{"id":9562,"date":"2016-05-17T19:57:27","date_gmt":"2016-05-17T19:57:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/faithforward\/?p=9562"},"modified":"2016-05-17T19:57:27","modified_gmt":"2016-05-17T19:57:27","slug":"after-the-eulogies-the-hard-part-of-being-human","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/faithforward\/2016\/05\/after-the-eulogies-the-hard-part-of-being-human\/","title":{"rendered":"After the Eulogies: The Hard Part of Being Human"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"shutterstock_101572000\"<\/a><\/p>\n

it\u2019s been months and weeks now. months since one friend died. weeks since the other. maybe because it\u2019s been one after another, one too-soon death followed by another, i\u2019ve tried mightily to listen to the lessons i\u2019m certain they and the heavens were trying to teach. to pound into my thick hard impenetrable skull.<\/p>\n

to make sure i didn\u2019t miss the point: live with all your heart. live now. don\u2019t let waste a precious second. and do not get tangled in all of those snarls that really, truly, could not matter less.<\/p>\n

why, then, is the last of those truths \u2014 the most certainly human \u2014 so impossibly out of our reach, or mine anyway?<\/p>\n

oh, i\u2019ve cried plenty across the hours of all these months and weeks. tears poured out of the blue because i heard a voice that reminded me of one of my two friends. because i bumped into an email. or a recipe. or a pine cone tucked into a pocket from the last time we walked in the woods.<\/p>\n

in the rawest days following death, your head \u2014 your whole being, really \u2014 all but quivers with the newness, the wrongness, of this life that seems to have a hole torn in the thick of it. in the hours when the stories are churned, and told and retold, you pay keenest attention. you distill the essence, as if a potion that might just save you. you whisper the hardest truths of a life just lost, and you spin them into incantations, promises to the slipping-away friend that you\u2019ll never forget. you\u2019ll never never forget to be alive in just the way their parting words implored.<\/p>\n

\u201cKeep marveling,\u201d wrote my friend who died in september, words she\u2019d sent at the dawn of a summer\u2019s day when she was pulled to watch the sun rise over the lake, and wanted me, too, to never stop marveling. and then, in a text one week before she died, she wrote: \u201cXxx swirl love swirl love recipe for today\u201d (she\u2019d had no time for punctuation that morning, and i didn\u2019t need it.)<\/p>\n

not many months before that very last text, exactly one year ago today, she wrote me an email that felt almost like haiku, or a buddhist<\/a> koan, wisdom refined to its purest:\u00a0\u201cblessings, blessings, more blessings. every minute is bonus. sun. birds. now.\u201d<\/p>\n

my friend who died in march, she too, left me with instructions. she wrote: \u201cif you love the life you have, please, please, practice gratitude. wake up every morning acknowledging just how much beauty is in your world. pay attention to it, honor it and keep your heart and your eyes wide open. you won\u2019t regret it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"IMG_7507\"because i love those words so much, because they wound up being inscribed on the back of the prayer card at my friend\u2019s memorial service two saturdays ago, i\u2019ve tucked them on my kitchen counter, just beneath the window sill, where i keep watch on the wonders in my tucked-away garden. i\u2019ve made them my everyday altar. i perched the card in precisely the spot where i stand when i make my coffee each morning, where i pull a cookie out from under the great glass dome, whenever i\u2019m packing my little one\u2019s lunch. i perched the card at the pulse point of my everyday, where i sometimes pause to stare through the panes, to catch a glimpse of springtime unfolding, to marvel at the flashing-by pair of cardinals, entwirled in the vernal\u00a0pas de deux<\/em> of lovebirds.<\/p>\n

and here\u2019s the hard part: no matter how deeply you promise, now matter how fully you inhale the one sure thing you know \u2014 that the only way to be alive is to be infused with love \u2014 the certainties begin to fade. or maybe they only get muddied. it\u2019s the stuff of being human that never fails to knock us at the knees.<\/p>\n

we lose track of our promise to live each and every day as if it might be our last, and to ferret out all piddling nuisance and distraction. and it\u2019s not because we\u2019re fatalistic or showing off our celtic obsession with the beyond, but only because it puts the sharpest edge to being alive.<\/p>\n

yet, the litany of temptations is as quotidian, as humble, as imaginable. it goes something like this: the guy in the shiny silver SUV who lays on the horn from just behind you, because you\u2019ve decided to heed the red octagon that\u2019s insisting you STOP; the soccer coach who picks the other kid (after months and months of vying) and doesn\u2019t bother to tell you directly, deputizing someone else to deliver the news you know will break your kid\u2019s heart; the email that wasn\u2019t supposed to land in your mailbox, the one sent by mistake, by someone who meant to grouse behind your back, except that she hit reply<\/em> instead of forward<\/em>. oops.<\/p>\n

yes, truth be told, it\u2019s these insignificant traps that clutch us by the ankles, that totter us from our vows to stick sure-footedly to a life lived beautifully, gently, blessedly. to stay above the fray, as if wafting with angel wings, hovering over the melee.<\/p>\n

i try, with all my might, to resist the temptation. to not give in to the bitter impulse. to stay tuned to the wonder, the astonishment. it\u2019s being human that makes it so hard.<\/p>\n

which is why i walk around these days with two slips of paper in my pocket, slips i reach for as if prayer beads, whenever i need to fill my lungs \u2014 and my heart \u2014 with all that is holy, to discharge the everyday demons:<\/p>\n

\u201cswirl love swirl love recipe for today,\u201d reads one of those slips.<\/p>\n

\u201cwake up every morning acknowledging just how much beauty is in your world,\u201d reads the other.<\/p>\n

and so, on the days, in the hollows of hours, when my promises tumble from my heart, and i feel my knees begin to wobble, i reach my hand in my pocket, and i hold on tight to the last best instruction from my two beautiful friends now watching from heaven.<\/p>\n

what makes you tumble? and how do you find the strength to right yourself?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"barbaramahany\"<\/a>Barbara Mahany, a former pediatric oncology nurse, was an award-winning feature writer at the Chicago Tribune for 30 years. She\u2019s now a freelance journalist and author of Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door<\/a> (Abingdon Press, 2014), and the soon-to-be-published Motherprayer: Lessons in Loving (Abingdon, March 2017). She\u00a0blogs regularly at Pull Up A Chair<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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it\u2019s been months and weeks now. months since one friend died. weeks since the other. maybe because it\u2019s been one after another, one too-soon death followed by another, i\u2019ve tried mightily to listen to the lessons i\u2019m certain they and the heavens were trying to teach. to pound into my thick hard impenetrable skull. to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2773,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1351,1352],"tags":[1273,105,1353,1354,451],"class_list":["post-9562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-death-and-dying","category-spirituality","tag-christianity","tag-death","tag-dying","tag-eulogy","tag-spirituality"],"yoast_head":"\nAfter the Eulogies: The Hard Part of Being Human<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"it\u2019s been months and weeks now. months since one friend died. weeks since the other. 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