Throughout all of poetry and literary history, life has been compared to a flower. Thomas Gray, Biblical literature, William Wordsworth, Anita Diamant and so many others speak of life as a flower for so many reasons. Its profound beauty and uniqueness, but the overall trait that elicits the flower’s comparison is its brevity. Life, like a flower, can be beyond description and magnificent despite its simplicity, but for all of its vitality and splendor nothing can last forever.
If you live for any amount of time, you will encounter loss and feel the stinging insatiable pain that accompanies death. There is no seminar, no class, no pamphlet, no words that can prepare you for it, not really. While no experience is exactly the same, there is the universal underlying tone that we all understand. Death can be a creator of peace or a source of conflict. For nearly every life that goes, there is at least one person, at least one person in the whole world who grieves its passing, who weeps uncontrollably as all do when we experience insatiable loss.
I’ve had strange experiences with death. Before the age of four, I apparently experienced it first hand. I stopped breathing and my heart wasn’t beating. (I suppose that’s what I get for pulling a plugged in hair dryer into a tub with me.) I stopped breathing and by medical terminology I was no longer living, but my Daddy brought me back. I was very little when older relatives died, but it didn’t touch me because being so young I wasn’t allowed to see the bodies, nor attend the funerals. It was for the best. As I grew older and started to gain cognizance over the comings and goings of life, I realized what death truly meant. It’s the life bit I still don’t have a grasp on. I was in third grade and I had a crush on a boy from church, a boy that seven years later would commit suicide. A young man I adored in sixth grade was shot in the chest at a party my junior year of high school. While these impacted me directly as they had been a part of my life at one point time, there was one death that shook me so badly I’m not sure I’ve gotten over it.
My mentor’s daughter’s baby was eighteen months old when she died from a car wreck. I went to the funerals even though I hate funerals, it’s instinctive I think. I had watched this beautiful little baby, Dayesha, grow up. That child rarely cried and was always smiling and laughing, she was like a warm pocket of sunshine. So as I walked somberly up to that itty bitty casket I had the strange inability to separate her from that warmth. I smiled as tears ran down my cheek, “Oh Day-Day, baby girl don’t you look so pretty.” Like a little doll she had on her pretty white dress and earrings. I stroked her cheek with the back of my fingers, but there was no warmth there. The precious baby girl was as cold as ice and I snapped. I backed away from the coffin to the closest pew and I bawled. I couldn’t stop it because until that point in my life, death hadn’t been tangible but in that moment feeling all the warmth gone from that little girl’s cheek, death became terrifyingly real.
Though it is a risk for many, death was never a factor for me as I faced cancer. The cancer I had was fantastically rare and save for a few scars you’d never know I had it if I didn’t tell you. Yes, I had cancer. It’s weird to think of now and is scarcely worth mentioning save for the reason I am writing this in the first place. I work at Starbucks and when you see so many people in a day, there are a few that stick out to me. One such woman was completely bald and wore the cutest headband with a giant pink flower. It automatically put a smile on my face and made me wish I could have done that when my head was shaved. Apparently my being bald freaked too many people out so I wore a wig most of the time. I asked her how her treatments were going? She just started telling me how they were going really well and then looked at me strangely because I was looking at her and smiling. I didn’t say a word but pulled down the collar of my shirt on the left side until my telltale pink line was showing. This woman smiled at me and said the two words that only another cancer patient would say after seeing only a scar, “What kind?” “Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, Stage 4a.” The woman nodded with a smile and introduced herself as Kay.
Kay and I had a strange friendship, she praised God that I was healed and healthy and I was so proud of her that she wasn’t vain and wore her bald head proudly. Kay just laughed, “Them wigs are hot.” I told her I was still working at Starbucks while I was receiving treatment, so I had to wear something for the sake of the customers. Kay just shook her head and laughed, “Oh honey, I’m too old to care about a silly thing like what people freak out about.” It turns out that Kay’s husband had been my health teacher in high school. Every time Kay came through my drive through window, it brightened my day, like a bald beam of sunshine just for me. We were kindred spirits she and I. It’s something that cancer does to people. While people say “I understand what you’re going through,” they don’t. They can’t and that’s okay. My best friend goes to church with them and told me that yesterday Kay went to the hospital because her liver was failing and told me to pray as they were all praying, that she would make it through. That still small voice spoke inside of me and whispered, “Kay’s going home tomorrow.” I couldn’t tell my friend that as she drove off to the hospital to see her for what I knew to be her last hours. So rather than praying for what I knew would not pass, I pleaded something different. “Dear God, let her pass peacefully in a room so full of love that it feels like Heaven before she even closes her eyes. Let her have a smile on her lips and joy in her heart, be with her, don’t let her be afraid.” So when I got the news shortly ago that Kay didn’t make it, I was finally able to mourn. Strange thing about cancer, that some of us make it with hardly a scratch and some of us don’t. I’m not going to pretend I understand that I understand it, nor that I have the answers because I don’t. All I know is that for the brief moments we spent together I loved her and she loved me and few people get to have that chance.
Being the nerd that I am, I thought of an episode of Doctor Who in which The Doctor, this immortal Time Lord able to travel through time and space in a police phone box called the TARDIS. In this episode, he has the unique opportunity to speak to the TARDIS’ soul as it has been placed inside a person. Through varying circumstances, this soul is released from its human body into its true form. She speaks to The Doctor one last time:
“I’ve been looking for a word, a big complicated word, but so sad. I’ve found it now.”
“What word?”Alive. I’m alive.”
“Alive isn’t sad.”
” It’s sad when it’s over. I’ll always be here, but this is when we talked and even that has come to an end.”
C.S. Lewis once said, “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” I can’t stop crying and that’s OK. While you may not believe as I do and that is your choice, I do find solace in that I believe that who she truly was, that beautiful ray of sunshine has transcended this fleeting mortality to the eternal. I believe that with all my heart. I believe that the wonderful and lovely Kay Sampson is truly home now. The hardest word to say is the one we think we’ll always have tomorrow to express. The hardest word to say is difficult because there is such a profound finality to it. The hardest word to say sometimes has to be expressed so that we may reconcile that in time all things fade from the world. The people we care about, regardless of their brevity in our life, the people we love we will lose. The hardest word to say is more than the end it is a well wishing until we see them again. So on that note I say:
GOODBYE KAY SAMPSON
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