DEATH informs LIFE

Today is a friend's birthday.  She's been posting pictures of her daughter's wedding on Facebook.  What joy & sweet remembrance in seeing those wonderful photos, especially seeing Kim looking so happy & hardly any older than the year we taught 6th grade, than when she was married over a winter wonderland Christmas.  How blessed her children are to have her as their mom, how blessed she is to be sharing these years with them.

Maybe I'm super susceptible to such sentimental meanderings, having just watched (again) Raising Helen.   The plotline about a Manhattan fashionista suddenly handed custody of her nieces & nephew after their parents’ sudden death makes scenes of mothers & adult daughters especially sweet.  And having just reread Erin & Doug Kramp's Living With The End In Mind makes me appreciate anew the young father's wisdom in addressing the unthinkable possibility of their unexpected passing. 
 
The first question in the book's first chapter asks, "Why should you read a book about embracing your mortality when the ultimate goal is to live?"  Their answer ~ "Because death informs life.  We can go about our day-to-day lives, or we can use the knowledge that we all will die to gain perspective on what is important today ~ whether we are healthy or ill."
 
The first personal sense my John had of Mom was the night the two of us first talked about getting married.  When I pulled out the church liturgy to look over wedding-related services & rituals, we discovered a piece of paper acting as a marker for "Funerals."  It was a list of hymns Mom wanted for her memorial service.  At the time, Mom was hale & hearty, on her 6th of 7 trips to Australia.  It was both a chortle & a WOW! moment, making me realize how cool it was of her to have thought ahead, to have written them down, and placed them where, if the need had come up, we would have found them.  And it left John pretty drop-jawed with amazement at the person who jotted down those page numbers.
 
Death informs life.  Did we use those hymns for Mom's memorial celebration?  No, we did not - she took a different route, asking each of her children to pick a favorite.  But having those jotted down numbers opened the door, it started a conversation.  Not only did it make it easier on all of us when the day finally did dawn that we had to organize Mom's memorial celebration, it became an opportunity for her to connect with each of her children, to let them know their participation in that special moment was special to her, to let each of her children feel a direct part of remembering Mom. 
 
How blessed I am to have the friends who post such wonderful moments in their lives.  How blessed I was to have a Mom who always seemed to live with the end in mind, enjoying each moment while preparing herself - and us - for the last.