When Someone Dies Young

                       

                        Today I thought about how everyone I know

                        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.