This has been a difficult several months for human deterioration and death in my circle of family and friends and in this town, particularly in these past weeks. Some were old and well lived, others way too young. All left behind family and friends who must pick up the pieces of their lives, sort through the memories and the grief, and try, somehow, to keep going. Some had the option of stopping life support; others watched as one day became two, two became three, and death came slowly and undignified to these people with such dignity in life.

My daughters came home from camp last week and showed me a picture of two geese: One whose head was bitten off by a fox soon after the photo was taken; the other saved by fate from this gruesome death. Usually able to face the painful, that day I flipped quickly past both geese, unable to fathom why some go and some remain and the choice is not ours to make.

My 91-year-old mother in law sits in her nursing home day after day rubbing her rosary beads. She no longer prays only that the nice aide who comes in to visit should finally get pregnant; now she also prays that her life end soon. It is an empty life of waiting, sadness, readiness, yet even in an acute state in the hospital last week, she pulled through and returned to her prison walls. Again, she languishes in her tiny room all day and thinks of the sadness that was her life when her young husband died of a brain tumor leaving behind one child, an eight-year-old son, my husband. If she could trade places with the young people whose lives ended so abruptly, I know she would.

Pachebel Canon has ended. I click off the tape recorder and close the nozzle on the saline drip. In a familiar choreography, Tuba eagerly begins his descent from the bathroom counter, and I grasp the needle and gently pull. Our difficult deed is over for today.

I go outside and look at nature, and the sunshine, and I recall a saying of my grandmother, my “Bubbe,” who lived a healthy life until at age 92, she died quickly in what some think was an exchange for my sister’s daughter’s birth.

“Make hay while the sun shines,” Bubbe would say, meaning live life fully while we can. And if fate takes us away from that place where we are strong and able, we must do our best to wiggle back. We must lean toward the sun whenever we are ready and whenever we can, whether in body, mind, or soul, whether for our sake or for the sake of others who depend on us. Or even, if only, for the sake of those who--without wanting to in any part of their being, and without wanting us to suffer—have left us behind.

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