Nur’s death triggered me into old unhealthy behaviors. Without realizing it, the smallest task became urgent. My Cinderella thinking returned with its subliminal dictum: let this pass and you will turn into nothing. But maybe this is just what I need: to release all constructs, to be defined by no thing. Each significant death to this point has made me reassess who I am and what I’m doing. The shock of life’s fragility has made me change so as not to waste the thread of time I have. But after my own illness, I am living fully, not wasting a moment, not squandering a chance, not racing toward tomorrow or burrowing in the past. Now, there is no overhaul necessary and no work, no thing to divert me from the full impact of this loss. Now, there is only the soft and unnerving challenge to simply feel the emptiness and starkly be.

Nur was like a worn stone cast high above us and watching her, helping her come back to us brought us all together. Yet as such a stone enters the deep, rippling everywhere, the impact of her going is sending us in all directions back into life. This is painful to accept. Nur’s dying kept us together, and her death is sending us apart.

Yet she is in us. We are her. She made sure of this, moment after moment, month after month, warming us each time she flared, and the heat of her spirit is now under our skin. If she taught us anything, it is that though we part, we never scatter.

Within forty-eight hours the priest who laid hands on my tumor has died, and this remarkable woman, who fought for years against her disease beyond even God’s expectation, has suddenly dropped to the other side, and our dearest friends, joyous in their newfound pregnancy, have lost their child.

How to make sense of such things, especially having been close to death myself. I wander aimlessly in a saddened shock, feeling powerless and grateful to be here at all.

Having almost died, I find myself so easily punctured with the soft cry of loss, though I accept the merciless, unpreventable fact of it. It’s not a morose resignation I’m feeling but a deep acceptance of the fragility and wonder of how many things attempt to live and how few are granted without preference the chance to do so.