There’s been a death in my family. The house has stood silent for two days now, empty, a tomb of what was once a glorious presence, a visitation of sorts of the numinous in nature. Though life goes on as normal, nothing soothes my heartache. How can it be normal when such a presence has been lost?

My brother-in-law made me a blue bird house for Christmas. I put it up in my yard, delighted with thoughts those beautiful creatures might one day bless my solitude. In Spring, I was indeed visited with two blue angels, blue winged creatures that take your breath away. I feasted on their comings and goings, on every shift of blue and color that lit up my yard. A nest was built, with baby blue birds soon evident within those cradled walls. I worried how babies with no practice with those lovely wings might make it to safety with no nearby limb apparent. Stories of baby birds dropping onto the grass nearby until they find their wings clouded my excitement. I waited.

I came home from work one day and saw outside my window my feral cat playing in the grass. It looked as if she caught another chipmunk and was tormenting it, truly unto death. I took a deep breath. The blue bird house seemed suddenly silent, no longer the busy terminal it was the day before. Had the babies made it out to safety? Was it, indeed, a chipmunk? Surely I would know if something more sinister had taken place. I tried to move on, still distracted and soulfully torn.

Some time later, my lovely apparitions returned, once more making my yard a carnival of color and activity. More straw flown in, more babies in the making. Enchantment filled my life again. I placed a pole in my yard, nearby, in front of my small friends’ house. Surely the babies can make it to the pole, I thought. Surely they will be safe, and free.

For the last few days, mother bird has sat on that pole in my yard for what seemed hours, looking at her castle, flying in and out on spontaneous whims. I imagined her checking on her little ones. I felt the time was near when she would call her babies out into the world of nature and instruct them in the art of flying. It was the Fourth of July, Independence Day, and I was home all day, rooted by the window and filled with awe.

Nothing happened. I guessed it wouldn’t be today, as it was dinner time. I didn’t think the hour was right to teach baby birds how to master life outside the walls. I turned on the news and ate my dinner near the window.

From what seemed like nowhere, squealing sounds arrested me. My blue apparitions, my blue bird angels, were diving and squealing in frantic torpedo-like drops toward my feral cat, who from my window perch, looked slyly guilty. I ran outside, squealing and yelling and throwing up my arms in frantic movements, “No, no, no!” I chased the cat with two distraught blue birds close behind me, squealing, relentless, terror stricken. The cat ran, no longer within our range. I ran into the woods behind her, yelling, crying, praying. She was gone. The blue birds could not contain their horror.

Tiny, tiny feathers lay in the grass, too small to be anything but what I feared the most. My tears could not console my blue birds, nor myself. They finally flew away, emotions I can only half imagine. The feral cat I adopted from her birth, fed and had “fixed” so no more kittens could wander our streets, had just broken my heart and didn’t have a clue.

Two days have passed. I’ve tried to take the longer view, to see this tiny death as part of nature’s web, as part of the coming and going of each of us, from birth to death and to whatever the universe holds out for us then. I know we can only intervene when and where we can, where we are invited in, and sometimes can’t even then. I’ve learned to do all I can, to do the right thing — the only thing I can control — then to let go of the outcome. I know we have no real control of this thing we call life. I know both the agony and the serenity of letting go. And I know my present sadness will smooth out into a greater understanding of what I am here on this earth to learn. But I am sad nonetheless.

I created the perfect storm in my own back yard and I feel helpless to alter nature’s way. My feral cat does what a cat does when it’s a hunter. Wild as she is, I cannot catch her to put her inside when baby blue birds seem close to flight. I still feed her every day, though I have tried to tell her each time I see her that she broke my heart. I can only hope she eats so much she gets fat and sluggish and loses interest in every little thing that moves in my back yard.

My blue bird house still stands in my yard, empty, silent, a tomb of what was once a golden palace. I’ve left it there to weep with me when I reach back for those winged visitations. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. I can only stay with today for now. The joy and awe that were mine only days ago teach me that life is worth the trudging on.

An elderly gentleman who lived down the street would often startle me with his routine greeting. “Hello, Duncan,” I’d call to him in the grocery store. “It’s good to see you out and about.” He’d look up, expressionless, from the produce he was handling and respond blandly, “Am I dead yet?”

Duncan had lost his wife years earlier, no longer felt productive in the community, no longer found interest in life around him. He was waiting to die. In his heart, I think he was already dead. Like many of our elderly, he identified purposes only in past tense.

