September 14, 2023
I have a vision of birth in my right eye. My left sees encroaching death. This joy would assure me that I am alive, but then so many parts my life are dying.
I have thought of birth and death as opposites, points on each end of a linear continuum. I have thought of them as far from each other as snow from summer. This morning they are with me, like two eyes, two lips, two cheeks of one face, and it is beautiful.
Rumi tells the story of three masters who teach through laughter, each day hanging at the local marketplace, rolling with joviality. One dies. This makes the people wonder. What will the two teachers do when their friend is placed upon the funeral fire? Will they laugh?
The dead master is brought to the pyre exactly as he was at the moment of death. His will, simply written, had one request, no preparation of the body, nothing to be changed from the time of his last breath. The community gathered. The fire was lit. Boom! Boom! Pow! came the explosions. His pockets were full of fire cracking rockets!
I want to die like this. I want to live like this. I want my finale to ignite, waking the somber, the serious, the judgmental. May my death shake the walking departed to celebrate the face of death as life.
Death
When my friend, Rich died, we danced, turned up the volume, grabbed partners or feverishly twirled alone. Rich had asked to die in my home, in my bedroom. Our relationship was new, and yet I consented. I felt it would be privilege “to journey this together”. I went as far as I could go, perhaps a bit beyond, stepping for a moment across a threshold between physical and spiritual.
Rich had power in dying to rouse my heart, to weaken my knees. His last shower became a fatal ecstasy where life and death were breathing down each other’s necks and whispering sweet nothings.
…I put a rubber mat on the shower floor,
and then a chair.
He grasped the sink and tugged on the bow,
dropping his hospital pants.
I pulled up his shirt and he swayed.
I swayed too …not looking …looking …not looking,
gentle with my gaze …then a prayer.
Please do not let me violate his tenderness.
Please show me where to look, what to see.
Please help me be wholly loving.
When finally he was seated, I pulled the hand-held nozzle,
adjusting the temperature just right to my touch,
asking three times, is this okay?
He only nodded, his blue moon eyes all full of color
and the whites so sparkling bright.
The way he looked at me made me shiver.
Then he began with deliberate strokes,
lathering the bar, making soft circles,
wisps of foamy pearls fragrant against his skin.
I was mesmerized by those circles,
watching the elegance of his hands,
moving around and around his body,
skin gleaming, and Rich cooly nodding
for me to wash away the old, the dirt, the past.
More suds, more circles, moving into private places.
I tried to look away. I did not want to stare.
In all his weakness, he still had power
to stir my heart, to rouse me to voyeur
his relationship with his body,
a love that caressed that broken mortal tenement.
A bag of bones and tumors and fluids.
he washed again and again, oh! again,
tender till the end.
It was the last shower.
I think he knew what it would do to me,
amazed what he had allowed.
To partake in this intimacy
pierced my every layer of strength.
I couldn’t decide if it was his humility
that let me share those moments,
or a bold display to make me falter
punctured and human and helpless.
I felt the death of pride, and a bud of new love
with what would too soon be,
forever beyond my touch.
I tell you it is too much
beauty for me now,
too much to speak.
Excerpt from The Last Shower, The Love of Your Life, unpublished manuscript, 2005
In the center of what foreshadows death, life perpetuates, love blooms, the fruits of intimacy demand unprecedented communion of self and other. How holy these moments, these breaths, unspeakable and radically enlivening. Death offered Rich and I the tender interplay of feeling and ritual, so like those at birth.
Birth
Nova Caroline Lord came to the planet a year and a half ago. But then, I seemed to know her before the pregnancy, long before the announcement of a babe in utero. At seven weeks gestation, tiny as a raspberry, Nova’s soul was luminous, lighting up my being. I wrote her a letter.
Dear GrandBaby,
I knew you were coming.
I knew you before you were a bit of matter, a charge in the ethos,
the vast spaciousness of the uncreated, always in my heart, though unmanifest.
I could feel your light gathering itself,
within Divine Being a spark, an essence
and that kindling like an ember
upon which angels breathed immaculate air.
Ember took flight through spiritual atmospheres,
a comet, a shooting star, almost imperceptible from where we are.
Yet you shone, our perfect compass
that we might be guided by your sparkling soul
to gather together, to behold the sacrament of life.
I was told for the first time last weekend that you are here, well,
in your mama’s womb, a bit of water, ions, hydrogen,
sodium, potassium and such elemental things, now elevating.
You began integrating molecularly, taking shape,
as God infused Her creativity and design, to my joy!
Now, grandbaby, I feel the purest connection to life,
your new and wondrous journey
already imprinted in your tiny body,
also imprinted in my heart.
Your Mama said you are growing 100 cells per minute.
Can you feel my love in every one? It is growing us together.
Birth and death are but one gift, the holiest of sacraments, the epitome of what it means to be human and divine. We come from Love wholly entrusted to us, that we may realize the privilege of loving in this world. We return to Love that God might savor the goodness of Her human creation.
There is only Love and it lives me, appearing most passionately through birth and death. In living, the parts of us that cannot love, die to a blessed humility. In dying we are born again to eternal life, Amen. (St Francis Prayer).