is
sad, how amazing that the forests and deserts
and
plains can hold us as we get up and walk
from
one season to the next.
--From the poem “Sadness in Spring” by RobinBecker
Yesterday, a
thirty-six-year-old woman who loved life and loved her young son even more died
from cancer. And I thought once again
how final death is. We can’t rewind to
before, no matter how much we might want to.
And we usually
want to. We want to ask questions. We want to hear a familiar voice. We want to show our love. Did they know, we wonder, that we loved
them? Did we tell them often
enough? Those questions are clichéd--because
they are so commonly asked.
The young woman
who died, Jennifer Arnold Smith, was a colleague of mine before her illness
changed her life. Jen knew for years that
her death was nearer than it should have been. She fought it, looked for
treatments, but she knew it was likely she would die soon. So she lived.
In the time she had, she really, really lived. She called it “living legendary.” She wrote and self-published two books. She told her story. She supported others with cancer. She went on trips and talk shows. A year ago, she took her son to school on his
first day of kindergarten; she had wanted to see that day, and she made the
most of it when it came. A week before
she died, she gave her son an early birthday present, a motorized scooter that
made his eyes open wide.
When my
brother-in-law Mo died by suicide this past summer, I thought of Jen, fighting
to live. Jen wanted more time, more
life. Mo was done. He could not tolerate life anymore. I wished they could have traded. I wished he could have given her the years he
had left, and she could have given him a way to go. If only it could work like that.
I miss them
both, Jen's lively spirit, Mo's sense of humor, both their gorgeous smiles. And I have no choice but to say goodbye to
them both.
Kay Ryan, in her
poem “Things Shouldn’t be so Hard,” writes,
“And when life
stops,
a certain space—
however small—
should be left
scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.”
Mo and Jen leave their marks on us and
on our world. And we feel them.
