There is nothing like the death of a friend to make me aware of my own mortality. Given survival of open heart surgery, a perfectly healthy looking person is diagnosed with a very rare kind of cancer. Eighteen hours or so of surgery later, she is tenuously clinging to life where she remains for over a month, in excruciating pain, clinging to that horrible place between life and death.
Today, blessedly, the committee beyond human control, in charge of these decisions, determined she could be set free since she wasn't going to be her former self again. The phone call to begin the chain of announcements began, turning the grieving process on in a myriad of relatives, each left full of memories and sense of loss.
The world lost a mother, grandmother, sibling, mentor, friend, and many more titles this lovely human wore. It lost a witty, talented, thoughtful, intelligent person whose death also takes away her music.
Grieving is a different process for each person who travels that road. Some do a fairly quick inventory as to how their lives will be affected while others take forever to grasp and deal with the reality. No two people feel the same, share the same memories, nor sense the same vacuum in their lives. She will be remembered in many places and in many ways as those of us who knew her play our own short personal videos of ways she touched our lives. It was time for her physical pain to disappear and our psychic pain to begin. As humans, between then and later, this process will be repeated many times, in many degrees, until we no longer have life left within us. We depart the world and leave grief to others.
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