(Karen always read and enjoyed my blog posts, bless her. This one is for you, my friend.)

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My friend Karen died last week.

I visited her a few days before she passed, sat by her side, prayed, even as she fought for a whisper. I struggled to be present, but my heart ached and wanted to run away at her suffering and dying. 

I asked if she was afraid. She nodded. Her skeletal face was etched with angst.

I whispered that fear was normal and assured her that she was going soon to the most wonderful space, filled with so much accepting love.

As I held her hand, I could only put faith in those words. I couldn’t prove them.

But somewhere deep in my being, I believe that God’s mercy and love is infinite. That God — or whatever name we wish to give that Divine Being — is all compassion and acceptance. She was going home, to that source.

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Karen was a quiet soul. She loved nature and photographed it with simplicity and wonder. She loved kayaking and hiking. She lived alone, divorced, no children, and I often wondered, what happened? It was none of my business nor did I ever get into details.

I asked myself at times — how much do we control our lives or how much do we abandon ourselves to where life steers us? Is there some Divine plan or, within that plan, do we have choices?

I don’t know. I know few things. I like to believe I know a lot. But I don’t.

Only my heart knows the truth and my heart is still mending. Still learning.

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I’ve had three major deaths in five years. And now Karen.

This is the way it is, I tell myself with a sigh of acceptance. As I grow older — and I am growing old — death will become more and more a part of life. I have a brother who is seriously ill. Is he next? When that happens, how will I cope with yet another loss?

Questions, questions. Few answers.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:

“Try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign language. Don’t search for the answers which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live with them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.”

But am I living everything? Am I living the questions now? Am I living life?

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Outside, leaves thrash in a heavy rain, tree branches dancing in the storm. Life is this. Storms that come and go. A world of impermanence where we can hold on to nothing. Soon, the rains will leave and the afternoon sun will fall soft onto the grass and the light will dissolve into evening darkness.

Karen’s death, and those before her, have shown me that life is indeed in the now, in the present moment. We are here to embrace all of it with open arms, in the thunderstorms that rage and the sun that follows, in the fall of despair and the rising into grace.

At her side, I told Karen that I was a “weenie” — that as much as I believe in a glorious afterlife, that I was still afraid.

And I asked her that when my time came, if she would welcome and greet me on the other side. She struggled with a whispered, “Yes, I will.”

As I left her room, she said “Good-bye, Marielena” with a finality that buckled my knees.

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I have loved in my life, and now, many I have loved, are gone. Writer C.S. Lewis asked, “Why love when it hurts so much?”

He wrote: “I have no answers anymore. Only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I’ve been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.”

A mature love understands at soul level that joy — as well as pain — is part of the deal.

I’m still growing into this, even as the rains fall heavier and the skies darken. And the sun brightens. Out my window, a rainbow splashes across the sky.

A gift. From Karen.