I have been spending time with my best friend during the last part of her life at a Hospice. The view out of her window is a garden.
For some reason I have been seeing everything as a window the last few days: the body language of loved ones, the skill of staff, the room itself as a window into all those who occupied it before, her surgeon’s words who likened the cancer in her body, ‘to a dandelion gone to seed and blown across her abdomen’.
Mostly, I am thinking about what I imagine as her windows; her view. At times I believe I have seen her clearly aware of both sides of the window of her body. Looking in. Looking out.
My view has been fractured. I keep thinking, ‘she is still here.’ She is still ‘in there’. At some moments it seems there must be a way to close the cancer window and ‘fix’ these unwelcome circumstances that have so swiftly swept my beautiful, exuberant friend toward the end of her life. I also see that the time has come to open the window wide for peace, to release her tethers through the freedom of a merciful last breath.
When I was a little girl, I had two windows in my bedroom. One looked out into fairly dense forest that went gradually downhill toward a pond that you couldn’t see through the trees. Out of my other window was a crooked apple tree surrounded by grass. Lots of light came in through this window especially in the morning.
I want to unflinchingly look now through windows like those. I want to persist and assist in this willingness to see what’s bright, lush, crooked, dark and deep. I want to practice the traverse down that slope into unknown waters and explore trust in the impermanence of one moment constantly dying to the next.
Is there a way for you to do the same with your difficult moments? Your joy? Your boredom or loneliness?
Awareness is truly a radical kindness for yourself and others in the great turn toward it all.
And for my incredible best friend who has lived her life packed full of adventures, enjoy this link to a site that shows the view from 50 windows in 30 countries. She would have loved to visit them all.
What a beautiful way of looking at your experience with your best friend. Those are hard moments.
I recently lost my very dear friend. When she died, my initial reaction was anger, (which surprised me) because she was far too young. She was my introduction to yoga. Years ago, she gave me her yoga bag which I still use today, so she is still with me as I practice my yoga. I’ve passed my anger stage and choose to remember all our shared adventures and laughter.
Thanks for sharing your beautiful words.
Thank you for sharing the experience about your dear friend. As you have expressed, there are simply too many shared memories for my friend not to continue to be part of my life. I am still in shock I think though. I really thought we’d see the other side of her cancer diagnosis. When we spoke about ‘after’ I think we both sincerely believed in it even if that was against the odds. I’m grateful for our time together and also sad it turned out differently.