Guest Post: Passings & Crossings

This summer, my friend Julie lost her husband, Mike.   Julie is the publisher of My Forsyth magazine, where I’m a contributing writer.  Julie is  generous and kind, and from all the tributes I’ve read, so was her husband Mike.  Grief is complicated and personal and I hope and pray my friend will soon find some peace.  In this month’s issue of My Forsyth, Julie honored her husband by featuring an essay he wrote a few years ago, after losing a friend.   I was deeply touched by the article.  In the wake of Mike’s passing, his words are haunting – and beautiful.  With Julie’s blessing, I’ve featured his essay here at the LKM to honor him.  I hope you’ll read it.

“Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.”

In Remembrance of Mike Brennan

(1955-2014)

MIke

Passings & Crossings

This month marks the anniversary of the passing of fine man who I am privileged to have had as a friend, even for a short time.  Thinking of him caused a gallery of other faces to appear and linger a while in my thoughts – family, friends, and loved ones who enriched my life for all too short a time before crossing over to what lies beyond.

The important people in our lives have a varied and everlasting effect upon us.  Like long-gone masterful composers, they permanently stamp little vignettes in our memories that we can call forth at will to warm the heart or swell the spirit.  Their acts of kindness, courage and selflessness provide a beacon that we can use to steer clear of moral hazards in the dark nights of the soul that occasionally afflict every human being.

For example, it was hard to watch an active, athletic mother who raised and fed six children from diapers to adulthood struck by brain cancer, eventually leaving her unable to feed even herself.  But is impossible to forget it when, in a two-year battle that first invalided, then ultimately claimed her, she never quit, never gave up, never lost heart, and she never complained.  Even once.  She looked a terrible fate in the eye, and never blinked.  I hope that I never have to find out whether I have that kind of guts.

Every day, people are passing out of our lives, taking with them the memory and knowledge of a different world.  It is quite a sensation to truly realize how frail and how fragmented is our tenure here, and yet how far goes the influence of our tiny moment in the sun.  The world around us is so complex and so vastly improbable that its very existence might only be thought of as a miracle.  I suspect for those for whom time is short, there is a vivid and intense appreciation of that fact.

And so I treasure those occasional odd moments of detached lucidity that I think of as “Joe Black” moments – drinking in an experience with every sense fully awake, savoring every nuance, as if both for the first and last time.  As if a small voice in a dim corner of the soul is telling me that I might never get another chance.  You never know.

Take a moment now and then to drink in a spectacular sunset, or to notice the way the air smells just before a summer thunderstorm.  Pause to watch the ballet of a hundred fireflies at dusk.  Really savor the way your wine enhances a well-prepared meal.  Listen to the haunting violin solo in Scheherazade, and imagine it as the voice of an imprisoned princess, wailing for her lover.

It is all too common these days to become totally buried in a fast-paced career and a high-energy lifestyle.  Santayana defined a fanatic as one who redoubles his efforts after losing sight of his goals.  Even if we admit that a certain amount of fanaticism may be a necessary ingredient in an active lifestyle, there in one thing we should remember always: The goal is to live well.

 This piece originally appeared in My Forsyth.

 

8 thoughts on “Guest Post: Passings & Crossings”

  1. I’m so sorry about your friend losing her husband, Allie. This is a beautiful post on remembering to live in the moment. It’s so very true that we really never do know. With that said, I’m going to take my son somewhere fun now, to hang on to the last afternoon before kindergarten! xxoo

  2. So beautiful. I am so struck by the part about our times being short, but influential.
    My father passed away when I was a kid and I wonder what my mom would have put into words about losing her husband if she had written something then.

    1. Thanks Tamara. I’m sorry about you dad. I lost my mom at 18 and I feel like our time was too brief, can’t imagine if I’d been a child. I hope my time is influential!

  3. What a perfect post for me to read today, on the day I went to my husband’s grandmother’s funeral. She lived for 91 years, and I think she would have said that she lived in the moment, and lived well.

    1. I’m sorry about your husband’s grandmother. My husband’s grandmother is 91! and I hope to be given the gift of that many years. The post was good for me too, as I learned some sad news yesterday. Live well I think is a good mantra!

  4. While I knew Mike wrote, I’d never read that. Thank you, Julie, for this, and you LKM, for putting it here.

    This outlook on life is what drew me to Mike. He got it. Revel in what we have before us, suck the marrow of every experience and try to share the adventure.

    While I only knew Mike for a scant eight years we became close. I convinced him to accompany me to the Pacific North West for an ‘adventure’ where we would visit friends we had in common and participate in a planned event. I asked him specifically because I knew he would enrich MY experience of the trip.

    I was right. He had what he related to me as the best time among friends he had ever had.

    Mike was a strapping example of a man. Robust, vigorous, a ‘presence’ in any room.

    And I’m the one who went to wake him the morning of our flight back to Georgia and found he had passed in his sleep.

    The call to Julie to tell her that her husband, that I had taken from their home four days before wasn’t coming home was damn near more than I could bear.

    I didn’t have to imagine what this would do to that lovely woman. My wife passed very suddenly three years earlier.

    I knew.

    Thank you Julie for one more illustration of the fine qualities of a man that was my friend.

    Lowell Haney
    Rome, GA

    1. Thanks for visiting and comments Lowell. You comment is beautiful and I am truly sorry that you had to go through all of that. I have never had to make a phone call like that, but I have received one. I will make sure that Julie see this.

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