life well-lived

i read such a beautiful book last week, "confessions of a funeral director:  how the business of death saved my life" by caleb wilde. 

it may sound morbid at first, i know, but far from it...the book is all about living.  it's funny and insightful, confirming my thoughts as to how much more comfortable other cultures around the world seem to be with loss.  i also learned how i might press in to be more present with people in my culture; less afraid of our own mortality. 

his writing even impressed on me to want to talk more about people that we've shared time on the planet with who have gone on before us.  and of all the trillions + possibilities of connections in history, we get to be alive with the people we know right now,  i find this a phenomenal gift.

taking notes on his chapters, here are ten key points i'd like to absorb into my life (we can also include sickness/loss in place of or in addition to 'death'):

1) enlarge your narrative of death to allow it to show you goodness, a story where beauty is found

2) let death break you open (instead of apart)

3) allow it to help you pause, reflect, meditate and take inventory of your own life

4) instead of focusing solely on the afterlife as you understand it, allow death to show you what is good about your life in the here and now and appreciate it more deeply in tandem with heavenly thoughts without using them as an escape hatch

5) the voice of death is silence; embrace silence instead of needlessly filling it

6) we are inherently mortal; let death invite you to be more patient with others and yourself as we all learn, grow, and overcome

7)  lean into the community that can create heaven on earth in times of shared loss and appreciate these relationships

8) let death teach you to love those you may dislike

9)  let loss lead you to active remembering and keeping people that you loved in your life and memory, tell stories about them and emulate what you most admired and respected about them

10)  embracing death is a key ingredient to embracing a life well-lived

finally, caleb wrote about the jewish phrase, tikkun olam, "the healing of the world".  it is a collective task involving everyone who ever has, is, or will be alive.  it focuses on being here now and says, "i'm here with you and i love you." 

if there is one thing he has learned in his years as a third generation funeral director, it is "presence and proximity before performance."  you don't have to do huge things to change the world.  how well we listen, comfort, and invest right now with the people we've been given is how the world is healed, one person at a time.