15 Minutes to Live

Oh Facebook...

My friend and fellow painter, Lisa Wilson, re-posted a link to this writing challenge, and sucker that I am for a challenge I signed up immediately and jumped right in, just moments awake and on my first cup of coffee no less. If you are similarly inclined to mine the depths of your consciousness (you can wait until you're awake if you like), the link is to the right.

I do not promise to post everything, but here's my first 15 minutes of off-the-cuff writing for today.

We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

15 minutes to live and a story to tell.

My stories are spelled out in great detail, painfully, excruciatingly, boringly detailed in my journals of oh, about 30 years, and yes, a lot of that is about fear. We are afraid of the truth of life…that everyone and everything ages, decays, dies but we all too often stop there at that point where what we know seems to end.

If I look around me, though, I am reminded again and again that life always follows death. Hiking the Sangre de Christos, over last autumn's dark and sodden leaves, I pass a narrow, linear swathe of iridescent moss and wildflowers. I pause and wonder briefly at it until I see beneath them the shadow of a fallen tree that has long since crumbled to dust. How long has it taken to decay to the point that life springs so exuberantly from it? I don’t know, but within its ghostly outline an entire new ecosystems thrives.

Like magic, the household waste I throw into the glass jar under the sink and later toss into the compost pile changes, sometimes in a matter of days, into rich brown humus that in turn nourishes the garden. Turning it I find worms, roly polys, burrowing bugs that eat and excrete and feed the robins who have built a nest in the nearby apple tree.

Friends and family, even those I know for such short period in my hospice work, die yet their voices and stories and presence continue to move and speak to me, reminding me of important truths, often ones I never heard while they walked this earth. Death does nothing to quiet them.

Relationships come to an end and if I pay attention to the hows and whys, the lessons learned from them inform and guide future relationships.

And one day I, too, will die. I have no worries about whether there is a life after death or what it might be. There is no need for fear. Life tells me so.

Life, death, life – that’s just how it goes.

and unsurprisingly, this was in my in-box as I closed this post: