Several things have happened in the past couple of days that reminds me how little time we really have, and we never know when life will drastically change.
A midwife friend I met when I was living in Santa Barbara lost her husband to a sudden severe illness on Friday. He wasn’t much older than I am. They have two young children. He was healthy just a few weeks ago, and now he’s gone. I can hardly wrap my head around it.
The next day, Saturday, Ginny McAlister, a student midwife whose blog I have been following died of an aggressive form of cervical cancer. She was also about my age. Two days before she died, she was awarded her dying wish: an honorary master’s in nurse-midwifery. She wanted more than anything to live to be a midwife, and she realized that wish. This woman’s story has been such an inspiration to me. She had a homebirth with her second baby (a 12-pounder!) and emergency transport to the hospital for hemorrhage and retained placenta. She found out on her daughter’s first birthday that she had a rare and deadly form of cervical cancer, and went through weaning her daughter, radical hysterectomy, chemo and radiation, and ultimately didn’t make it. Through it all, she kept working as a labor and delivery nurse and doing her classes and midwifery clinicals. She caught other women’s babies while grieving the loss of her uterus and fertility, while battling nausea and fatigue from chemo. She, too, leaves behind a grieving husband and two young children. Reading her story has made me love my life ever more fiercely. Safe journeys, Ginny. Know that you made a difference while you were here, and though we never met, I will never forget you.
A midwife lost her husband. Another husband lost his midwife wife. Each left a young son and daughter behind, and a heartbroken spouse. Both were young and healthy before their illnesses began. Pathophysiology is a bitch.
I think of the families, of what they must be going through. I wonder how you go to bed on the day your spouse dies, what your still co-sleeping toddler asks when mommy isn’t there in bed next to her. I wonder how you get up and face the next day after that, how you change diapers and make toast and put one foot in front of the other when your entire world is turned upside down.
I am reminded of a poem by Ellen Bass:
“to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.”
It makes me want to stay up all night. Indeed, that’s why it is 4:30 in the morning and I am up blogging. My mind races, feeling the pressure of so little time left. Even if I have seventy more years, it’s not enough. I go to bed every night, cavalierly assuming that I will wake up in the morning. I act as if I have endless sunrises to watch. But I got out of bed today and went to work, driving in a Seattle “snowpocalypse” (I had 3-4 inches of snow on my car). The roads were hazardous and other drivers sometimes careless, and I saw how precarious my existence in this body on this planet really is. I worked with families who were welcoming new babies, helping them to breastfeed, and I realized that these babies were going to outlive me. They would still be on the planet when I am gone. That was a sobering thought.
I went outside on my lunch break and walked around with my camera, attempting to capture the beauty of that particular moment in time in that particular place. I couldn’t take a gorgeous snowy day for granted. Who knows when or if I will ever see another one. This song, Live Like You’re Dying, played on my iPod as I walked, and I burst into tears. I stopped in my tracks, feeling my feet in my shoes, cold, planted on the solid path.
“All of the moments you didn’t notice
Gone in the blink of an eye
And all of the feelings you can’t help feeling
No matter how hard you try”
I don’t know how much time I have left, or what will be my cause of death. I hope for many, many more decades of life spent welcoming new babies and caring for women and their families. But Ginny hoped for that, too, and that wish was not granted. I have no reason to think I won’t live for a long, long time. I have health problems, but none (that we know of so far) that are likely to kill me. But every body, no matter how beautiful and perfect-looking it begins its life, will ultimately stop working for some reason or another. One of the babies I helped with breastfeeding today is going to die of breast cancer. One will have a heart attack. One might die of complications from pneumonia or the flu, well into her eighties. Another will get lung cancer from smoking.
I’m not trying to be morbid, just realistic. I have seen up close how short life is and how it can suddenly change with little or no warning. I have no answers for why some of us get to live for a very long time and others don’t. Luck, chance, karma, fate, predestination–pick your theory. I don’t claim to know anymore. I used to be dogmatic in my beliefs, but my dogma didn’t relieve anyone’s suffering. Sitting quietly in the middle of the awfulness, holding a hand (without offering empty condolences, meant more to comfort me than the person who was hurting), making space for grief to unfold in its own time–these allow for healing far more than saying something is God’s will. Don’t get me wrong; I believe in a loving God. I have experienced grace, and joy, and miracles. But there is also a lot of shit that happens, and I’m not going to blame it on anyone or anything other than the fact that we live in amazing bodies that work with far greater precision and complexity than I can fathom, and sometimes they fail sooner than others. Most of the time, they do a zillion processes simultaneously, and do them amazingly well, but occasionally something goes wrong, and then people get sick, and sometimes they die. Sometimes babies die. Sometimes mothers and fathers die. Sometimes grandparents die. We all die.
But we also all live, too. That is what I felt today, the full range of sadness and rage and pain and delight and hope that can fill a human mind and body over the span of a single walk in the snow on a lunch break at work. I will die. I know this. I fully accept it. I am not afraid to die, not in the least, because I have lived my life as passionately and purposefully as I have known how. I pay attention to momentary delights, and this gives my days meaning. I know I lived well. The following pictures of my walk prove it. They prove I was here.
I wandered around my church today, in a snowy cathedral. I planted my feet on a path many others have wandered on, many with hearts as heavy and full as mine. This trail outside my hospital is one that people surely must have walked, seeking solace after what might have been the best or worst days of their lives. I wandered through my church with my camera, peering at the glorious world through its lens, and I captured moments in time. This leaf cradling a few drops of melted snow mattered to me. These rocks, this pine cone, this forest shrouded in clouds all spoke to me of divine goodness. They preached a message that said more to me about God than I could have heard sitting in a pew, at least today. Words are sometimes too noisy, and they often say so little. This snow-covered stone wall told me about glory and grace and goodness. This mountain whispered messages about the fundamental wholeness that unites everything.
I walked for only half an hour, but I went back about my day feeling revived. I was here today. I paid attention. Today mattered.
Send prayers and loving wishes to the grieving families of my friends, will you? And the next time you see something beautiful, pay attention.