I’ve been crying a lot this week following the death of my friend. I don’t know why, really. I’m happy that she is out of pain. She is healthy. She will never hurt again the way her cancer made her hurt for the last four years. So, I don’t know quite where this emotion is coming from. Another friend, Nina Walther, said that death is a sacred moment where eternity touches earth. I know that my brother-in-law—who saw his father-in-law die, breathing one moment and then just gone (gone!) the next—said with awe in his voice, “That was a sacred experience.”
When I was getting my Master’s degree, I was working on twenty Irish laments (songs sung in olden times during an Irish funeral or wake) to determine style. One afternoon, a stop sign emerged suddenly in the bright glare of the western afternoon sun. My husband stopped our old Winnebago faster than I had ever known it to stop. Standing in the aisle (yes, I wasn’t expecting a sudden stop) my outflung arms felt like they were being ripped off my shoulders. I sat in a heap on the floor after we stopped, groaning in agony. My daughter gave me aspirin, and while I waited the twenty minutes for it to kick in, one of the Irish laments-by Turlough O’Carolan- came to mind, so I started moaning it. It was successful! Somehow it dulled the pain. I decided to experiment with some of the other laments. None of them help alleviate my hurt, so I went back to intoning the first one—over and over and over until the aspirin dulled the pain.
That experience let me know that of all twenty, only one lament echoed the energy of real, deep-seated pain; all the others were for healthy people who were sad. And that’s a different thing. One was for the dead; all the others were for the living. So concerning my friend, am I sad for her, that she doesn’t get to experience earth life anymore? Or am I sad for myself, that I don’t have access to her ready friendship anymore? Those are two different things. I suspect it’s the latter.