Walk down another street
This blog began as a result of a death. Diagnosed with lung cancer, my stepfather died 37 days later, leading me on a journey to explore and question what I would do if I had 37 days left to live. The answer was, in part, to write these essays as a leave-taking for my two young girls, to provide them with the Me Past Me, the Me that is bigger than Mom Me, stories of my life, my people, my insecurities and ego, my questions and my truths.
That death caused me to question my story, my life’s narrative, my throughline and contributions and legacy and mistakes and regrets and patterns and desire lines. And, at the end of the day, it led me to understand that death is a part of life, not separate from it, that to know death is to live life more fully.
In these pages, I’ve written a lot about death–some particular ones, like my Daddy and Tara and Meta and Matthew and some thoughts in general about the leave-taking that accompanies death. For those touched by the last lecture of 46-year-old Randy Pausch who is quickly dying, my friend Mary from Fort Dodge, Iowa, wrote today to tell me that he will be on Oprah on Monday, October 22, in a segment called "A Special Report on Death" which will focus on candid confessions from those who are dying—and what it really means to live.
From The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, I read these words this evening, a poem that speaks to me:
Autobiography in Five Chapters
I
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost … I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes me forever to find a way out.
II
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place
but, it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
III
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in … it’s a habit.
my eyes are open
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
IV
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
V
I walk down another street.
– Portia Nelson
How much of life is spent in that hole, falling into it, blaming others for it, owning our own responsibility for it, but still falling into it, or walking around it? Why don’t we walk down another street, I wonder? Perhaps in our last 37 days, we will turn that corner. Can we get there before then? How would the quality of our lives be changed if we could? It is a street without street signs, it seems, not on MapQuest or Google Earth, one we can only find from the inside out.
We know things, I believe, only by knowing their opposite. I know autumn by knowing spring, I know love by knowing hate, health by knowing illness, peace by knowing anxiety, regular by knowing decaf. And I know life only by knowing death.
Death ends a life, not a relationship.
It takes us down another street.
