“The trees are about to show us how beautiful it is to let things go.” ~Unknown
The trees in our neighborhood are just beginning to show their fall colors and will soon release all this bright beauty to the earth below. Autumn IS all about letting things go, isn’t it? And the older I get, the more things I’ve learned to release.
Sadly, this week I had to release a dear friend, just three months after she received a diagnosis of Stage 4 lung cancer. She accepted the inevitability of this outcome with characteristic determination, preparing herself both practically and spiritually in every possible way.
“It’s all good,” she liked to say to me, even when telling me about the latest scans with their evidence of frightening progression in her disease. “God and I are good with this.”
What amazing grace! What deep and abiding faith.
Anna was a friend of my heart, but also a friend of my soul. She cared deeply for everyone she encountered, and demonstrated the kind of Christian love and service to all that’s seldom seen in real life. She bore a fierce determination to see the good in all things and all people (well, there were a couple of politicians she never had a nice word for) and would work tirelessly in service to those people and animals in her realm who were in need.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have a multitude of friends, each of whom have brought unique gifts to my life. Anna was different than any of them, though. We never had a meal or a drink together, never went to the movies or shopping. She wasn’t part of any of my music or community groups. She was a neighbor who appeared quietly every day to walk with Lacey and I, along with Spirit, her faithful white American Eskimo by her side. Over the past few years she became a dear and trusted friend, a Christ-like figure for me, who had an uncanny sense of what was going on in MY spirit and knew what I needed to hear to help me heal it.
Her death feels like the bright sadness of a sun-soaked fall morning, the color all the more beautiful because it is gone so soon.
I will miss her, of course. But, as I told her the last time we spoke in person, her presence will live in my heart forever, along with my mother’s. There is beauty and solace in that knowledge.
It is said that transformation comes through great love and great suffering. Every living being experiences this over and over in their lifetime. It’s resurrection on a daily basis. Though I’m saddened by my friends death, I am transformed by watching the way she walked through the world during her life, and the grace with which she let go of it at the end.
A beautiful thing indeed.