Saying goodbye
Driving home from the funeral of a dear friend last week, I wiped away my tears of grief while smiling to have witnessed the sheer reach of her wise, gentle, and loving life. It’s a funny thing about friendships. No matter how close you are to a person, it simply isn’t possible to know them beyond the bounds of your own relationship.
My friend was my spiritual director for almost fifteen years and I am an entirely different person because we met. I have wracked my mind and cannot think of another soul outside of my family who touched me as she did. It is not a surprise to me that her life deeply impacted many others as it did me. In fact, as I headed out that morning, I said to my husband that I had been one of many to her, but to me she was one of one.
What I didn’t realize was how affecting it would be to glimpse some of these “many.” How listening to others speak so lovingly and admiringly of my friend would both shine new light on her and also affirm all that I knew and loved about her. How touching it would be to hear other people’s voices crack as mine had when I told my family that she had died.
Realizing that we don’t know can be uncomfortable, but it’s worth it
We can get so wrapped up in our own stories, our own side of things, our own feelings and fears and worries. We are so busy seeing things from our own points of view that we forget that we are indeed one of many. We often miss the opportunity to be surprised by how much more everything is when we rise up out of ourselves and take a look around.
Doing this – entertaining different ways of seeing things, acknowledging that it is more than likely that we are bit players in the sweep of life – can be disorienting. It can be frightening to confront the possibility (the probability) that we do not understand fully that which we are seeing. In a world where so many seem so certain, admitting that we don’t know the whole story can feel precarious.
But embracing the certainty that it is more than likely that we don’t know the whole story is a superpower of sorts. The certainty that there is a non-zero chance that we don’t “get it” shifts us into a mindset of curiosity. It inspires a hunger to know more. It gets us wondering. Rather than making us feel vulnerable, we find that this is a lovely, engaging way to live.
Our truths are rarely the whole truth
Curiosity and wonder do not deny all that we know. I walked into my friend’s funeral 100% confident that I knew and loved this woman; that she had touched me deeply; that my life was better because she was in it; and that I was heartbroken that she had died. All of this was true and is true.
And yet my truth was an incomplete truth because her life was more (much, much more) than our friendship. And the truth of her life that I glimpsed at her funeral added to my knowledge of her. As impossible at it seems, seeing her beyond the borders of our friendship made me even more grateful to have known her.
As I said goodbye to my friend that day, I felt myself also saying hello. Hello to the woman I didn’t know – her other friendships, her family, her students and colleagues. I was saying hello to the ways that she touched this world that I hadn’t before realized. I’ll be honest. For a second, this made me feel small or incidental; like maybe I hadn’t mattered to her as much as she had to me. But only for a second. Mostly, I felt wonder and curiosity – both about her life and about my own.
The truth is that we are small and integral parts of an incomprehensible whole
I suspect if my friend herself had been with us that day, she would have been stunned by how deeply she had touched every single one of us who gathered in her honor. Her funeral gave me a glimpse of how little we know about the sweep of our loved ones’ lives, let alone our own. I drove home pondering how our lives – even quiet lives lived in small towns – send ripples far and wide. And how, though we may not know all the ways we are affecting other people, we can trust that we are.
What if – especially on days when we’re feeling small and incidental – we could remember this? That we matter? That the world is a better place because we are in it – loving and caring, listening and sometimes talking, doing what we do each day? That, even if we don’t know it, our light is brightening the darkness for someone else?
If, thanks to her funeral, you and I can remember this, then my friend’s light will continue to shine in this world.
Patanjali teaches that we misunderstand the reality of most situations (Yoga Sutra 2.4). He does not do this so that we feel bad about ourselves or so that we strive to be omniscient. He teaches this so that we are always aware that there is more to the truth than our own perspective. Living with that awareness makes us the kind of curious, gentle, hopeful and wise people that my friend was.