So much of what we fret over in our lives seems so futile when death is hovering and waiting to claim us. What came to my mind as I watched Mom hang on was the power of relationships. They are what matter at the end.
Eleanor left us while her caregiver was brushing her hair. It was an insignificant moment with nothing momentous about it. She stopped breathing for awhile and the next breath didn’t start - unlike so many times over the previous ten days.
Somehow, I thought it would be different. That something this important would be preceded by a crescendo of sorts, like any well written novel or movie – cue the string section! But, as T.S. Eliot wrote, she went “not with a bang, but with a whimper.”
And so we all must.
What makes our lives significant is not our dying, but our living.
It seems that Eleanor hung on for ten days so that she could keep a date with an old family friend. And it wasn't an easy hanging on. What she worked out in her spirit during that time I will never know, but I do know that she thought a relationship was so important that she endured so that she could bring closure to it.
Would that we all would value our relationships in life as she did in death.
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