Earlier, I shared that in wheeling Ann to surgery, I could only wheel her so far, and waiting there at the door of the operating room, I realized that no one can go beyond the glass door with you. There is no question that, for me, in that moment, the glass door became the stranger, the messenger of the extraordinary. And very often, the person escorting us to and from the glass door is our completing other. Indeed, the most powerful form of messenger is the unexpected presence of a loved one. Why? Because through their love, we often see what we are capable of but not living, and this unnerves us at our core. So the bottom gets stirred up, which is painful and confusing, but all of us comes alive.

It seems that difficulty is woven into the design of life, so that we need the presence of others to help us through and bring each other alive. The bridge of our well-being is often made visible when the stranger, the fellow, the completing other jars us to inhabit our life. During the last few years, I have been jarred alive by the silence of a friend as we hiked up a mountain at sunrise with her dogs. And I was yoked into the unnamed center of my soul when holding my father’s hand, as he slept in a wheelchair months before his death. And just last week, I was stopped by the twilight as it made the skeleton of a tree dance without moving.

Throughout this book, we have explored this truth from many vantage points: that the gift of true relationship is that we awaken and complete each other. This is a very ancient and vibrant idea. In Greek mythology it’s believed that only when the Gods vanish or die, can humans have interior fire. Indeed, it’s believed that a function of the death of a great spirit is that its fire will then ignite within the hearts of those remaining. The loss of a loved one is such a piece of God, a form of Spirit whose coming and going draws us more rawly into the open. Having done so, the piece of God vanishes and we are hurtled into the pain of grief and loss. The very covenant of legacy is that what we loved in those who died is now ours to keep alive.