loss is unbearable. "Don't seek comfort," Tony, Alan's friend, tells him. "Don't avoid the suffering." The dead deserve all our grief.
the Friends Chapter 15
15 years ago
2 comments:
"The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree
Are of equal duration."
~T S Eliot, "Little Gidding"
We need to mourn. But on the other side of mourning is the fact that we all die, and the quality of a life is not measured in length of time on this earth. If you remember your friend as you speak of her, and if her absence brings grief to her daughters, the she truly learned to live and love before she died, and what greater achievement would a longer life have brought her? We each get a span of time to learn to live, and the fact that we do not know how long it may be, is the incentive to do all we can to acquire the wisdom to live in each moment, and treasure the time we have.
Thank you, Diana. Life is too short to worry about the little things. We should live life fiercely, giddily, and with such kindness to others in every look, gesture, and speech.
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