AS I SEE IT
Ruth Sanford
It happened again. My intention was to spend a few days "a bit later" with members of family upstate. A telephone changed all that. I am on my way home from a funeral.
"Why can't we," I say to myself again, "celebrate life instead of death?" Recently I have sent flowers or a gift or a long overdue letter to persons I care about, and I've let it be known that I no longer send flowers when someone dies. My flowers are for eyes that see and hearts that feel, whatever form my flowers take.
Again I have observed that my sadness and weeping (seen and unseen) at the time of death are largely my own regret for time and expressions of caring unshared with, or opportunities for full and joyous living denied or unrealized by the one who has died. How sad that I did not follow the urge to send him the book I knew he would enjoy or stay and talk with her when I knew she was alone or tell him I cared and thought he was courageous! How sad that he never took time to enjoy his family and home or to take the risk of doing what he always wanted so much to do; or she to make friends with her daughter or to take the music lessons she always longed for or paint the pictures she dreamed of painting "sometime'' These are the things one weeps for - hopes and talents unfulfilled, lost in a wasteland of routine days.
And so I celebrate Life; I celebrate the persons, one by one, whom I know and love; I celebrate the aliveness of me; I celebrate Today. The future, the hereafter, I do not, cannot know. Nor can I live fully in any tomorrow if I dare not make the choices which free me to fully and wholly today.
And that is the way I am seeing it today.