Embrace Life

January 19th: This morning I visited a gravesite that I have not been to in 41 years, a gravesite of a dear friend that I lost when we were both teenagers.  I was there to visit his mother, Bobbie.  Bobbie extended a hand of friendship to me, a teenage girl, at a time when I was struggling to find meaning in the death of a friend, a time made more difficult by the subsequent separation of my family.  She extended a hand despite her own pain and suffering.  Our communication tapered off as I grew older, got married, and made my way into the world as an adult.  But still, we kept in touch every year through an exchange of Christmas letters.  Christmas before last she indicated she was not well.  This Christmas my letter was returned.  I visited the gravesite today knowing that Bobbie would want to be buried near her son; I visited the gravesite today to confirm what I had suspected, that Bobbie and her son, Brad, were once again united.

2016 has been a year of much personal loss and I want to absorb into my heart and mind the myriad of ways in which the people I lost touched my life.  And so today I honor Bobbie and Brad, two friends who embraced life to its fullest.  I am grateful for their kindness and their friendship.  I am grateful for their lessons – that the frailty and uncertainty of life is no reason not to live the life you have now, that adversity and loss are sources of empathy and compassion.  Bobbie was a role model and for this I am grateful too.  She was a woman working in the corporate world and whether she intended to or not, she introduced me to the idea of all that was possible during a time when women were still primarily wives and mothers.  I admired her strength of faith.  I loved that she filled her post retirement and even widowed years with her family, travel and community outreach.

I have a jar filled with sand and shells from a beach where we spent time in Brad’s final year, a gift made of things that he loved, a gift that he did not live long enough to receive.  After learning of Bobbie’s poor health I made plans to return the contents to the ocean.  The jar has been a token of something lost, the desire to release its contents a need to let go.  But the lid, sealed after all these years, refuses to come off, and today, standing at the gravesite reflecting on these individuals and remembering the way in which they both embraced life, I realize why.  I’ve been looking at it all wrong.  This jar of sand and shells from a summer in 1975 is a remembrance of the beauty of life, of friendship, of a life well lived, and of the importance of living your life now in this moment.