Left Behind

This has been an unusually sad week for me. I know, in my vocation, grief is a constant, and paying attention to my emotional and spiritual processes is a necessity in order to be available emotionally and spiritually to others, and healthy in myself. At the same time, some people touch me more than others, and this week, someone whose life had touched mine deeply, died. She was a young woman, 32, who had lived with breast cancer for maybe the last 4+ years. She leaves behind a husband, parents, a sister, and friends and acquaintances enough to fill a funeral home's reception hall.

Her husband and a friend have initiated a foundation, donations to which are intended to support women as young as she and younger who also find themselves with breast cancer. Such a foundation is needed. One of the things she wrestled with was how separated she felt from other women her age; she felt isolated by her disease, as well as singled out by it. It is an unpleasant fact we might just as soon ignore, but young women can get breast cancer, too. Cancer truly is no respector of age...

The foundation is supposed to be an indicator, a marker, a tangible evidence that she lived. When she was living, she took a quiet pride in it, but it was not something in which she put great store. And really, she spent little time worrying about what her legacy might be. One of the things that made her remarkable to me was her simplicity: she was able to be simply focused on the living of each day; she was simply grateful, especially for the love and care she received; she was simply determined to live as long and as well as she could; she was simply not bitter nor resentful, but simply strived to be as welcoming of what each day brought. Consequently, her true legacy might be more simple than even a foundation in her honor could be. It might be that she's simply become an inspiration to others. She certainly is an inspiration to me.

Her death came after the weekend that I saw "Transamerica." In the movie, the main character's son is given a cowboy hat. He leaves it behind, but his parent holds onto it. Eventually the son returns, and the parent produces the cowboy hat, giving it back to the son.

I know, this is an obtuse reference, and one might easily wonder why it touched me the way it did. Let me say! In the first place, it reminded me of something one of my son's has left behind with me-- a bongo drum! My son left it with me when he began what is proving to be his own odyssey toward adulthood (that elusive state of maturity, unrelated to age!). He's been back more than a couple of times, but the drum remains here, maybe more a testimony to who he was than anything. Maybe it holds for him little promise of who he is to be. (The cowboy hat was more the latter in the movie.)

The point is, I got to thinking about all the things I've left behind, with my parents when I was younger, or just along the side of the road as I've been journeying toward my own adulthood. A couple of years ago, a friend I knew decades ago sent me pictures of my kids I'd somehow left with her when we each went our separate ways! Who knew? Most of what I've left behind I've long ago forgotten. There just is no keeping track of it.

All of which leads me to wonder about several aspects of leaving behind.

On the one hand, when we go on into death, do we worry from the other side about what we've left behind? Or is it all gone in the Great Forgetfulness, once we've crossed over? And if it is gone from us, then why worry so much about it now? What reassurances do we need, are we more truly seeking, so that we can leave, with less worry for what we've left in our wakes?

On the other hand, what about those of us who are the ones who are left behind? Do we encourage the dying to leave something with us? Are we seeking some way to hold onto some part of them, after we can no longer hold onto them? Or are we wanting more, maybe some reassurance that the world we live in truly is Real, and the people we know and love are not chimera, but flesh and blood, as we feel ourselves to be? Are we seeking, too, to locate ourselves in, say, the flow of time which we call history, so that we feel connected to what has gone before in this world, and have some hope to be connected to what will come after we are no longer in it?

As we are rowing our own boat, and life is but a dream, what matters?

For me, with my young patient, what has mattered was our relationship-- that elusive, non-material, ever ephemeral, and yet somehow more substantive and lasting actuality, wherein I can feel the impact of her upon my living, and know in my heart I've been changed for having known her. As one of the ones she's left behind, I can hope that, in some respect equally non-material and real, our relationship had a similar impact upon her course-- perhaps one she carries forward with her, even now.