The Crown of Power

A few weeks ago my friend died.  He lived a long and I hope, from his perspective, satisfying life.  I find myself thinking about him, or rather his dying, and what I witnessed through his process. 

I could write all about his life, how he was a mentor to my son, a brilliant violinist, conductor,  and teacher.  His drive for perfection, and his passion for music, for his students and for Heifetz.  But I experienced all this while he was alive.  In life I learned from him many things.

But, it is in his death that I have come to a new understanding that is difficult to put into words.  It is an image, a thought that melds into a feeling, a feeling tucked deeply, somewhere behind my heart. Or even deeper still.

I grew up surrounded by grown-ups who were in a frenetic whirlwind to keep death at bay.  There was worry over this and that and then this again. A sneeze from one of us would immediately be home diagnosed into pneumonia with death looming from each corner of the room.  Our mother could see a swollen gland from half a block away and would be sent into a tizzy of concern, anxiety, and worry.  Everyone who knew our mother knew of her penchant for worry, so much so that as we grew older it became somewhat of a joke.  Worry was just something that Mom did. 

It appears that, according to psychosocial development theorist, Erik Erikson, I never had a chance:

“Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.”

As a young person, I feared life, and I feared death.  But being a rebel child I fought against my fears and made the motions of living a life, all the while worrying about the next moment.  Secretly, the thought of the moment of my own death lived inside me, controlling my responses to the world outside myself.

Then our mother died. 

It was a slow process that included a decline first into dementia where we faced that profound grief one experiences when first we lose the person we knew and loved, while they are still living.  As the dementia took hold of her bright, funny, creative and often ridiculous mind, the core of her fears came more and more to the surface.  She was simply terrified.  Never having worked through her fear of dying, she had spent her life avoiding the certainty of her own death.  Let me just say here, without malice or judgement, that it was not the most gracious end of life experience. Our mother died as she had lived, in fear. 

Here is what I know. 

She died anyway. 

All those years of worry, of fear, of being afraid of life for fear of death did not change the inevitable.  It may have given her a false sense of control to help her defend against her fears, but the inevitable is just that, inevitable. 

Freely I admit that this is not a divine epiphany by any means.  The poets and philosophers and play writes of the world have been putting pen to the subject of death and the fear of dying for centuries. I personally, have called a truce with myself concerning my own mortality, along with a host of many other things. 

But then a few weeks ago my friend passed away, and this time I was there. 

I watched as he slept, made less agitated with the help of morphine, his breathing even but shallow and labored.  He had been a worrier as well, from the same generation as my parents.  In fact, the similarities were sometimes uncanny.  He too had fought off death furiously, taking radiation treatments up to the last week of his life, with hope that he would walk again, play the violin again, somehow cheat death.  Many people have told me that they always thought of him as someone who would be here forever. I understood, I felt the same way. 

For all the worry, for all the fears, for all the moments lost thinking about the next moment in time, he died anyway. 

As I looked on it was clear the man I had known, appreciated, was often frustrated by, and learned to love unconditionally was no longer there. There before me was the completion of a life.  I was witnessing an ending and a beginning at the same time.

Process.

The realization that this is all a process. In life we are always working toward fruition, a completion, a goal, an end product.  A grade, a score, a promotion…we want what the prize is at the end.  But life is not an end goal, it is a process, a day to day, minute by minute process which passes, ultimately, into death which then begins something new, unknown.  Life and death; it is a packaged deal. 

Looking back on my friend’s death, my mother’s death and the deaths of loved ones  before them; I honor and respect all their lives and all they gave me. I release with that same respect and love that which no longer serves me well.  In understanding life and death and, more importantly, in the acceptance of that universal reality, there is an exhale of breath and a release of the very fear that has, in the past, held my life frozen keeping me from my own truth, sometimes from living life itself. Life, without looking, consciously or unconsciously, through the lens of a constant enveloping fear of death, can be the ultimate in empowerment.  For me, it becomes the Crown of my Power, 

For I am set free.