I have been lately looking around and considering where I am.
The other day, for instance, I stopped and looked around my double-wide. For as long as I can remember I had wanted a house with a library. Well, I don't have a "library." My entire house is pretty much a library, with bookshelves filled in every room, and in some cases, books just stacked on tables and floors. The books have meaning for me; in some ways they represent my entire life. I realized that I have the library I always wanted. The thought surprised me, and made me feel content.
When I moved to Charleston some seventeen years ago, just me and my kids, I was on my own, and that was okay. In that first year, a nice guy was doing work around my house, and I asked if he wanted a slice of the pizza I had just made for dinner. He said no thanks, it was the night of his monthly dinner meeting with friends. I felt a bit sad at that. I liked eating out, and I missed friends.
But somewhere along the way, I found friends, and we have so much in common. I now have more lunches and dinners with friends than I probably should. We have books in common so that I am always being led to another story, another idea, and they will always allow me to tell them about the book I have just read that they would love. And we share values, both Democratic and democratic, so that my work, now that I am retired, has a sense of purpose and fulfillment, and of community. And we have laughs, which is as important to me as anything.
My kids are gone now, and that transition has been tough. But they are doing great things, and even though I may feel more insecure about where I am in their lives than anything else, I am learning to just take pleasure in our relationship, because they both give me great pleasure.
My husband's death, a year ago, was a loss that also led to finding a piece of a puzzle that had been eluding and frightening me all my life. As I looked around at people who would inevitably die, and wondered at how to accept the fact of my own death, I began to live differently. Instead of thinking about where I would be in x-number of years, I think about what a day it is today. The hardest thing about death I think is imagining life going on without me. But when I die, so does that consciousness. That makes the present moment the more valuable.
So here I am as Thanksgiving approaches, a very different time for me than it was a year ago. I am feeling a wholeness I hadn't felt until this year. And while I know there will be struggle, frustration and sadness, and there are moments when the thought of dying takes my breath away, I know I will get through it and on to that place of contentment again.
