Saying Goodbye

This post is about death, so, if you are a bit squeamish around this subject then please read on and hopefully reading this will help you get over your discomfort.  I mentioned in a post recently in my blog from Bogota, Colombia, that the theme of death was very much present with me, having recently turned sixty, I suppose, but also feeling rather vulnerable being alone in an unsafe city in South America.  I had an overwhelming sense of the mortality that binds, embraces and unites us all.  And, yes, Gentle Reader, we are all going to die, and for this reason we are called to live intensely, as though each day is our last, while greeting each new day when we awake with a song of thanksgiving and joy.

I am thinking of my mother's death, Joyce Alaire Greenlaw (nee Gentner) twenty-five years ago at the age of sixty, my age now.  Here is a posthumous portrait I painted of her in 2007



I remember our last conversation.  She was dying from lung cancer in hospital.  Following a movie, Edward Scissorshands, I went to see her, knowing that in her words she was "going down fast."  Her breathing was very laboured and she seemed scarcely conscious.  We chatted for a while and I told her about a dream I'd had the previous night.  Basically we were having lunch together on a restaurant patio in a European country.  We were drinking white wine.  She asked me what the dream meant.  I replied that everything was well between us and we could part as friends.  She seemed pleased and relaxed.  I kissed her on the forehead and went home.  One of the nurses asked me if I wanted to sit by her bed for the night.  I knew that I needed to sleep and somehow I felt okay about not staying and so did Mom.  When I arrived the next day in the early afternoon she had already been dead for forty-five minutes.  I went over to her bed and again kissed her forehead.  I didn't see her die, but we parted as friends and I knew that where she was, that she was well.

I have no doubts about an afterlife.  I remember when a couple of years earlier the wife of a friend died from melanoma and another friend and I both prayed together for her soul.  I had a vision of her as a much younger woman, or girl rather, of fourteen or so.  She was wearing brown and white peasant garb (remember Holly Hobby anyone?), had long flowing hair (in life her hair was always cut short) and she was running through beautiful meadows surrounded by trees, uphill, smiling joyously with her arms stretched out before her.  The following day her widower, my friend, came over to visit and told me that a friend of his I had never met before had a vision about his wife.  Detail by detail he described exactly the vision that I had had yesterday about his wife. 

I have no doubt at all.  I do know that it is important that we forgive, pardon and reach out to one another in a spirit of love and reconciliation.  This life is very short, but a breath or two and then we are gone.  This life is short, but how we live in this life and especially the way we treat one another is going to have a huge bearing on how we are going to spend eternity.