One friend died last summer of cancer. A neighbor passed last month in his sleep. Last week, a favorite relative heard that he has congestive heart failure.

I took the grief to a spiritual adviser. “Pay attention,” she said. “Remember the lines from Mary Oliver’s poem, ‘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?’ Fold lightness into the heaviness by crafting a life review. Go to your heart. Notice what you see there. Don’t edit. Don’t try to be linear or chronological. Don’t try to make it good. Just make it yours, however random and humble. Do it now, while you can. “

I started to let snippets of the past well up in me. Stories rolled in like rushing tides in the form of the poem English teachers often assign: I Come From — in which we list colors, smells, images, tastes, any memories that pop.

I come from great-aunts and great-uncles with funny names like Albertine who spoke in a foreign code I couldn’t crack.

I come from the pungent mills where my grandmother Bernadette held her first job. “I got to sort paper,” she told me. “I was lucky to get clean work.”

I come from fish sticks and french fries on Friday nights, the blue-book Baltimore Catechism, white-dress First Holy Communion and the shame of forgetting how to recite the Hail Mary in front of all the fifth- and sixth-graders, and all the teachers, nuns and priests who led the school.

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I come from acting the boss in Mom’s full-length apron, begging my younger sisters to mop the linoleum floor with me before our parents came home.

I come from crisp nostril-biting winter wind and forest green pines, snowplowing down steep white slopes chasing my brothers and other boys.

I come from riding my black no-gear bike, pedaling backward to brake, breathing hard up a soft incline, which seemed then like a mountain, to eat with Pam, whose mother broiled tuna melts with a single slice of tomato under the bubbly cheese.

I come from drawing hopscotch at wide low tide, collecting salty teal sea glass to pitch into the sandy squares, and then the whooshing waves erasing our game.

I come from the Latin class spelling bee where I stood when the intercom blared that John Kennedy had been shot.

I come from rocking younger siblings, babysitting for all six on Saturday nights, rustling tinfoil-topped Jiffy Pop and later hand-washing the yellow Pyrex serving bowl, the smell of buttery popcorn replaced by warm lemony suds.

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I come from blue lakes, learning to balance on one water-ski; showing off daily one high school summer until one of my brothers flipped doing slalom tricks and needed 40 stitches to reattach part of his nose.

I come from my dad telling World War II stories: the Pacific Theater; Navy songs, pictures of aircraft carriers and Hellcat planes.

I come from me as an infant who slept in a tight closet, the only space my parents had then. And I come now from me as mesmerized grandmother to twin 9-month-old boys, growing and glowing as their time here begins.

I come from 62 years of cycles; gains and losses, births and deaths, dark nights of the soul and brighter days, and deep thanks for these decades.

In “A Path With Heart,” Jack Korn-field writes: “When people come to the end of their life and look back, the questions that they most often ask are not, ‘How much is in my bank account?’ or ‘How many books did I write?’ or ‘What did I build?’ or the like. The questions such a person asks are very simple: ‘Did I love well?’ ‘Did I live fully?’ ‘Did I learn to let go?’ These simple questions go to the very center of spiritual life.”

What if we all pay attention now, while we can, while we have choices about what to do with our one wild and precious life?

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Hospice workers tell us that we die the way we live, and that such reviews seldom boast of heroics. So I hope, now and when my life flashes before me, that my heart fills with what I have loved and how I have lived, and that I remember where I came from.

Susan Lebel Young, author of “Lessons from a Golfer: A Daughter’s Story of Opening the Heart,” teaches mindfulness, meditation and yoga. She may be reached at:

sly313@aol.com

 


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