Autumn is here. The sun was warm in the yard, but the breeze was soft and cool. The dogs chased balls without panting, without tiring.
In an earlier time, before we had dogs and a child, we often handled holidays like Labor Day as three-day weekends, driving the seven hours to either my parents’ home or Jeff’s parents’ for a quick visit.
One year, we arrived as the first splashes of color marked the trees. My brother grilled dinner while I talked to my father. Jeff chased our niece and nephew around the yard. Dad seemed fine, firmly in the period that follows middle age and precedes the fragility that chills with the hint of death. It was his autumn too.
We talked of this and that. Then he looked at the sun setting in the west and his tone became reflective. He said calmly that he had walked farther than he had yet to walk, and perhaps that was not a bad thing. It is never a bad thing to know you are nearing home.
My father died suddenly nine years later. He walked to the post box to drop off mail, walked home, and fell just inside the front door. My mother, who was an instructor for the Red Cross, tried to resuscitate him until medics came, but his heart did not restart.
I remember him as he was that day in the yard —scents of autumn and outdoor grills in the air, standing with his hand gently over his face, looking at a setting sun and talking of the journey and the journey’s end.
All of our lives will end in a death. What makes life a miracle, a challenge, a wonder we can never fully comprehend, is the journey, the steps and stumbling blocks and wild, wonderful rides that mark the landscape between birth and death.
None of us knows how long our journey will be, how many steps or sunsets or years are left. My father was in his sixties the evening he talked directly with me, for the first time, about his life and death.
At that age, it was more than fair to say he had walked farther than he had yet to go. I am now nearing sixty, and I have almost certainly walked more than halfway Home.
It isn’t the distance that matters, either how far I have come or how far I have yet to go. What matters is that I look back often enough to retain the best of what was, weigh what to let go, and then walk purposefully forward.
There is much I want to do, to write, to say, moments I want to share with my family, my son, my pets, all of the friends who have blessed my life and given it richness.
Regardless of your age, whether you count steps or haven’t yet feltl there is a finite number to count, we know some things. We should live every day fully, as if we have forever and yet as if it is our last.
Do what needs to be done. Love without reservation. Make a difference today. Do not downplay or forget the comfortable, the kind, the quiet because it is not the extraordinary, the amazing, the symphonic.
I loved listening to my father, the scholarly, religious historian who never felt young again after he saw his lieutenant die from a wound larger than a man’s fist after he stepped on a landmine on their first day in Europe in World War II.
For all of the knowledge and insights he shared with me for more than 40 years, though, I remember most the message captured in a quiet conversation while we waited for dinner.
Life is partially as beautiful as it is because we never know how colorful it will be or how long it will last. Make each day count.
Elizabeth Coolidge-Stolz, MD/ (c) HealingWoman