Winter is a death of sorts. Grey mornings, cold, leafless, quiet landscapes. Roots, reaching, stretch to soak in moisture from deep within the earth. We humans hurry from buildings to cars to grocery stores, no skip in our walk, unnoticing and unnoticed. Nature sleeping, yet alive with unseen movement just below the surface.

Death, in similar fashion, sends us scrambling for shelter within comforting words. Death forces us to stretch the roots of our believing deep into our questioning souls, to find the moisture of the spirit there. It reminds us we, like nature, have seasons and reasons enough to track our passages. We sit with someone else’s dying and get in touch with our own. We know something profound is happening we cannot decipher with our eyes.

I cannot sit with the death of someone I’ve loved without both the joy and the pain of it. The laughter shared, the things said, the memories bonded in that exchange of one life with another. The loss, the unfinished dance, the things unsaid. Such a mystery, to laugh and to cry with the same experience, death.

We are, after all, nature’s sibling. We look back over our shoulder to claim a common source. We can learn from winter. She’s been doing her dance long before we drew our first breath. She’ll be here long after we’ve taken our last.

The sun breaks across the winter sky and within its wink, a hint of spring. A memory breaks across the landscape of a dead friend’s life and brings them rushing back, alive in us. For but a moment, we languish in the smile of it, the pain of it, the song of it that rises up in us from somewhere we know not:

Death only is for those who cannot see beneath it. With death, a friendship vaults into lasting presence that lives in the one who remembers. In that sense, Dear Friend, death is no more for us.

Perhaps that’s enough for now. Winter carries spring and spring, winter. We carry the dead within ourselves, their passing embedded in our living. They carry the mystery with them silently into death and wait. Nothing is lost.

I’ll continue to cry and continue to smile with the death of those I love. I’ll continue to love winter with spring hidden within its sleeve. I’ll continue to pay attention to my breathing as a sacred thread that bonds us all, the dead, the eternal, nature, myself.

I’ll continue to live until I die. And then? I’ll continue to breathe into the mystery of it.  

A relationship does not end with death. It crawls inside the survivor and lives side by side the memories and dialogues that continue to evolve within the one that’s left. A change, perhaps, from external encounter to internal presence.

There’s a change of energy, that’s all — from energy that once moved out in the world for all to see to the energy of invisible friendship that now fills the space the physical body once claimed. The felt presence of the one gone is just as recognizable and real to the one left behind as it was the first time the magic danced between them.

Death is not the end of a relationship but the ensoulment of it. When we come to recognize one another as spirit on a human journey rather than human on a spiritual journey, we will have eyes to see this and ears to hear.

For me, this continued presence of a life has something to do with that sacred energy shared between two people. When a relationship is truly alive, enlivened by the love, the deep sharing of feelings and longings — time “wasted” on one another, as Saint-Exupery poetically expressed – it carries that life in death.

We are as close in death as we were in life, closer perhaps, as the space now between us is thin and transparent and accessible to soul, on both sides of the curtain. The soul connection lives. The felt presence lives.

In the 1970’s, Joe Pintauro wrote a poem that lingers still in me each time I witness the death of one who filled my life. I choose to print it here in its entirety.

Lizzie and Blondie

Our one and only maple tree
began to make that yellow-green
lace one april day when my mother
died, one sudden warm april
day that pulled at our maple
tree buds and everything that was
including her, and though she
seemed only sleeping, it was a
sure truth to everyone, she died that day.

My father was a carpenter. He had
to carry his tool box all the way
home from work. At the door
he was pale and puffing and
they told him, “Too late.”

But when he saw her, his face let up
and his color came back, as if he
were suddenly telling himself, “Nothing
drastic has happened yet, just . . . this.”
She was no stranger to him.
Even dead her familiar face made
him safe from his confusion, as if
she actually told him, “I died,
that’s all.”

He slightly raised his hands
and said, “Lizzie, I’m sorry
I’m late.” Tears came, and that
was it. He held her hand.

It was then for the first time,
I saw them as they really were.
She, who I once knew as the
beginning and end of everything
warm and soft, my only real
absolution for everything,
was just a girl, in a blouse
with a lace collar, whose name
he couldn’t guess,
and he was a handsome boy
with blonde hair, and
they met at Coney Island
one afternoon.
-Joe Pintauro
From Kites at Empty Airports