My friend, whom I wrote about in the previous post, re-embraced eternity a week ago. There are no more hospital visits. No more medications. No more tubes and bags. No more delirium. The funeral is over. The words have been said. Now the living just continues. And so it goes.

I will never be able to find her anywhere again. I can go to her house and she will not be there. I will have abundant proof she existed, and yet she does not. That is the mind bending truth of death. The comic truth: death makes people disappear. Thanks for that, Captain Obvious. It may well be the most self-apparent thing you’ve ever read, but yet it is the most difficult thing about death. The most difficult thing to adjust to, to accept, to make sense of. Here one moment. Utterly gone the next.

I happen to believe there is sufficient mystery in life to make an unseen realm possible. You can call it what you will, but I think death is a labour that births us into a new life on another plane. We are midwifed by those who love us and mourn us on this plane and welcomed by those who have already arrived into the other place. It doesn’t matter why I believe that, but I do. Does it comfort me? Sure it does. It’s not that I’m rattled by the alternative view of finality and end. Quite the contrary. I just don’t think it’s true. So I don’t give that possibility much thought to be honest.

My friend was philosophical about her death. She knew it was coming soon and knew it would hit the rest of us hard. She was right on both counts. Death is coming for each of us. We know it cognitively, but we generally push the thought about the when away. One day in the hospital, I asked my friend if she’d be there to greet me when my time came and she said she’d be there with open arms. She added, “It may be sooner than you think.” I was alarmed for a moment, wondering if her nearness to death gave her access to inside information. And it well may have. Then I realized there’s not a damn thing I could do about it anyway. Que sera sera. I’ll stay as long as I’m supposed to…just like everyone else.

One of the best studies of death and the human condition was Alan Ball’s masterpiece Six Feet Under. With the tagline “Everybody Dies,” the show gave us a glimpse each week into the myriad ways people meet their Maker. Sometimes tragically. Sometimes comically. Always finally. In the very last episode, the series wraps up with a montage of how and when each of the main characters dies. It’s powerful and poignant. Everybody dies. Everyone will mourn someone. Everyone will be mourned by someone. When and how are the only questions unanswered. Are they the questions that matter though? How we lived is far more important a question. Did we raise others up while we were here? Did we leave things (including ourselves) just a little better than when we found them. Did we shift even one person’s life for the better?

I can tell you that my friend did all of those things. She was, by all measures, an ordinary person who made an extraordinary impact because she lived a life of compassion, honesty, love, forthrightness and high expectation. She did not choose how or when she died. But she most certainly chose how she lived. And what a life it was. What a wonderful life.