“Why am I still alive?” an older person might ask. “Of what purpose is my life? What meaning is there for me?” These are not empty questions, not easily dismissed in a culture that deifies production and efficiency and youth.

If the things that form the center of our living don’t shift with the shifting sands of time, we miss the revelations that throw themselves in our path. If our sole focus remains only on the external facts of our existence – our belongings, our career, our retirement portfolio – we may come to the end of our life and discover, as Thoreau so well articulated, “that we had never lived.” 

Youth is dedicated to bringing to fruition those talents and potentials that define and set us apart as an individual. Old age is dedicated to stepping beyond ego and into a more soul connection with all that unifies, makes us one, allows us to feel comfortable with transcendence and loss. We get in touch with this living thing so we might get in touch with this dying thing so we might get in touch with this living thing . . .

There are things we know that we don’t know with our conscious mind. These accelerate as we age, speeding up with layered awareness. Sudden flashes of insight and profound intuitive connections and understandings break in on us. As the last vestige of sand slips through the hourglass of our being, our black and white thinking, our superficial divisions of things, our clinging, all evaporate into lesser bonds. We care more about our wholeness than about our holdings. Hopefully, we relax into the unity out of which we emerged.

What accounts for this midlife shift at our center, then, and for these revelations unleashed in later life? It’s as if the thread that holds together our outside life slowly weaves its way inward into our very being and unlocks the channel to all that is eternal. It’s as if we come to know ourselves, intuitively, as eternal beings. Wired so, from the beginning.
 
This all happens within the context of daily living. This shift in perspective and intuitive wisdom doesn’t cause one to withdraw, but to become more in tune, more connected, more reverent of who and what have blessed one’s experience. 

Simple pleasures, like planting a garden, painting images, listening to music, become mosaics of the divine, speaking. Moments with grandchildren turn the act of holding into praying. Writing down memories and reflections for future family members becomes, for us, a backward timeline of self-realizations and closures. Life seems full and precious, connected, both within and without.

What would leave a person untouched, unmoved by this natural midlife shift? Discomfort with an inner life, I suppose. Unresolved hurts, a closed mind. A disconnect with imagination. The refusal to make room for the unexpected. An unwillingness to listen to that inner voice. As many things, I imagine, as there are injustices in the world.

Our vocation, as such, as we step into the autumn of our life, is not to become less enchanted with life, but more. More connected, more alive, more passionate about what we love. Like getting ready to take a great leap, or surrendering ourselves into a deep dive, we breathe in as we prepare to breathe out, for the last time.

When the shell of our life falls away, when the voice from within becomes the only sound we can hear, when the night dreams we have collected over the years take on a life of their own, we will dance old age, laughing. We will climb upon the back of the soul that has accompanied us on this magnificent journey and ride it, singing, into death. 
 

My father died two weeks ago. He was seventy-seven. He died the way he had lived, without pain, without having to feel anything. 

I asked to clean out his home office. It is a small room; it was his kingdom. I knew that, for me, cleaning his office would be a final rite of passage.
 
His presence hung in the little room like the smell of old pipe tobacco, familiar, haunting. The walls gave evidence to all that kept my father going and protected him against the world, and from us.  Family pictures papered the room, old letters tacked up like friendly ghosts, travel mementoes from happier days, birthday cards and anniversary poems which told of his history among us. My eyes feasted on these closeted walls, straining to glean the silent rapture my father felt in placing here his captured feeling.

Things stuffed in every possible cranny throughout the room cradled him here those many nights he sat to pay the family bills. Round cans of eight milometer films which hold the history of our family ties: our first step, our baptism, Christmas mornings, wedding days. His favorite novels. Travel scrapbooks. Medical books, outdated now. How-to instructions for appliances, old coins, rocks. His things, once deemed clutter, now sacred.

I touched Daddy’s file cabinet. I felt excitement surge within as I opened it and slipped silently into his “secret stash,” to learn what he could never reveal about himself. My heart quickened, eager to touch somehow his internal world.

The drawers creaked beneath the strain of its bulging treasure. Old family photographs engaged my being — vaguely remembered ancestors, photos of my parents as children, familiar landscapes of our family pilgrimage, pictures of my siblings, not entered in our usual family albums.

