There is a thin veil of sadness shadowing our journey this week. My hubby’s father has passed away…and although he was more absent than present in our lives, his undeniable reality was always a reason for hope…now we are plunged into an emptiness of hope where our relationship with him is concerned. Perhaps it is this truth which sits in the shadow and permeates our days just now…I am not sure. Certainly, as I have written previously, we did go to Adelaide earlier this year and we did bridge much of the questionable past, and my husband’s Dad did let us in a little, to his home and heart…but it only served to make everyone more aware of what we could have had…
I guess it is like nearly all things to do with the human journey, a matter of attachment….to an idea…to the hope of an idea…to something other than what is…
Our youngest daughter cried…feeling a loss of human life, a loss of the grandfather she always wished she had…she cried for the man she only met twice in her 14 years, and yet who filled a space inside her filled with hope and longing…
And my Husband…I do not know what he feels…sometimes I look into his eyes and I see only confusion. The veil of sadness permeates his sigh when he holds our daughter as she cries…when he tries to quantify the nature of his relationship with this man he called Father. When he asks me to write something to go in the paper…because he is devoid of thought about this…only filled with a feeling…but what feeling? Regret?? Resignation?? Pain?? I am not sure even he knows…
But there you have it…death is a sobering thing…it equalizes us all…it leaves no room for doubt about our humanity…
Birth brings with it hope…a feeling of euphoria…of indomitableness, of conquering and miracles…and we can see the path of a new life stretched out before it/ school, friends, lovers, children of its own….but death is for many, the end of that path…where any path leads from death is filled with fear, the unknown, conjecture…and it brings with it a sense of the vulnerable, inevitability and fragility of life…
K Rahner in his ‘Theology of Death’ says, that death ought to be considered as the culminating act of life in which a person expresses what it is they stand for or what their life was actually all about. Sobering thought…but we can’t all be martyrs to a cause and express our life purpose by dying on a cross. In simpler terms this means that when we die the legacy we leave behind in those whose lives we’ve touched gives voice to what we stand for. Still a sobering thought, but one which if remembered, should enable us to live more consciously and therefore die more peacefully.
As I walk the dog along the late afternoon beach, with my children, I watch the extraordinarily beautiful sunset and think how lucky I am…and how precious is this sharing we call family… I determine not to judge my loved ones and what they do or whom they choose to share their love with…I determine to open my heart to them always, in every second of every minute…so that when the inevitable does happen and I too pass away from this leg of the journey, they will be filled with my love and the memories of my arms around them and my joy at being with them…
‘Death ends a life, not a relationship’. Robert Benchley
2 comments:
This was beautiful, mum. Of course we will be filled with loving memories of you and the time you have spent with us. x
To Miss Independent
Thanks Babe...Love you
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