dying is the new living

We begin to look at death...face-to-face...and find that it is our own image reflected back.

--Trudi Jinpu Hirsch-Abramson, Zen Center for Contemplative Care

During the hellish month of June, I wanted Rich to watch a video produced by the Zen Center for Contemplative Care (www.zencare.org/film/film.html). Okay, he said. Me sitting, him leaning on his four-legged cane, the video began.

There are only two feelings, love and fear...we leave because we have some place else to go...coming back to the live moment is the greatest healing...

I pulled over another chair, and Rich sat.

As the words and images caressed us, of a 57-year-old woman dying of cancer, of a burly Zen priest not holding back on tears of compassion -- he looks like he used to make cement overshoes, Rich said -- of Trudi's hand being gripped by a woman near death -- I felt a shift in us.

"Your life is going forward," Rich said. "That's more important than mine."

We held hands, my right in his left, gripped tight.

I could not pull him back into a life reeling backwards. And he was not pulling me into death, the place of no past, no future.

We shared the now, without fear and with love, understanding that there was no separation between living and dying (except one still has laundry and taxes).

I hold onto Rich's photos, his clothes, his imprint on all of me. This is the hurting part, the part that will dissolve into time.

But what is growing -- exponentially, Rich would say -- is an eroding of borders between past and future, between love and fear, between life and death.

Candace