Musings

One of my dear and nearly life-long friends called me to explain that he might be dying. The painful, invasive biopsy of his lungs confirmed the worst: widespread lung cancer. As he has suffered a collapsed lung twice in the last few decades, the prognosis is grim. And, his smoking like a furnace has turned his chest into a war zone over the years.

His life has been replete with hardship and grief: both of his children were struck down with medical traumas, and only his son survives. His marriage has been torn asunder, and financially, for most of his life the wolf has been at the door.

In spite of these hardships, he has always tried to maintain good cheer, laughed at my feeble jokes, hiked with me in the wilderness, skied the Black Diamond runs together, shared the last of our food and water in secret desert places, and always respected our friendship as something precious and true. As is typical of him, he had a hard time telling me of his condition, of his fear and grief.

So this, Al, is for you. As your computer is history, I know you are unlikely to read this directly on-line. Perhaps I can work up the courage to print it out and hand it to you in person sometime soon.

A wise old Hopi Indian once said, “Take a kernel of corn, plant it in Our Mother Earth with the sweat of your body, with what you know of the times and seasons, with your proper prayers. And with your strength and manhood Our Father Sun multiplies and gives it back into your flesh. What then is this kernel of corn? It is not a simple thing.

Nothing is simple and alone. We are not separate and alone. The breathing mountains, the living stones, each blade of grass, the clouds, the rain, each star, the beasts, the birds and the invisible spirits of the air---we are all one, indivisible. Nothing that any of us does occurs in a vacuum, but affects us all. I would have you consider how you fit into the pattern of the whole; how far your influence may spread. What it may grow into……

We know that we are all one life on the same Mother Earth, beneath the same plains of the sky. But we all know that one life must give way to another so that the one great life of all may continue unbroken.”

Should the outcome of your trial by great pain and suffering be death, know that you will live on in the memories of those who knew and loved you. Like the ripples in a pond from a pebble thrown into the water, your influence and essence spreads to infinity—through your son, and his children, and his children’s children into the fog of time. It is the web of life, and it is good.
Oil on canvas by Fredrick Remington