Reflections :: Honoring Life’s Passings

In a few weeks it will be the anniversary of the death of my aunt Mary.

I have written here about her before; she helped raise me in that my parents shared a house with her and her husband. Her daughter is the closest I will ever have to a sister.  The kind that I talk to almost every day, stay up late waiting for, eat unhealthy food with, and sing songs badly and too loud for no reason other than because the car windows are down.

We both just went through chaotic, emotional weeks of great change. While processing on the phone, we only barely touched at the reality that her mom has been gone a whole year already.  It is the unspoken between us, and when the date gets here we we are certain to share it together in ways intimate and personal, though yet to be known.

Death is such an important part of life, and one we take with such little responsibility.  It is an unfortunate truth in our society that we would much prefer to sheen over the painful aspects of living, to medicate or consume or exercise them away.

This does little in favor of a satisfied soul.  The way of authentic health and vitality in fact is one of growth and change, of ever deepening meaning and understanding of our own lives.  Nowhere is this better studied than in the ineffable facts we witness merely by being human, that is the fact of the cycles of life and death and life again. Consider the many different people you have been.  Perhaps these changes have come in the form of different roles, identities or responsibilities.  Whatever the case for each person, the fact remains that for a new aspect of us to begin something old must transform.  Herein lay the treasure tucked deep inside life’s most unexplainable part:  death teaches us the importance of letting go.

When a society doesn’t value the reality of pain and passing, its health as a culture is diminished and death becomes sensationalized.  Grief is a transformative energy, and one certainly not limited to saying goodbye to a loved one.  A job change, a move, the end of a relationship or even the start of a new one can access deep, perhaps long held, and very normal feelings of despair, pain and other emotions.  It is this, the experience of pain, that makes us most infallible.  It is this infallibility that draws us deeper, in a more real and soulful way, in to who we truly are.  Likewise, it is here that we have the most in common with one another.

We just passed the midpoint of the year and head now towards the season of fall.  It is a good time to take pause in grateful reflection, and honor all the passings and human parts of our experience, for our own vitality and health within.

Photo courtesy of Flickr: