Many of us can say that we have lost too many friends and members of our families. From 2001 onward Death has seemed to have been a continual presence in my life. Art and music have been vehicles for honoring those who have passed and to ease myself through periods of mourning. I've made five compilation CDs of death songs, with certain people in mind. Several memento mori pieces have been impossible to complete.

When one of "the girls," would have been next to enter on my ongoing list of those who had died in a given year, close to me, famous, or inspirational, I stopped keeping track and took my website off line. Now, in 2008, I selectively and gingerly bring it back again.

A prayer and a moment for all who have prepared the way for us when it's our place in the queue.

"It's like belonging to an exclusive group that we all enter eventually..."
-Dave, 5.18.05

"... I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
-Mary Oliver
The Summer Day

 
"We are what
We have lost."
-Alex Kuo
Sherman Alexie
Indian Killer
New York, NY: Warner Books, 1996

"Time is nothing."
-Henry
Audrey Niffenegger
The Time Traveler's Wife
San Diego, CA: Harvest/Harcourt, 2003
pg. 521

"When the soul leaves the body, it is no longer under the burden and control of space and time. The soul is free; distance and separation hinder it no more. The dead are our nearest neighbors; they are all around us. Meister Eckhart was once asked, Where does the soul of a person go when the person dies? He said, no place. Where else would the soul be going? Where else is the eternal world? It can be nowhere other than here. We have falsely spatialized the eternal world. We have driven the eternal out into some kind of distant galaxy. Yet the eternal world does not seem to be a place but rather a different state of being. The soul of the person goes no place because there is no place else to go. This suggests that the dead are here with us, in the air that we are moving through all the time. The only difference between us and the dead is that they are now in invisible form. You cannot see them with the human eye. But you can sense the presence of those you love who have died. With the refinement of your soul you can sense them. You feel that they are near...

We forget that there is no such thing as empty space. All space is full of presence, particularly of those who are now in eternal, invisible form."
-John O'Donohue
Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1997
pp.226,227

"...the idea is to stay in a constant state of departure while you are continually arriving..."

"...some suffer from a lack of life. some suffer from an overabundance of life..."

"...combine waking rationalizations with the infinite possibility of dreams..."

"...accept the confrontation between souls..."

"...the world is an exam to see if we can transcend to direct experience..."

"...life understood is life lived. bug me and I can learn to love that which bugs me...go salsa dancing with my confusion..."

"...self-awareness--one person is a character in another person's dream..."

"...you haven't met yourself yet, but the advantage in the meantime is that someone you meet may present you to yourself..."

"...in hell you sink to the level of your lack of love. in heaven you rise to the fullness of your love..."

"...life is wrapped in a dream..."

"...as the pattern gets more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough..."

"...there is only one instant and it is now...time is constantly saying "no" to being one with everything...the story of moving from the no to the yes..."

-Richard Linklater
Waking Life (film, 2001)

"Death is the opposite of time."
Deng Ming-Dao
365 Tao, Daily Meditations
Harper-Collins, 1992

XXXI.
"Last week I had an intuition that someone I knew might be affected by a story I saw on the news of a plane crash simply because it fell in an ocean near friends. A flicker of thought, I quickly discarded it as I do every day I hear of car wrecks on the other side of town. Nonetheless I wrote a few letters and thought about how impossible it is to mourn for this planet, to even fathom the simplest bombing, to adequately cherish anyone, to expect to go unscathed. Tonight a friend I hadn't really expected called with grief bolted to her heart. She'd received my letter (I hadn't mentioned my concern) and lost six friends. I could say little. Death makes sense to me, in its inevitability, life should have limits, but I still stagger in each context, crash or cancer or shock, stagger for those of us left behind."

-Lisa Gill
Red as a Lotus, Letters to a Dead Trappist
New Mexico: La Alameda Press, 2002