Ask anyone for a life review, and I don’t care if they are eight or eighty. They are going to tell you about the hard times. Somehow we all know that life is not about the easy times. “I ate 100,000 good breakfasts.” “I got good grades in college.”
No, our lives are created and characterized by struggle. It’s painful to drop expectations, fail miserably, lean on others, and feel sorrow, anxiety, unrest and uncertainty. We would never go through these times voluntarily. They just come. As Toni Berhnard says in the book “How to Wake up,” no one gets a pass from those 10,000 sorrows. Life would not be life without it.
Columnists are people too, with lives that cannot always be separated from work. Such is it for me now. The extended Gordon family has spent a week in that painful, sacred space. We have dropped everything to be with my husband Mark’s brother and his family at a time of critical illness and passing. At times like this it becomes crystal clear what’s important, and what is the small stuff. Just about everything is small stuff.
When I was single, my girlfriends and I would discuss possible marriage partners. One of the first and most important questions would be, “Is he a keeper?” By “keeper” we meant a lifer, someone who was capable of and interested in committing for a lifetime, and living that commitment every day, through thick and thin. So it is amazing to watch my husband’s family, a real tribe of “keepers,” rally around one of their own as he lived out his final chapter on this earth.
We all know that death is certain, but there is no guarantee we will approve of or understand the timing. Big questions inevitably arise, especially when the person passing is younger, with responsibilities and dependent loved ones. Why this pain and loss? At some point we all come to see that we are not in control, but must live with whatever happens. It’s often when acceptance settles in that we see our true selves.
What strikes me as amazing about Mark’s family is that they don’t think they’re amazing. You will not find anyone who assumes that he or she belongs at the top, or deserves recognition for his or her efforts. Doing one’s job is good enough. The highest honor and the first priority is to love and serve others, especially one’s family. The more critical the service, the higher the honor.
Death is a time when one needs to simply be present as it unfolds the way it will. Once it was clear what was happening, this family’s natural ability to be present with each other came to the forefront and stayed through a 14-hour final bedside vigil. Love showed up and stayed, clothed in physical touch, tears, snacks, drinks, naps, ears to listen, laughter, phone calls, and reminiscing. None of this takes away the pain, but it adorns it with a cloak that makes it bearable, and passes critical time.
Not that we should be this way all the time. Lives need to be lived, schedules made, money earned. But when these times arise, how important it is to accept them! To see them not as interruptions to life but the real thing, and to take the time to let them shape us. To feel the pain and loss and begin to grieve.
I love big families. Mark has six siblings and I have four. Big families are good at deaths. Everyone does their part. There are just enough important roles to go around.
And now, as anybody who has lost dearly knows, time needs to pass. Time is an unrelenting healer when we let it be.