Death

happens only to other people . . .

Photo: © David Whyte

How we live shapes how we die, with reluctance or with courage and almost always with a good measure of both, but dying well involves undoing the way we did not fully live.

DEATH

happens only to other people, death will never find me. Death happens only to other people while I am alive; and strangely, death, when it comes, happens only to another person even when I am in the midst of dying myself. 

All around us on the planet, every day, and in ways we cannot bring ourselves to think about, hundreds of thousands of people pass away, saying goodbye to their lives and to their loved ones. We walk in witness with death the longer we live, and we walk alone but often secretly speaking with those with whom we have walked and talked during their lives. But even as we mourn or celebrate those we knew and loved, we, unaccountably, live on - our hearts beating faithfully, looking on death as we do unconsciously on other people -  as a strange form of miracle that can never be fully understood. Death is something that only happens to other people and that somehow and unaccountably, takes them from our daylight hours.