A Friend Meets Death, Full of Curiosity

Essay and Poem

Our lives are full of curious and mysterious things, and I’m quite certain what came before our birth and after our death will reveal even more curious and mysterious things. And as breathtakingly beautiful as the coming together and parting of starlings during murmuration.

I spent the last couple of days in the ICU with a dear friend who is dying.

When Death Comes

by Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

We talked of such things just days before: walking through that door full of curiosity; looking at time as a concept, not a reality and eternity as more than a possibility. She lived her life as a bride married to amazement, taking the world into her arms. She touched so many lives in powerful ways, and they all passed through the door that day to hold her hand and kiss her forehead and tell her how much she has meant to them.

Yet her life had been filled with such sorrows and hardships. Even within the last twelve months, cruel horrors of which I don’t know how anyone could endure befell her. And perhaps they aggravated the disease that is now killing her so quickly.

Only two week ago she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that had spread to her liver. A week later she had a biopsy and called me with the good news. Yes, the cancer had spread, but she was eligible for gene therapy. She could live another three to five years rather than the three to five months she had been given before. We were so jubilant.

The next day she woke feeling ill and was rushed to the hospital–-septic poisoning, perhaps from the biopsy. She was put on a ventilator and blood pressure medicine. Five days later her extremities turned black. If she survives to go home, her hands and feet will have to be amputated. This is a woman who two years ago endured a painful ankle replacement so she could hike the Pacific Trail, a dream of hers. A woman who kayaked and surfed and ran with her German Shepard along the beach.

I wrote the first half of this post yesterday in my office at the keyboard. The next half I wrote in my head while swimming, my first time this summer, the pool finally warm enough to get in. It was so peaceful, immersed in the warm water, parting it with my hands, feeling that silky resistance, looking up at the oak trees, a brilliant green against a brilliant blue, the golden grasses beneath rising through the hillsides. It was all so breathtakingly beautiful.

When I got out the coyotes began to howl, singing back and forth to each other from across the distance. Just yesterday we watched a feral tabby we’d been feeding trot into those hills with a baby squirrel in its mouth, one we’d been watching with its siblings playing beneath a bush just that morning. We were happy for the cat, who lives a perilous life in the wild. Sad for the squirrel whose life had been taken too soon. Someday we might see one of the coyotes who trot by our home with our feral cat in its mouth.

The beauty and brutality of life, all intertwined—in our little backyard, in my friend’s life, in the world at large—is a constant theme in my writing it seems. I do not know how to account for it.

Go gently, my friend, into that goodnight, into this mystery that wraps us and hides so much, our comings and goings. Pierce the veil that we all will face someday, that separates this time-bound sense of existence from the eternal round from which we sprang.

What will we see on the other side? Could it be less miraculous than what we see now?

Till then, I’ll look for you in the starlings’ murmur, in the whale’s rising, in our shared granddaughter’s laughter, in all the things bright and beautiful we cherish in the here and now.