Twenty-two months

When Jane died from NET cancer 22 months ago today we both expected my time of mourning would be short. While we do not believe, as Christians do, in an eternal, joyful heaven, the experience of our lives had taught us death was as much beginning as ending. We have worked together before in this world–and will again. Her work was done for this go-round. Mine was not.

In the month before she went into the hospital for the heart operation we believed would open the door to further treatment and an eventual cure, we talked a lot about the future and what we hoped it would be.There were things we wanted to do together, places we wanted to visit together, books we wanted to write together. NET cancer would delay those things but not end them.

I will continue to mourn the death of Jane’s body.

And if that were not to be–if NET cancer did kill her–then I would move quickly through the stages of grief, secure in the knowledge of who and what we are. Her soul would rest for a time, consolidate and share what it had learned, look closely at the pattern of existence and determine what was next to be done and what form she would need to do that. We both believe in the gradual perfection of the human soul over lifetimes–that every soul has in it a Christ-nature or a Buddha-nature that is nurtured across time–that each of us has the potential to be who and what they were, but suited to the time of our own enlightenment.

The body as automobile

Our bodies are no more special than a car–a means for traveling in this world. When a car wears out–and any mechanical device will–we discard it and get a new one suited to what we need it or want it to do. I will admit I feel a little sad when I trade in my old car but that sadness has no staying power. When I give up this body I expect I will feel the same way. I know that is how Jane felt about hers–at least that is what she told me–both before and after she got sick.

–the loss of a body is shattering–

But I have learned a hard lesson since Jane’s death. While we can view our own bodies as mere vessels, it is much harder to view the body of the person we love that way. When the soul that animates the vessel departs we are left with the memory not of the soul but of what the body that soul animated did, the role it played in our lives, and the role it played in the lives of others. Our mortal lives, being wedded to the physical world, cannot experience the soul of another except through that other’s body and its actions. As a result, for as long as we live in the physical world, our memories of another soul are inextricably bound up with our memories of that other’s body.

One flesh, one soul

For husband and wife, then, whose lives together are as much about touch and warmth as about words, actions, and ideas–who have become as one flesh both physically and spiritually–the loss of a body is shattering–whether from NET cancer or any of the other deaths that flesh is heir to. I have said to people since Jane’s death that it is as though half of me were amputated when she stopped breathing. But that is a pale analogy that masquerades as truth. The reality is beyond what words can describe.

I have learned a hard lesson since Jane’s death.

An amputee misses that limb for the rest of his or her life. Even the best prosthetics are no match for the original item. But there are no prosthetics for this kind of amputation.

Moving forward

It would be easy, given that knowledge, to give up–and some do. Some commit suicide. Others climb into a bottle, a joint, or a syringe. Still others work themselves into a stupor–bury themselves so deeply in one form of work or another that they do not have time or energy to feel anything.

I am guilty, sometimes, of the last of these. Yesterday I lost myself in writing and researching and trying to understand the lives of others. Today, writing this, it has slowly come back to me that the way out of death and mourning is to live.

…every soul has in it a Christ-nature or a Buddha-nature…

I spent the weekend building and staining bookshelves. For the first time since Jane’s death I was truly living focussed in the moment again. That same feeling has permeated my writing this morning.

I will continue to mourn the death of Jane’s body. But I need to remember to celebrate her life and the continuing journey of her spirit–as well as the continuing journey of my own.