The Hammer of Mortality

   You know how stuff happens? One day you are cruising down the road safe in your own secure routine. You're minding your own business, not really paying attention to much other than what you need to do; pay the bills, feed the cat, clean the dog poop out of the yard, and you get hit in the stomach with something that is so unexpected that you can't breath?

  You may (or may not) have noticed that the blog has gone dark for a few weeks. I generally write this for my own amusement, and yours, to catalog my life, and let you compare yours with mine-just to see if there are similarities, the "Oh yeah, I do that too," or to learn if we are even inhabiting the same planet.  But every so often life abandons its long meander and makes a sharp left turn. If you're out wool gathering you miss the curve and end up in the ditch.

  This is what happened to me recently when a dear friend who I had just seen a week previously called to tell me she had been diagnosed with stage four cancer. There is no treatment or reprieve. This news shocked and stunned members of my writing community of which she is a beloved part. We writers are a tribe who inhabit dusty book filled rooms or attic garrets; working in quiet solitude, we are accustomed to scribbling out our emotional baggage, a show and tell to the world. We are willing to commit the complex curve-balls of human relationships and tease out long buried feelings for every psychic trauma we have suffered to the page. Yet, as our group sat and looked at each other, none of us, so skilled with the production of words, could find any that could convey what we were feeling. Not a word, sentence, or syllable seemed adequate for the news we had just heard.

  It is the time of my life when these events start happening more frequently, I suppose. I have only lost one other really close friend and that was fourteen years ago.  When I was seventeen my grandparents packed up the home they owned for thirty years and moved into an apartment. I remember thinking about the lifetime it took to acquire all those possessions and one day, poof! Gone. No need for that couch, the dining room table that had been the scene of so many family dinners, or the bedroom space to host family visits. It occurred to me, even at that young age, that there comes a time when one divests of all the items that are gathered during a lifetime; career, a house, kids as they move away, but it never occurred to me to add friends to that list.  But here we are.

  And the thing that's hanging out there, what's left unsaid; the elephant in the room is this -- that day is coming for me too. And you. I don't know when, most of us don't; maybe not for a long time, or maybe tomorrow if I absent mindedly step in front of a bus. That thought makes me take a good long look at all the stuff that's sitting around here. Do I need it? It makes me think, have I done the things I set out to do, to say. Am I the person I always hoped I'd be?  Meanwhile the routine, the habits, the bits and pieces and stress of daily life allow me to hide from the inevitable. It seems there are things I should be doing, changes that need to be made. (And I'm not talking about making pre-arrangements. My kids can cremate me and divvy the ashes into freezer bags for all I care.) What I'm talking about is slicing it down to the bone. What's important? How much more time do I waste doing things I don't want to do?  It's high time I figure it out.

  The hammer of mortality is going to get us all. The deception, the slight of hand is that we have time to burn. The poet Mary Oliver asks "What will you do with your one wild and precious life?" It is a question well worth asking, and coming up with the answer too.

  After my mother died a friend of hers wrote to me describing her loss. She and my mother had maintained a friendship from the time they were young mothers with small children. At that time we lived in Minnesota. My family was to leave and relocate several times. The bond between the two stayed strong. At the time of my mother's death she wrote," I remember when I thought Indiana was as far from here as the moon; I could never reach either place. Some things are stronger than never or far, Heaven is however, farther than Indiana." That is true no doubt, and time of departure isn't on a schedule.

  For the next weeks and months my friends and I will all be holding hands. It seems that is one of the reasons we are  here together. Because really as Ram Dass says, what we're all doing is walking each other home.