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.
