Living until we say goodbye
Today is Halloween. At school, the children have decorated the classrooms and corridors with ghosts, pumpkins, bats…
At assembly they’ll dance and sing songs like “Ghostbusters” and a tongue-twister about a bat and a chupacabra, and later they’ll walk through the haunted tunnel they’ve built themselves, for their own enjoyment and that of anyone who wants to join in.
Tomorrow we also mark All Saints’ Day: families will go to the cemetery, check on the gravestones, clean them, bring flowers, spend some time remembering their loved ones and go to mass.
These two festivals let us open a parenthesis in our lives to look death in the face.
Death has gone from being a natural event, woven into family rituals, to something we avoid.
If what I want to talk about is self-care, it might be good to care for ourselves when we grieve, too — at the moment of saying goodbye to someone we love.
If we could see the benefits of being beside someone who is leaving us, we would surely find the courage to accept the loss and stay with them.
If we set aside our own fears and insecurities, our difficulty accepting what has to be, we would begin to see opportunities for love and growth even close to the moment of death.
It sounds crazy to see anything positive in dying. But when I normalise that moment, put my anguish aside and allow myself simply to be with what is, accepting what is happening, death stops being a problem. I understand that it is what it has to be, and that I can make that occasion the most beautiful one I have ever shared with the person who is leaving.
In my experience, being beside someone who is leaving lets you realise how utterly beautiful life is, right up to the very moment we say goodbye.
For me, there are many gifts in accompanying a loved one who has to go: being able to care for them, pamper them in whatever they need, say “I love you” as many times as it takes, and close whatever was left unfinished.
If I put myself in the place of the person who is leaving, I would want to feel accompanied by my loved ones; to be able to let go in the peace of knowing that all is well and that I no longer have to hold anything up; to stop being afraid of leaving; and to share the deepest secret of all — that we love each other, and that we will miss each other.