“All goes onward and outward..and nothing collapses.
And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.
Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and i know it.."
walt whitman
-leaves of grass
she is still here. her body suffered, im not sure why it was to be this way for her, but she knew she would have to let it go. i can feel her, with the others, in my thoughts, on the tip of my tongue when i call out her name but im meaning to call someone else entirely. she's here, in the unseen spaces and with the others that have suddenly noticed that there's a little more space around or perhaps an empty one.
She is one of three who came to us. Her sister had already passed before she had time to be here. Seeing how Marys story has unfolded its most likely from the same condition that our Mary finally surrenderd to. We brought her sister home anyway, said prayers and buried her here.
saying goodbye takes time. it lingers, for us and for them, if your paying attention you can see it in the unfolding. I have begun a tradition of putting bells on our friends, it began with Mary, before she passed. Her leaving was not sudden or unexpected, it was a decision made between her, me and God. So there was time.. time for preparation, for thinking about the process, of leaving one place to unfold into another. i felt like she needed a calling forward, as there was a feeling like something was not yet complete on her behalf, or maybe it was mine. a simple bell tided loosely with banana twine hung around her neck, so they would hear her coming. i lit incense of myrrh and frankincense, to clear her path, blessed her in anointing oils, but really i'm seeing, it is i, who has been blessed here.
The bells are like a whisper, a calling to God, something to join them while they are in their bodies and perhaps not.
why cant the parting be simple, a divine letting go.. a simple slipping out of whatever this is really is? why cant it be beautiful, a celebration of sorts, they are showing me that, my teachers here, masquerading as four legged ones. nothing that is real, really ends as Whitman so famously noted, 'all goes onwards and outwards and nothing collapses.." wouldn't surrendering to this just feel like grace? to know deeply that this life, here, is so very temporal and anything that means anything goes on and on. that part feels more real for me than any ending does. my beloved mary showed me that.
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