today's gratitude

...is for funerals. I just came home from one, and I am so moved by what I heard. What wonderful work to take from one person's life words with the power to inspire so many.

Just to say goodbye to a person who wanted so much to live every day makes you appreciate today's sun, snow, and birds on a new level, when you step outside, at least for a moment. But this funeral, like the woman it was for, gave us all so much more. Dori Ach prepared her self to depart this life with a faith based knowledge that death would not be the end of her journey. I hope that when my time comes, I will be as brave and positive and concerned about others as she was.

After receiving a prognosis of just a few months to live, Dori spent the last ten beautiful years of her life bravely battling lymphoma, as she had previously battled breast cancer, and the woman who counseled her twice a month during that long fight shared one of Dori's favorite poems, by Mary Oliver, which I'd now like to share with you here:

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

AMEN