My father’s sensitivity emerged with each turn of my hand. Old files with letters my sister and I wrote from college, telling of our adventures and noting needs from far away. A letter detailing reasons why I chose to live in New York rather than returning home after college. Old papers I wrote in college, defending civil rights, Southern literature and a social conscience. A note signed by my dad and my brother, then an adolescent, “My father promises to pay me $500 if I do not drink by the age of 21.”

Hand made Father’s Day cards, words of affection he secretly digested.  A piece of paper scribbled by one brother, “One free gutter cleaning.” Death notices of his own departed siblings, carefully clipped and cataloged. A history of his feelings and gratitudes emerged, unspoken during his stay with us, denied except in death.

Hours passed without my emerging from this secret place, my father’s interior world. Feelings so deep, wordless, memories so alive yet so secret, hidden in life from us, now so poignantly present. My father had slipped into his file cabinet a history of relationships, a lifetime of family, without so much a gesture to those of us he loved of its importance to him. We can only guess. 

I did not want to leave this place.

Alone, among all these ghosts, these treasured images and symbols of lives linked together, I got it,  firsthand, how love kept at bay was my inheritance.  Stored away in his file cabinet, he hoarded all the potential moments of his life, all the things he held dear — fantasies upon which he could muse, at arms length, in his quiet hours alone — precious thoughts he could not act upon in the real world.

Storing this in his file cabinet rather than living it. All his potential caring, all his potential fathering, his potential being-in-the-world. And here I was, alone in his study, feeling all the feelings, reliving all the memories, fantasizing about all the potential exchanges never granted in life, just as he did.

There must be some message in why he saved all these memories for us.  A message about his life, perhaps, a message I don’t think he figured out himself, but left for us to figure out.  For my part, I got what I needed for the moment. I gathered up this precious cargo, this treasure-hoard my father left us as his last embrace, and carried it gently downstairs. To share with my brothers and sister, my mother and children. To make it live within us, alive with all the meanings hidden. Alive with Daddy.
 
                                                                                      — December 1994

“Where do you go from the top of a thirty-foot pole?” This question, posed by Thomas Merton the day he died while attending a monastic world conference in Asia, stated at me from a box of old handwritten notes and collected writings I had put away in my thirties. Scribbled in my own handwriting on an old index card, the question stared at me and presented itself as if for the first time. At thirty-something, I found the question provocative but not particularly revelatory. In my fifties, I find it profound.

Living for fifty-plus years gives me a purity of perspective, an intuitive inner knowing, a sense of detachment I did not have in my thirties. Like Mark Twain, I finally have the wisdom (I didn’t have in my youth) to go with the experience. Rather than accumulate, I long to simplify. Rather than respond to authority outside myself, I am grounded from within, in what I know because of my personal journey.

Rather than invest energy in discovering the truth of the matter, I know now the importance lies in my ability to experience it, fully. I find myself choosing professional workshops, reading matter, or general sharing of ideas, not for knowledge I do not already have, but to enjoy the metaphors others use in describing their journey with a question of subject. I can see it through their metaphors and experience it in a way I wouldn’t have on my own.

This enlarges and opens new doors in a house I am already building from a different direction. Rather than seek only those who are more like me, who think like me, live like me, I delight in people’s differences as a source of richness and dialogue. This does not mean, as we age, we don’t seek a close circle of fellow soul mates, but that others’ perspective of the truth are interesting instead than threatening.

I’m comfortable at my age with mine not being the last word, or if what I say has no interest for others. We each start up different poles and therefore have a different view and experience of the mystery. Even though the mystery itself is universal, our personal experience of it can only be told in our own story and adventure.

My spiritual journey has gone full circle, rounded out and reclaimed the joy I knew as a child at play. My view of death from the top of my thirty-foot pole is a swan dive off the tower on the lake at my old summer camp. We stand in hushed silence as we watch one another take a turn, one by one, climbing the ladder to the top of the tower.

Only one person stands on the tower at a time, but we are all standing with that person, watching, waiting, being with them as they take their turn at diving. Good luck, we say. Good jump! we clap. And then the turn is ours. We climb the ladder, glance around at those who love us, who cheer us on, then relax and dive into the unknown.

Death, releasing ourselves into those invisible hands that have reached for us from the other side of our understanding, is something we each experience when someone dies. Like consciousness, we participate in death as something the other end of which we can only guess. As those around us die and return to their origins, part of us returns with them as much as part of them remains with us.

