Just an ordinary week wrestling with mortality

And a letter from my inner voice of love, telling me to let mortality sit this one out and dance with eternity.

Mortality, eternity, and the in-between that is this one life we have on earth.

That is what has been occupying my mind and laying heavy on my heart in these weeks after my mother’s death. That mortality should be in my thoughts right now is not surprising. We may be lucky enough to live to 87 like my mother (but hopefully not unlucky enough to get dementia) yet none of us have any guarantee of the years left to us. And so what keeps coming up for me as I circle these questions of death and the afterlife is this:

I am less afraid of dying than I am of not living fully.

When you sit at a loved one’s bedside as they transition from this earth to what lies beyond, you either make a friend of death—as I saw my mother do, closing her eyes and letting go even as she held our hands—or you fight it bitterly. And to what avail? When it’s our time, this is a battle we cannot win.

I don’t want to push against my own mortality. That’s exhausting. What I do want is the eternity of life here, now. That is behind the Big Leap that I shared last week. Whatever moment we are living, in that instant we are living it forever—until it’s gone. Every day affords these sweet moments of eternity.

Lately, I have been asking for signs from my mother that she is with me. Show me a heart-shaped stone, Mom, I tell her, as I walked the beach one morning. Scanning the broken shells and stones on my Gulf Coast beach here in Florida, I spot it in seconds. I hold it, warmed by the sun, and slip it into my bag. My mother was not a beach lover but when we persuaded her to go with us, she amused herself by picking tiny seashells that would fit inside a pretty wine bottle. Once home, she would set them one by one into the bottle until it was full. I suspect this was a meditative practice, although she wouldn’t have thought about it that way. These bits of shell merged to form a beautiful mosaic, like the millions of moments of our lives. Each one distinct but part of the whole.

Image by Esther Merbt from Pixabay

In interviewing my mother for A Mother’s Journal I created for my oldest daughter when she was a baby, Mom told me to write down that her “best accomplishments were raising three children to be wonderful adults, trying to be a good person and helping others, doing well at my job and being a mother, wife and grandmother.”

It was a good life. It was everything she ever wanted. A 50-year marriage, three children, the five grandchildren, the great-grandson she met and held on her lap last year. It was her version of millions of tiny seashells in a bottle. It added up to a life that made her whole.

I think that wholeness is what made her acceptance of death easier when it came for her. She had lived a beautiful life. She knew she was loved and had loved well. And she was so very weary of dementia’s hostile takeover of her mind and body.

Now as her loving family we have the task of making ourselves whole in her absence.

And what I have discovered is that wrestling with my own mortality is not the way to do that. In the way that the universe tosses breadcrumbs in my path, the theme of

Letters From Love with Elizabeth Gilbert

last week was mortality. Both Liz and the incandescent beam of light that is poet

Andrea Gibson

, who faces an incurable cancer diagnosis, wrote movingly about a question so many of us would rather not contemplate. Andrea writes:

What of this day isn’t holy if you are still here to witness it? You are here to witness it. You are not already gone, Sweet Song. The music is still playing. When you think you’ve misplaced your high notes, you’ve simply forgotten that grief can sing them too.

All this past week the death doula Alua Arthur, author of the new memoir, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End, has been appearing in my path. Alua founded the company Going with Grace, to support people as they answer the question “What must I do to be at peace with myself so that I may live presently and die gracefully?” I first encountered her when author and meditation teacher

Sarah Blondin

wrote about taking Alua’s workshop last year that Sarah said encourages “an intimacy with our finite lives and in so doing, help us live.” Sarah writes:

“In some way, I was unable to fully live until I thought deeply about death. Rather than circling around my fear of death, I faced it head on, and found a place of freedom I wouldn't have found otherwise. Whatever ails us is trying to give us something. As for me, and my fear of death, it taught me how to see myself without layers of pressure and misunderstanding. I am eternally grateful for discovering this now, while I am still alive, instead of at the end of my life.”

Alua was also the guest this past week on

Beyond with Jane Ratcliffe

. In one exchange Jane quotes Alua from her book: “Death comes either as a friend or a stranger. It is up to us to decide.” Jane asks: How do we make friends with death? I listen closely for Alua’s answer:

Start making plans for it. Start thinking about your life in the context of your death. “If tomorrow was my last day, what of this life that I've lived?” “If tomorrow was my last day, what do I still need to do in my life?” “If tomorrow was my last day, boy, they're going to have a good time going through these boxes and tossing everything!”

We can start being more present with our mortality. Also with our aging. We push aging aside a lot and that's not fair. We can do more to embrace our aging and all our lines.

And then, as if the universe hadn’t given me enough of a focus on death and mortality, a few days later I listen to the podcast

Pulling the Thread with Elise Loehnen

who interviews Alua, talking here about our very human fear of death:

When we can pause for a moment and rifle through all that noise to figure out what the root of the fear is, then we can be with it in a meaningful way, rather than just let it run our lives…the goal is never to get

over it entirely, but rather to learn from it, to be with it, to not let it run our lives, but rather to let it fuel our lives.

And so, in the spirit of getting on friendly terms with death and my own mortality—perhaps the last gift my mother ever gave me—my inner voice of love wrote me this letter just after dawn one morning. (With these letters, I follow Liz Gilbert’s guidance. I read a poem for inspiration and then set a timer for 6 minutes, to keep my analytical mind out of the room. I write by hand in a journal that’s only for me and love.)

Dear Love, What would you have me know about mortality?

Oh dancer sweet, come sit with me awhile, stop your frenzied pace, always in such a hurry, always doing, trying to outrun what you cannot outrun. You're tired, I see that, so sit beside me, be still and breathe. Now close your eyes. Do you feel it? All of eternity, right here, inside you and all around you. I know you find this hard to believe, that there is an eternity of time and there is mortality, co-existing. I know it seems contradictory, but trust me. It is true.

On this earth, if you take my lead—and I am always first on your dance card, remember?—and let love dance you to the end of time, every dawn will bring an eternity of time. And when you live in that state of abundance, mortality holds no power over you. It cannot frighten you. I know you are afraid to die, but far more tragic, my twitchy grasshopper, is being afraid to live. Because then we let mortality win before we take our last breath.

You were meant to live with every ounce of your beauty, power and light. When you do that, firefly of a million summer nights, eternity will skip with you from this life to the next, dancing your dance in the hearts of everyone you have ever loved and who has ever loved you.

This story has a happy ending, my love. There is nothing to fear. I will be with you always, from your last breath to the one beyond.

The last dance is ours.

Love, Love

Question for the comments:

Is your mortality something you think about? How have you parsed these questions around death and getting comfortable with our finite lives here on earth?

Three Songs for 3-D

Dementia

“Our Love Affair,” Frank Sinatra

When youth has had its merry fling
We'll spend our evenings remembering
Two happy people who say on the square
Wasn't ours a lovely love affair?

Divorce

“Dance Me to The End of Love,” Madeleine Peyroux

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love

Destiny

“Questions, Chaos and Faith,” Joy Oladokon

Nothing is certain
Everything changes
We're spirit and bone marching to the grave
There are no answers
There are only questions, chaos, and faith