everyday and eternity

I had a profound experience yesterday.  So profound that I am still spun today, still out of sorts, still not myself...yet it happens every day, all over the world.  Eventually, it happens to every single person, without exception.  I didn't learn anything I didn't already have vocabulary for or have experience with, I didn't surprise myself with my reaction, I wasn't surprised at the reaction of others...and yet it was profound nonetheless.

I put my hands on the chest of a man I didn't know, whose skin was purple and whose eyes were staring, a man whose wife crouched beside me on the floor sobbing and screaming, and I tried to push life back into him.  I failed.  The police came, and then the ambulance, there were phone calls and prayers, and "it's not over yet" - and then it was.  He didn't come back.  I had some part in all of this, and I don't know yet what that part was.  I wasn't a hero.  I didn't keep my cool and do everything right.  I didn't save the wife from grief or pain.  I didn't save the guy or die trying.  I didn't make the news.  I tried to go back to work, and then, finding I couldn't concentrate, I left an 'out of office' message in my email and went shopping.  My coworkers in an office hundreds of miles away don't know why I took the afternoon off.  My husband didn't know why I wasn't at the office, why I didn't answer my phone, and the lady at the store who asked how I was doing didn't know that as she walked away, I thought to myself, "I touched a dead man today". 

The last time I saw my aunt alive was Thanksgiving 2007.  The meal was over, the family was hanging out in various stages of turkey-coma, and my aunt, almost bald, rail thin, dying from 40 years of smoking, went to take a nap.  She took me with her to lie down.  I laid in her bed with her, in a dusty bedroom with a wall full of old vinyl records that hadn't been played in years, ashtrays on the headboard and dressers, cats curled up at our feet, and I felt that I had entered sacred space, where eternity touches the earth.  She asked me if there was anything of hers that I wanted, and I told her the pearl necklace that she'd lent me for my wedding. She said she wasn't sure where it was, and kind of drifted off, distracted.  She told me that the worst part, the part she hated most about dying, was the weakness.  And I told her that she didn't need to be strong now, that it was okay to be weak.  We talked a few moments longer, and then she fell asleep.  I quietly slipped out of the bedroom and as I joined the rest of my family, and realized they didn't know that I had just been with her, privately, that she had shared this moment with me, I wondered how they couldn't see that I was marked somehow by the experience.  I felt as though there was a ring of light around me, and I dared not touch anything, or speak too loudly, for fear it would disappear.  It was not that I felt any sense of righteousness or accomplishment, but that I had been privileged to enter sacred space, to spend a moment with the dying, and pierce the veil between this world and that other place where spirits go, where evil has no place, and there are no lies. 

Yesterday I visited a proximity to that space, a disconcerting arena where work and money, real estate and gas and politics, food and even grief don't matter.  But it was different this time.  It wasn't personal to me, didn't belong to me.  I had no part in this man's life, no perception of his spirit.  He was already gone, yet the warmth of his body belied his absence, and I just couldn't make sense of it.  Couldn't give up on him, but couldn't possibly imagine how life could again fill the space behind his eyes, could change his purple back to pink, could lift his arms to hold his dear wife.  He was gone, but so nearly gone, so closely gone.

The veil is so complete that we do not remember our pre-mortal past, our other life with God in His Heaven, so complete that our loved ones leave this life and we sometimes say that they live on in our hearts...as though they, as themselves, do not exist anymore.  And yet, they do continue to exist, they reach across the veil and touch us.  They come as angels to reveal truth to prophets and men, to save and to warn, to uplift.  They wait anxiously and fearfully, or humbly and happily, for the day of their resurrection, when they will be reunited with their bodies.  They learn and serve and work and love.  They wait.

I fear the circumstances of my own impending death.  I fear the fear that I might feel as I see it approaching.  But I do not fear what awaits me on the other side of the veil.  I do not fear that I will cease to exist, that I will forget myself or my loved ones, that I will be lost and wander, or that I will be trapped here somehow, unseen, angry or sad, and lonely.  I hope that I make of this life the work that the Lord would have me do.  I hope that I will fulfill my purpose here, that I will say, as Thoreau said, I went into the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life...to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.