I have, indeed, opened this gift of life. I have tasted the wine. I have danced with the stranger. I now seek more passionate ways to enjoy, to share, to live out this grace. Being at the top of my thirty-foot pole allows me the time to resolve unfinished business, to redeem any dissatisfying relationship I didn’t have wisdom enough to handle in my twenties or thirties. I have eternity spread out before me now.

I have the opportunity, during this phase of my life – which Erik Erikson deems the time to resolve whether my life has integrity or causes me despair – to be the person I am meant to be and to enjoy the fullness of this awareness into which I have grown.

When I take my early morning walk, I find myself, not taking an examination of conscience, but an examination of consciousness. How conscious am I of the richness, the privilege, the wisdom of all that has brought me to where I am? Am I able to absorb and integrate the revelations available to me here from the top of my pole? Am I suitably grateful? Am I conscious of those things in me I must let die and those I must nurture?

Mountain tops and thirty-foot poles and sunrise vistas have always stirred the human spirit to reach beyond itself. So too, those internal ocean depths and spiritual valleys and spiral pathways have wooed us deep within. Within and without, above and below, loud and soft, mystery invites us forward.

I have reached the top and found there to be more, within myself, within my personal experience of becoming, within the circle that includes my own experience of death. I embrace them all as long as breath holds me in her eternal rhythm and leads me still.

If we have allowed ourselves to move in and out of Center throughout our life, moving into death will not be foreign. It will, in fact, feel familiar, intimate, personal. The silence out of which we came into life is the same silence into which we will return at death. It has accompanied us, a faithful companion, in our breathing, in all of our letting-go, in each attempt we have made to create more space within for the light.

Death is passing through that hidden gate in the center of the garden and recognizing it as home lit up. We recognize the light we have been shepherding in ourselves to be one and the same with the Light that receives us in death. We can let go and become one with it, at last.

The more comfortable with mystery we have been in life, the more comfortable this mystery of death. Death cracks open all mystery and invites us inside. Perhaps this is why so many who have briefly passed over to the other side only to be yanked back into life report feelings of deep peace and joy. In the end, it is so natural.

Christopher Reeve speaks of leaving his body in a moment of death, content, happy to be with the Light, then, returning just as mysteriously, happy to be back in the light of his body, in the love of his family beside his hospital bed. Both life and death hold rapture for him now.

Life for most of us offers less dramatic experiences of what we can expect. Small moments of wholeness in which we catch a glimpse of our true self and the divine energy that emanates from the core of us. These are as close as our breathing.

We have only to close our eyes — to listen for that part of us that does not change, that informs us of our true nature, the potential of our being – to hear how close death has been to us, all along. Seeing ourselves as separate – separate from all things living – deludes us into thinking of death as an unnatural event, a tragedy. It’s as natural as breathing, as laughing.   

Age allows a certain wisdom. We learn we can’t hoard energy. We can’t control or will it. We are energy, localized in a human body. Sacred energy. It does not belong to us. It is on loan, for our delight, for our creativity, for our compassionate contribution to the spiritual evolution of life. As the energy of our body ebbs, the energy of the one who first gave the gift enters.

If we have been open to recognizing this divine energy in the persons, the insights, the words, the natural state divine energy has taken shape for us throughout our life, we will recognize this divine energy in death. Perhaps that’s what people speak of when they tell us they saw their whole life pass before their eyes just before they thought they were going to die.

This is the light we have discovered in our darkness, has shepherded us through our experiences, that has informed our life. We follow it now, in instant flashback, through all the steps of our life, and beyond, to where it bends and returns to the Light that has sustained us throughout. If we were conscious of this connection in life, death is a validation. If we were unconscious of this in life, we will be delightfully surprised; that’s all.

Dying is part of living, not the end of it. Science tells us that energy is not lost, but changes form. The mystery of our matter and what happens to our matter at death is not something we can know. We can only look at the moon, and all things that cycle in nature, and ask the question. The answer lies in our future. It resides at the Center.

What of this spirit whose longing for matter set life in motion? What of this light we have harvested within us all these years? What of this breath that has cradled us and witnessed us? What of this life that has poured itself through us? Does this end with death? Does it carry us forward in that eternal river that flows, far beyond our mind can carry us?

We can only wonder and listen to our breathing, and be at peace. It is our breathing that marks for us that we are not dead. It is our breathing that holds the mystery we have never been able to crack. Our breathing, that mystery that has companioned us in life, becomes our bridge.

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