Silver Linings
One of my oldest and dearest friends lost her 34-year-old daughter five years (almost to the day) before my Colleen died. After Colleen passed, Lynn mentioned to me what a gift it had been to be by Emily’s side when she died. I didn’t feel this way about losing Colleen in those early days after her passing. I was indeed glad that she had chosen to come home to Bear Hill to go to bed and not wake up here, on that late November night in 2017, rather than to do this at her home in New Hampshire, but a gift? Watching her leave this world at such an early age felt traumatizing to me. For a long time after that event, I found the memory of her last 20 minutes (struggling to breathe from deep inside her diabetic coma) an intrusive and disturbing one.
As time went by, I began to see what Lynn had meant. Early on, I knew (in my head, at least) that it had been better to sit with Colleen as she died than it would have been to receive a phone call that this had happened. But it was months before I began to recognize just how important it was for me that I had been present as she left this world.
I was unconscious when Colleen was born in 1990, but I did hear her lusty cry through the general anesthesia I had been given. At her death, I spoke to her while she struggled physically, believing she would hear me just as I had heard her twenty-seven and half years earlier. I knew I was offering what solace I could to her that afternoon, but I didn’t immediately get that I was offering myself a gift as well. I feel so honored to have brought this amazing person into her life on earth, to have witnessed both her beauty and her suffering throughout that unique life she lived, and to have been able to send her out with the same love I had always held for her.
Today’s prompt (for writing, reflection, whatever you want to do with it): Can you remember experiencing an event as an unwelcome challenge, only to later see it as a gift? How might this memory inform your next experience of railing against a life event that feels too hard or too unfair? Might there be a positive aspect that will eventually be recognized? Might you stay open to this possibility, even if you cannot yet see what it will be?
Ann, I watched by father-in-law and then my father pass. It is so difficult to witness the progression of normal breathing to agonal breathing (a true indicator that the end is near). But what I have learned since is that the body is amazingly kind, and while it may seem harsh, this breathing is not hurtful to our loved one. Our struggle to let go is the real struggle in those moments.