Death and roses

We say the bloom is off the rose when we mean to designate a fading of something. This autumn I have been thinking a lot about death. Three deaths of people I know happened in one week. All of these people brought very different, yet beautiful things to this life. So it would not be possible to celebrate their lives and leaving in the same way. It would seem inappropriate, if not garish and disrespectful.

Since we don’t know much about any reality beyond this one, it is difficult for us to have universal conversations about endings. We have separate communities with grieving rituals and beliefs about what happens next. Some of those communities mourn elaborately and some very privately. Africans ulilate, stamp and wail to express grief. It pours out of them in vibrational torrents.

Some European cultures sit in stiff black clothes on wooden pews, with downcast eyes, not looking around and sing ethereal songs about heaven and dust.

What we do share universally is that the environment–our shared world of culture, geography and traditions, presents us with grief. We don’t get the choice to live a sorrow-free life. This brings me to wondering if we universally share difficult painful experiences, then is there universal experience of healing from them that we share also? Apart from our culturally created meanings about tragedy and loss that is. If there is anything, we find it again in the rose.

As the seasons change, the petals fall. Sometimes in big clouds and sometimes one by one like teardrops. We acknowledge that the bud and the fully opened bloom are both gone. They are transitioning. First the petals float to the ground and then the heart of the rose begins to make its fruit.

Sometimes a round green apple, like its culinary relative, and sometimes a shiny red one, but in either case something totally different from a rose flower.

I have learned, mostly by watching others heal, and then by testing myself in times of grief that true healing is not about forming theories about rose hips or heaven. It is about watching the process of change with wonder and appreciation.

This is the universal healing we share as all beings: the awareness that this moment is different from the last moment and will be different from the next moment. And that all moments contain within them the potential for amazement. The bud, the bloom, the fall and petals, the rose hip, and indeed the thorn, all present themselves to invite us to sing in the new reality, whatever it is.

How ever many petals fall, there will be something to celebrate in the next reality. Transition is continuous. Some cultures have a construct of what the next reality is, i.e. a named place of light and eternal happiness. This is a healthy construct to be sure, but it is not universally shared. What we share universally is the acknowledgement of change. And that sometimes the change is very painful. We also share universally the opportunity to watch the change with eyes open to possibility and beauty.

The cliche that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, reflects the universal acknowledgement that deep feeling is an important part of being human. And that includes grief. Those of us left behind, whether scattering ashes and droning requiems, or thrashing and wailing, are feeling deeply because reality has changed for us.

This depth of feeling is our gift from those who leave us. If we feel the natural urge to argue and say: I’d rather skip that feeling and keep the person, fair enough. What I’m really acknowledging then is that I’m not open to one aspect of beauty and feeling. That doesn’t mean I’m a bad person, but it does present me with yet another opportunity to deepen my experience of engaging with life. Through death.