death – Janis Dehler

The Path of Hurricane Helene

Shock and sadness wash through lives as water rises, washes away dreams, muddies lives, upends structures, and rips apart the trajectory of what feels certain, familiar, steady, and known. Water finds its path, determines lives, then flows to the source. Watery tears are shed for all that is lost and forever changed.

“Death is water’s close companion. The two cannot be separated, and neither can be separated from us, for they are what we are ultimately made of: the versatility of water, and the closeness of death. Water has no beginning and no end, but death has both. Death is both. Sometimes death travels hidden in water, and sometimes water will chase death away, but they go together always, in the world and in us.”

― Emmi Itäranta, Memory of Water

“Water is life’s matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.”

– Albert Szent-Gyorgyi.

“We forget that water and life cycles are one.”

-Jacques Cousteau.

Click for Ongoing Reading list

Life as a Fractal

I pause and witness a day’s labor:
dead branches piled on the ground,
pruned lilacs in the grove
of unattended neglect, 
young shoots now allowed to grow
and provide the scent of spring
when they mature into bloom.

It is easier to see another’s aging
rather than my own— 
when a tree or a flower
completes its purpose, 
ceases to be its full self, without fear,
it returns to the earth, restored 
to the wholeness of creation.

While my aging manifests in human form, 
the Self that resides within does not grow old—
itself an everlasting fractal of the whole.
When I no longer bloom, when
my mission is complete, 
the Self is absorbed into All That Is.
A new cycle begins.

“Modern humans became fixated on a collective hallucination of linear time, ignoring the fractal spirals of the surrounding universe.”

-Daniel Pinchbeck

“A fractal is a way of seeing infinity.”

-Benoit Mandelbrot

“Any issue and any problem, no matter what height you look at it from, no matter how much you extend past the first fractal, it’s still a fractal of something that emanates from within your consciousness – from within the human consciousness. And it’ll move on and manifest itself externally, and then those are what we pick up as societal ills. But all these battles we’re fighting are internal. For me, it’s reconciling hope with dread and trying to cut out some place in my mind where my heart can be protected a little bit.”

-EI-P

Click for Ongoing Reading List

Into a New Day

He came to see me 
after the death 
and the days then months 
attempting to rebuild what was
to be both she and he
for the little one who longed for just one 
as the blocks placed one atop another 
crash down to the floor
then stacked and restacked 
a life that could no longer be 
until he forgot himself 
could not sit nor play 
with the boy he loved 
and lost the sleep longed for 
to ease the pain felt in a heart 
that ached to open to peace 
and being in change 
that can’t be contained or
reversed only built upon 
as he lives into 
being carried and opened 
then transformed 
as he and his son 
walk hand in hand
into a new day.

“The song is ended but the melody lingers on.”
Irving Berlin

“No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.”
C. S. Lewis

“You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present.”
Jan Gildwell

For Ongoing Resource List: Reading for Heart and Mind

Click

A Lifetime in a Breath

It is said, “It will last a lifetime!”
“How long is that?” I ask.
Is it the 97 years my mother-in-law 
expressed her gratitude’s?
Is it the 7 days my daughter graced
us with her existence?
Maybe the 2 weeks a mosquito 
became a pest?
Or the 24-hour life of a mayfly?
Existence—not infinity but arbitrary.
A question of quantity or quality?
Between the intake of breath
to our last expiration, we count days, months,
then years; yet truly, they are breaths.
In each moment, we live a lifetime,
not knowing if we gain one more inhalation,
one more moment to love what we see, 
who we are, whom we touch, the
sun kissing our skin, or the colors of a fall tree. 
We take it all in; we breathe it out.
 
One breath, one breath, one holy precious breath. 


In memory of my bonus sister Cynthia and my Aunt Pat, who within these last three weeks, each breathed a final breath, leaving a world and loved ones held close to their hearts.

“the tired sunsets and the tired
people –
it takes a lifetime to die and
no time at
all.”
Charles Bukowski

“It’s not that we have little time, but more that we waste a good deal of it.”
Seneca

…Enjoy this precious single breath,
for the harvest
of our whole lives
is that same one breath.”
Omar Khayyám, Quatrains-Ballades

For Ongoing Resource List: Reading for Heart and Mind

Click

Who Am I Now?

Who am I now?
he inquires of the image—
the me that is not me,
without you,
reflecting
lines of loss as identifiable
as a fingerprint.
In unfamiliar land
he explores, tastes, 
tries on identities,
see what fits—
foreign to himself,
a shadow of what was. 
Visions arise of what could be.
Body, mind, and heart
tired and worn,
he sees the we 
now past.
The future is I.
Who am I now?

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
…live in the question.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it – keep going, keep going come what may.”
Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.”
Gilda Radner

Ongoing Reading List: Reading for Heart and Mind

click

The Euolgy

Stories fill me
Memories shared
Emotions felt
Witnessed
Words assembled
Convey a life
61 years in 15 minutes
A splash of color here
A gray area there
A focal point 
Bring it all together
As complex as 
A 1,000-piece puzzle
As simple as sitting
In the heart of love.

“Life is a song—sing it. Life is a game—play it. Life is a challenge—meet it. Life is a dream—realize it. Life is a sacrifice—offer it. Life is love—enjoy it.”
Sai Baba

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments but what is woven into the lives of others.”
Thucydides

“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not a mark of weakness but power. They speak more eloquently than 10,000 tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief and unspeakable love.
Washington Irving

Ongoing Resource List: Reading for Heart and Mind

Click

What’s After?

