What Really Matters?
Years ago I participated in a workshop in which one of the exercises was to sit facing another person and to ask and be asked, repeatedly (sometimes for hours), a series of simple but challenging questions such as Who are you? How do you avoid relationship? And, What really matters?
In the ongoing workshop of Life, there’s nothing like a life-threatening illness—in oneself or a loved one—to especially pull into focus the last of those questions. I’d had my own life-changing opportunity to explore this line of inquiry early in my adult life, when I was just 33. More recently, however, in July, 2013 my eldest sister was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I’m not the only friend and family member to marvel at how Beeby chose to live the question What really matters?
An otherwise very healthy and youthful 73 year old, Beeby was a most unlikely candidate for a fatal disease. It was truly hard to believe she’d succumb as quickly as the stats I researched on Google said she probably would. But, a few weeks ago she did, in just under two years since she first turned yellow, and in spite of the full armament of surgical and pharmaceutical interventions she chose as her best course of action.
Even as various CAT scans and physical symptoms showed that even the “big guns” chemo wasn’t working, Beeby resisted any urge to read or listen to what anyone had to say about the course the disease might take. She preferred, she said, to take each day as it came, to live as normally as possible for as long as she had to live – and she was adamant that no one suggest a date when she might die. So, almost to the very end of her days on the planet, she carried on a social life, went to her grandkids’ school functions, swam and walked, fussed about what to wear, read novels, and watched TV, and, as she had for several years, wrote poetry.
While Beeby insisted she didn’t have a bucket list (she was more a “go with the flow” kind of gal), she did, in her last months, actually manage to pull together and publish a powerful collection of her poems for her family and friends. The first copies of “Unhooked” arrived from the printer the day before she died, so she was able to hold the book and see for herself the fruition of one of a few goals she’d aimed to complete. I’m so grateful she did finish! Reading the poems she'd selected to represent her final thoughts and feelings reveals truly what mattered to her; without them, I and others might have guessed but never really known.
I write this now not only to mark the passing of my remarkable sister into another realm, but also as a reminder that “quality of life” issues do not belong exclusively to the period after receiving a dire diagnosis. Asking What really matters? on a daily basis can give important perspective to our relatively unthreatened lives. Now that my emotions are no longer so much tied up in anticipation of losing my sister, I find myself with more space to focus on what else might really matter.
In this period of early grieving, what really matters is surrounding myself with flowers and other things of beauty, life and color. When we reached Cape Cod to say goodbye to Beeby, I found that the lilacs in full bloom there were the very best consolation I could have asked for; when we returned to Michigan last week, I was glad the cool weather had prolonged our own lilac season. In the past week, I’ve planted more flowers in our garden this year than ever before. And, when last Sunday my neighbor and good friend Helen snuck in the house and left a vase of fragrant pink peonies on our kitchen table, I couldn't have been more thrilled. After a hiatus from painting of late, I’ve held a week-long party in celebration of my passion to paint those peonies. I like to think Beeby is somewhere—close by, just out of sight—loving them too.
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