Continuity

I went back to S. last week after a year. The 5 days seemed to fly. In fact, I had so many people to meet, lunch and dine with that I barely got a minute to sit. However, I am not complaining. It was just like going back home … the same familiarity; the same love … did not feel like I had ever left. Of course, the last year has left its scars on the city, a couple of buildings have been pulled down, a few new restaurants have come up, and construction on the light rail has started … but the coffee is still brewing strong and its still getting cloudy and peak hour traffic still makes me wonder if maybe another bridge across the lake really would not be such a bad idea. It was good to be back and I am already looking forward to my next trip.

I also said good-bye to a dear friend, philosopher and guide, B., who breathed his last earlier in the summer. A touching service was held on Sunday night in his memory as we all sat around and reminisced him. Constructing the rich personality that he was by piecing together each of our different perspectives and experiences with him over a period of a decade and a half. The diversity of the motley gathering reflected how he managed to attract and bring together his students from every discipline and every continent only to send them out enthused with the very vigor and lively intellectual vibrancy that he exemplified. By uniting people, nurturing open minds and connecting ideas lay the realization of his vision and the success of his life’s work. It is sad that he is no more, and that he has left us so early, but it was also a pleasure to tie and tassel the loose end of the bright and colorful thread, that was his life, that he weaved far and wide across the tapestry of human experience.

I also spent some time with an old friend who had recently lost her father in an untimely fashion. While the passing was beautiful and painless for him, the suddenness of it left my friend and the rest of her family deeply traumatized. It broke my heart listening to her talk about the entire experience. At the same time I admire her for having effectively navigated such troubled waters, while maintaining her own sanity and being a support to her family.

I attended service on Sunday at the UU congregation in my old neighborhood. The service on the passage of the soul and its health in life was refreshing to hear and left me a little calmer. It helped me get some solace and put my friend’s trauma and B’s passing in perspective. On the other hand, it also helped me realize that my greatest fear of all is not my own mortality as much as it is the fear of loosing my loved ones. It reaffirms the need to love all we know in sincerity, the need to rise above the trivial, for who knows when this fragility that we take for granted will give away to loss and grief.

While death is indeed the ultimate absolution, and indeed the only truth that none of us can escape … Love and the acknowledgement of Life really is what we have to construct our continuity in the very face of our immortality.