WE ARE EDDIES IN A POOL

WE ARE EDDIES IN A POOL©

By Linda Lee Greene

One of my sister Susan’s coffee cups warming my left palm, and the thumb and fingers of my right hand encircling its curved handle, I sat and watched the droplets of rain eddy across the surface of the pool in the lanai of her Florida home. Beginning as tiny rings of rain that rippled out in a series of concentric circles, I was reminded that birth and death and the life in between behave in the same manner. Like the lifespan of every human being, each concentric pattern on the water was a whole, a time-capsule of a tiny aspect of the energy of life.

 

                All through Florida’s December rains in this year of 2018 my darling sister Susan kept to her bed suffering the culmination of more than two years of life-robbing illness. Her earthly future was nearing its end, but like the cores of the eddies in her pool, she was still the nucleus of the enormous circle of life she had created in her sixty-three years. There was evidence of it everywhere—in the home, the garden, the artwork, the crafts, the pet grooming business, in every concerned human and animal voice, and in almost countless other illustrations of her heart and mind and spirit. Having scored so many achievements, one would think that there was no more for her to accomplish. A casual glance would suggest that her circle of life was complete—that a person in her weakened state couldn’t possibly do any more anyhow. But no—there was still one more contribution she had to give to life, and her debility was her instrument.

“To live is to suffer!” Nazi concentration camp survivor and psychotherapist Viktor E. Frankl examined this reality to great depth in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning.” He advanced further the premise that if there is a purpose in living at all, there must also be a purpose in suffering and in dying. Woven among Susan’s several successes was an equal number of misses, and the hardships of existence she sometimes encountered manifested now and then in defensive behaviors that were unfortunate and/or unproductive. She was no different than most of humanity in that regard. But over the course of her illness, she did attain to an almost immaculate grandeur. As her body deteriorated, her soul grew sweeter, and her spirit blossomed. My sister showed us how a person can rise to the highest level of courage and strength and even of altruism in the acts of suffering and dying. In effect, she showed us how to die a good death.  

Dostoyevsky said, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my suffering.” My sister’s final deed, that last concentric ring that sealed the circle of her earthly life, was to prove herself worthy of her suffering, a feat that shaped a shining example for all to follow.