I am here. Here I am. Today is a new day. It feels like I haven’t been able to write freely despite the fact that I have felt the need to write. There are things in particular that I’ve been wanting to let myself pursue in writing, but it continues to not happen.

Meditation saves me everyday. I feel so much better about myself and my experience during my daily meditation. Today has been a sad day. I’ve been feeling a sadness for some time now. It’s the sadness of living and dying. It’s what we do everyday, but usually without the medically induced physical suffering and the tangible waiting that comes with terminal illness. The gratitude and grandiosity of our shared experiences are as intense as the suffering and the waiting. Death is the thing that breaks me down into every part of myself. Down to the shards with the jagged edges. Unable to hold myself together. Not able to make sense of the fragments. Bare and barely living is how I feel. My time here has no real purpose. What am I working so hard for? What am I pushing so relentlessly for? How smart, informed and well read do I really need to be? How put together, well taken care of and flawless do I really need to appear? I’m broken down, spirit-to-spirit with the departed, face-to-face with my barely living self and I’m reminded of what really, really, really matters. All the stuff that no one needs to know but me. I don’t know if there is any other purpose in life except to know how it matters to me.

Purpose and matter. I don’t think there’s a conflict with these two. I think they are more similar than they are conflicting. In some sense, it feels like it’s more about accepting what is across the space of our perception of past, present and future. There are not really words for the experience of whole heartedly understanding what is.

Death is a time and space of rest for everyone. I appreciate that we can be slower. Sometimes I desperately do not want to pick it all back up, though. This time and space is more comfortable to me. It feels important and gratifying to celebrate someone who has touched my life. It feels lovely to learn more about who someone is to so many others. It feels connecting to understand more of what truly mattered to someone I only knew part of.

I don’t know if we can ever know a whole person solely through our relationship with them. I think one of the beautiful experiences in life is when we get to see more of their brilliance and love through others. Death is not a dark place.

Completely,

Laura