Returning to the source

This morning I found out that a friend who's been fighting cancer for several years has finally died. This is someone I've known for about six or seven years, although we never got together in person – we met through our blogs and collaborated on a few mail art projects over the years, including last year's infamous apron exchange. She's been so much on my mind over the last several months, ever since she emailed me last summer and let me know her cancer was back, and that this time she wasn't going to be getting better.

I'm so grateful to her for sharing some of her experience with me. I don't know very many people who will talk about death – for one thing, what is there to say, really? – and she and I didn't actually talk a lot about it, either. But just to know someone who's willing to just acknowledge the fact itself – yeah, it's real, we really do die! – without getting all metaphysical about why things happen, where we're going, or what it all "means" – to me that has meant a lot.

It seems important, while living my life, to always remember that somewhere down the line my death is already waiting for me. It makes everything seem more real, more vivid and saturated, more raw and sensitive, which is, I guess, the way I've always tried to live, even though I've often complained about how much it hurts sometimes. It reminds me to keep asking myself, "If not now, when?"

Anyway, this friendship was not about death, even when she was dying. It was about enjoying life. In a way it was a very pure friendship, because it only included a very thin, clear slice of both our lives. We shared the pleasure of making things, giving gifts, listening to music, enjoying colors, smells, textures. I'm going to miss knowing she's around, here on the planet somewhere still, making everything around her more beautiful.

The little statue up there is a Jizo - in Japan, this is the guy who protects the souls of children who have died, including miscarried or stillborn babies and even aborted fetuses, among other things. I started making little jizo statues this winter as a way of meditating on my own "lost" children, the ones I never got to have – something I've more or less come to peace with, but which still gives me a pang every once in awhile. Jizo statues are commonly seen in graveyards and also along roadsides, since they also protect travelers.

Tonight I'll make one for my friend. May you walk in peace and beauty, wherever you are.