She advances ever close to her last breath,
and asks, “What is after?”
“After this belly rises as I breathe,
the touch of grandbabies soft skin,
the kiss placed on these lips by my love,
after the thoughts that drift through this mind,
the fear in not knowing,
the joy in seeing my beloved’s face.”
Then, she hears from within,
Look to what was before.
“Before this body descended
from my mother’s warmth,
wailed as I took my first breath,
before this body formed
from a seed fertilized to grow,
before I was a thought or a desire,
before the stars formed?”
You were a part of everything, and nothing.
A drop in the ocean of love,
the scent of a flower wafting on a breeze,
all that is after that which was before.
“Now I see,” she whispers. 
“I will return from what I have learned,
from this body, from form, from life, in love.
I return to the ocean of love.”

(image from Hubble Telescope)

“In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory.”
J.R.R. Tolklen

“That’s what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays.”
Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet In Heaven

“Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the ocean.”
David Searls

Ongoing Resource List: Reading for Heart and Mind

Click

The Unseen Force

I thought of the ways we rejoice in life,
offer gratitude to the unseen force,
weary then from trial and toil,
seek solace to soothe our soul.

One thought riding the other,
one emotion responding to need,
making our way to a final day
when breath retires
and we release to what comes beyond—
something or nothing.
We call it faith or delusion,
each in their own way.

Then, I watched the sun set,
sparkling on the waters deep,
hearing a child’s laughter 
as she ran through the evening waves.
Whatever you are, I mused, 
this is what you are.
This is how you speak.

“Thus, to know humanity, understand the earth. To know the earth, understand heaven. To know heaven, understand the Way. To know the Way, understand the great within yourself.”
25th Verse of the Tao Te Ching

“My work is like a dialogue between me and unseen powers, like alchemy.”
Cai Guo-Qiang

“To work magic is to weave the unseen forces into form; to soar beyond sight; to explore the uncharted dream realm of the hidden reality; to infuse life with color, motion and strange scents that intoxicate; to leap beyond imagination into that space between the worlds where fantasy becomes real; to be at once animal and god. Magic is…the ultimate adventure.”
Starhawk

For Ongoing Resource List: Reading for Heart and Mind

Click

The Final Breath: a short, short story

“William thought of that Sacrament now and felt bad for all the children who were forced to divide their ordinary lives into sins and not-sins so they would have something to say to a cassocked stranger.”
Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

That is where it all started, she thought, as she lay her head back on the pillow reviewing the course of her life as she struggled to breathe.

She saw herself clearly, first as a young girl, fearful, as she crept closer to a curtain which she would step behind to talk to a man about bad things she did or thought.

She started memorizing in her head, I yelled at Mary, I wanted the doll my sister got for Christmas, and on and on through a litany of events and thoughts from her week wondering if these were good enough sins to tell the priest.

Now, in old age, she realized that this is where she started to divide the world into good and bad, sin and not-sin, black and white, where no middle ground held any merit—a line drawn as if chopped by a cleaver.

As she wept, holding this young girl in her heart, she began to forgive herself for all the ways she judged herself, all the times she shut herself off from her own desires, cut herself off from others out of fear, expressed anger at those who saw events and people from a different perspective. All the ways she stopped herself from fully living her life.

She opened her eyes, felt all the love in her heart, gasped for a final breath, and cried out to anyone who would listen, “I am alive.”

“Hate the sin, love the sinner.”
Mahatma Gandhi

“He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed, he decided to append an eighth, regret.”
Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity.”
Thich Nhat Hanh

For Ongoing Resource List: Reading for Heart and Mind

Click

The Last Breath

When my baby lay dying,
we called all to our home to meet her,
to hold her, to kiss her goodbye. 
When everyone departed, we lay on our bed 
with baby at rest, spooned between, 
and I slept.
While I was sleeping, she took her last breath, 
swaddled in a yellow rose blanket, 
smelling of powder and lotion. 

When my father lay dying, 
We were called to his side.
We sat, stood around the bed,
told stories, laughed, wiped tears,
and sighed. After a night and a day 
I walked out to rest. 
While I slept, 
he took his last breath. Then we sat 
and waited and remembered as 
his spirit fully left.

When my mother lay dying,
we called all to her home, as we 
sat, cooked, ate, and talked, laughed, 
and cried, for five days and nights. 
At dusk she lay quiet.
Leaving my brother to sit vigil,
I slept. 
She took her last breath.
Seconds later, I was at her side.
We washed her body and adorned 
her with rose petals and oil.

When my sister lay dying, 
I slept in my bed,
then awakened from a phone call 
to rush to her side after she drew 
her last breath. I sat with tears, 
spoke to her spirit as memories of 
her sweetness and her challenges 
washed over me— the joy, the delight, 
the losses that formed her life.

Now, I wonder, 
will I wake before I die?

“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly. What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.”
Marcus Aurelius

“If you are living every experience fully, then death doesn’t take anything from you. There’s nothing to take because you’re already fulfilled. That’s why the wise being is always ready to die.”
Seneca

“Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to ‘die before you die’ and find that there is no death.”
Eckhart Tolle

For Ongoing resource List: Reading for Heart and Mind

Click