Love One Another

At 63, pretty often I hear about a death in my circle. This month it happened to be a suicide by both a high school classmate and a Burning Man acquaintance. I know we live in a more immediate world of information, but even in a less plugged in world I would have heard of these deaths sometime.

A friend of mine blogged this week about the death of his brother eight years ago and his continued sadness and commitment to as I like to say "be here now" and love one another.

My mother and my niece of 29 both died in 1990 within a few months of one another, while I was at a new job and it was my first clear look at what someone's death meant in my life. With my mother, who was mentally ill, the question was whether I was living my life in a way that made me sane and that created who I wanted to be. My niece's death, on the other hand, was all about whether there was something I could do to help my sister survive the loss of the light of her life.

Over twenty years later those lessons have not changed very much. Am I living my life as fully and gracefully as I can, and in each moment does each person in my life know I love them, and do my actions reflect that.