Embedded in Time
By Angie Muresan
I have worked within the geriatric field for over fifteen years. My awakening moment came a few years ago as I watched a dear friend die after a long battle with cancer. I question the choices I make in my daily life, because I want to live with honor and integrity, both as a child of the living God, and as a woman. Following is the piece I had written on my blog last month, as once more, I agonized over a very ill friend.
When older people get together there is something unflappable about them; you can see they’ve tasted all the heavy, bitter, spicy food of life, extracted it’s poisons, and will now spend 10 or 15 years in a state of perfect equilibrium and enviable morality. Irene Nemirovsky, Fire in the Blood
I have a few friends who are well into their eighties; women who have lived their lives thoroughly and enjoyed the amassed daily moments to their fullest extent. I love these women for what they are. There is wisdom in their advice, a sense of humor in their actions. They’ve come to terms with the destruction life has in store. Physical health and beauty deteriorating, husbands and friends lost to death or alzheimers, children and dear ones far away, their bodies betraying them daily. But their kindness, their compassion, their love survived every treachery and evolved into a beauty transcending the physical.
I know they have fears. Whenever I see them upset at their lack of control over their bodies, they fear for their dignity. For their self-respect and the respect, or lack of, others have for them. I like to remind them that their self-esteem need not suffer because their bodies fail. They are more than that. More than fragile bones and decrepit muscles. They are the light in the eyes, the smile on the lips, the love they exude.
Some have come to terms with death encroaching, others have not. But, I don’t believe it is death they fear, or maybe not as much; what they fear is their disappearance; the disappearance of their voices, their laughter, their memory. The fear of becoming a dusty one-dimensional photo. The cessation of their story.
And then the fear of eternity. Who is immune to that? All around, so vast and unfathomable. Like grains of sand or stars in the night sky. And all that had been left undone and unsaid. All the mundane and not so mundane choices made daily that may or may not have purified the soul. Or whether their faith will pay off and they will be in the presence of God and their loved departed ones, or rotting away, first their flesh and then their bones.
And yes, for some the fear of death as well. Of what happens at that moment when this earthly life ends and the other begins. That transition from the mortal to the immortal. The termination of one and the beginning of another. How will it be? What will they feel? Where will their soul go and how will it get there?
Yet, despite all these thoughts in their minds and in mine, I marvel at their depth, at the lives they’ve created, at their multi-dimensional facets, the little glimpses into the girls they were and the women they’ve become. So graceful, caring, resilient. And I look forward to my old age, not in despair but in hope; the hope that I’ll become like one of them, enduring and persevering.
Angie Muresan was born and raised in Romania during the communism dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, where even her thoughts had to be censored for fear of blurting the wrong thing out. Now, she lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, her two children, a house full of books and no television.
