A Beautiful Woman Died Last Week.

A beautiful woman died last week.

This doesn't come as news to most.  Indeed, a beautiful woman dies every day somewhere - and to be honest, countless dozens leave us daily.  Some are old and have lived a long, plentiful life, others leave far too soon.  In the last two years, many beautiful women have left far sooner than they should have.  We remember their names:  Mischa, Myra, Mandy, Freda, Patricia.  Photographs, stories left behind of happier days bring their faces back, recalling fragments of shared conversations, walks and visits, dinners - times that seemed commonplace, but were truly magical in that moment.

My wife to this day will want to grab the phone and call Freda, just to tell her of some milestone in our kids lives, some funny event, or a wrong or hurt that happened.  She might even get to the phone before catching herself, realizing that it's been two years since cancer stole her best friend away from this world.  Every best friend that falls, every confidant that is eroded away by disease, every prayerful rock that is pulled up by domestic violence, they leave behind shadows, voids, wounds.

You can't blame them, it really wasn't their choice most of the time.  For those who get a diagnosis that says "you have days/weeks/months to live", that news usually helps them to really live for the first time, to find out what they're truly made of.  Once treatment begins, that diagnosis often changes from weeks or months to actually being months or years.  Some say it's because of advances in medicine, and there's truth to that, but I suspect it's more that the disease is slowed down by an infusion of life, of people finally living for what they want to do, instead of going thru the motions, mired down in the routine of life.  The fog of life is lifted and people finally see what is the most important to them.  Not the car, not the cleanliness of the house, or the job that we sell our lives to like prostitutes.  They discover the important things like time, relationships, sharing, and their legacy.  In fact, those with terminal illnesses in a twisted way are the lucky ones - they have the time to adjust, to change, to resolve differences, to say the things that were always left unsaid, to find that new path and pack as much into it as they can, for they know that their end is nigh.  Even if they beat the odds and recover from that which threatened their mortality, that mark and legacy changes them, for they know that time is a fleeting thing, and there's so much living to do in such a short time.

A beautiful woman died last week.

Her family had just moved to a new city because of her husband's job.  They had been in the city for two weeks, not all the moving boxes had been unpacked, the boys were getting ready to go back to school in a new environment, the house in the old city hadn't sold yet, there were tens of dozens of chores to do, errands to run.  Her husband was home that day, ironically his job was that or ER Doc, and he is trained to handle most any physical trauma.
But a blood clot dislodging itself in her system changed everything.  She had time to call her boys in to her, and comfort them - telling them of her love for them and her joy of being their mother, all while her husband was dialing 911.  Not days, not weeks, but barely hours later she was gone.  She still got time to honor her family with last words of love and hope, although too too briefly.  She didn't spend that time giving out to-do lists, not in any traditional sense anyway, and her concerns wasn't that the house wasn't as presentable as she would like it.

What of those beautiful ladies who do not get that time to share, to give last words of comfort, of absolution before leaving?  Accidents happen were a life is changed, gone, in mere seconds.  Drunk, sleepy, medicated drivers, angry people who can't take out their frustrations on those who caused it, but instead turn their rage against bystanders.  Natural disasters of wind, fire, water that change entire landscapes in moments -- and there's no time to react before those stories are ended.  Their shadows are of a different intensity, the edges of the void left by their passing are much sharper, more jagged.  The questions that surround those are not so rhetorical, but their focus is more concrete, so much that people left behind can only speak to the spirit, the memory of she that was.  Their closure is harsher - the slamming of a door instead of the dimming of a light.  But the blame left behind is more tangible - wither at the person who caused the accident, produced the violence, or even drove her to take her own life to get away from her existence.

Many, many beautiful women died last week.

Life is a terminal condition - we can only reasonably predict the beginning.  The middle is a mystery, a melange or experiences that shape us daily.  Who we are is we are right now -- and that's different that who we were a year ago, or who we'll be a year from now.  The end of our life, which we want to be a mystery so many years in the making, isn't guaranteed a fixed time or place - only that it will happen.  We feel some sense of sadness for those that are given a glimpse as to when that time and place will be.  In our humanity, we hopefully grieve, whether greatly or quietly, when we hear of lives being ended, whether they were central to our lives, or a news story, whether it happened domestically or abroad.  Religious purges, ethnic cleansing, territorial exterminations - whether we call it justified or unjustified, build support or show outrage because of it, fire, flood, earthquake, war, famine, pestilence, disease, terrorism, accidents, oppression -- all of these words and actions are given so that we can wrap our heads around a universal truth:

A beautiful human being died, their story has ended, and our lives can never be the same because of it.