Our habit of looking backward is only matched by our desire to grow, keep growing forever, perhaps; or to look forward at the vast horizon and never see it rush toward us, not feel the edge and the bright light or the pure darkness beyond. Amazing how an event from childhood can reach into the heart and into the cells of the body, certainly into the convolutions of the mind and the echoing halls of memory, steering the feet and the desires toward or away from today's choices. Amazing how our efforts can disregard time, as though today's choices were all that existed and all that mattered: as though time itself, a current that began at some unremembered flash (if it began at all) and runs on to an out-of-reach terminus (if terminus there is), would carry these bodies and their endeavors on without faltering, and would never let us… fall.

But the fabric of life — you know the metaphor, the threads interwoven, the patterns and folds, texture rough and smooth, it is still a single two-dimensioned sheet, above it an overarching sky, beneath it a solid and receiving earth. All things fall, in the nature of things, and all spirits, liberated, rise. So how is it our habit of looking backward, and our habit of disguising the approaching horizon, disallow tears?

There should be as many tears as smiles, as many cries as kisses, sooner or later. It's all right: it's the fabric of a life. Two weeks ago, a woman who had spent many weekends with me in community, together with a small group of outdoor enthusiasts on trails in the White Mountains, or together as we create vision and practice for an ecovillage community, a woman who sought the company of others while living a solitude in her home, chose to take her life. I had not seen her for many months. Those who knew her better tell me she suffered from depression, and had lately severed ties with the past, changing jobs and buying her own house. The habit of looking backward serves us poorly when we step into something we do not know.

She drove to a cabin in the woods, left her car and her things neatly arranged, walked until she found a comfortable resting place, and slept. I don't know the method she used for her departure; life in amazingly tenacious, though, almost unstoppable at its beginning and its end, so I imagine something powerful was taken into the body, an agent or angel of death. I imagine the passage was fairly short. I believe the passage was incredibly difficult, since the body was not prepared to go, not worn thin and full of histories and accumulated weights. It was a solitary passage, as perhaps all deaths are in the end, but it was a solitude that was unaccompanied.

The cabin's owner and others in the area who knew her found her car, but no note. They wondered why she visited without calling. They began to search for information, and little by little words from friends and acquaintances began to assemble a picture that frightened them. They looked into the picture and saw perhaps their own mortality, their own faces, and began to search for their friend in earnest. They walked many of the trails in the area, called in emergency teams to help. Two days later area officers found her body.

*

Yesterday a good friend left his home here in town, and flew to Florida for an indefinite but limited amount of time, to be with his mother as she waits in her body for death. She has battled cancer, and the latest return of the disease has spread throughout her body, so that even the poisons taken to slow its progress have merely sickened and weakened her further. I have not met his mother, but this is a close friend, and what touches him, touches me.

A death is a tear in the fabric of life: the shell breaks down, what contains us and carries us through our pleasures and our pains no longer has the strength to travel, and it falls through the fabric, making a hole. The perfect universe works its constant magic, and while matter falls, energy is released, to return to the Source which probably is not at some far end of the firmament, but all around us. The fabric rips, or these few threads that held a body within the horizon of our limited outer sight unravel; the hole is not large. It is the size of a single body. But every living thing nearby feels it and, depending upon how often they have allowed tears and how intimate they have become with their own fears, either work frantically or calmly and gently to repair it. The cloth will always be repaired, and must be, because we travel along its surface day by day, offering our labor for a wage, purchasing small distractions with our salaries, embracing our friends young and aged, being channels for the creation of new life… the mind wants the fabric to be mended, and wants the passage of a day to be opaque, neither admitting the endless darkness of the earth nor the limitless brilliance of the sky.

With their hands, those who witness a passage make their own repairs, imperfect and human, immediate and anguished. Those of us who stand by them, who receive upon their return home, or who speak with them as they do their good work, we also feel the damage in the fabric. If you have caught your tears in your hands then you know that this water is water of the body; if you admit to losses you know that every loss is yours as well, is your passage as well, and every tear is a drop of recognition. Recognizing the onrushing horizon, we speak gently to those doing the good work, we who are standing on firmer cloth wrap our fingers in their shirts and the hems of their dresses, holding them with our good strength as they bend over that hole: you may return, you should return, your friends are waiting for you.

For those that have practiced longer, and have met mortality in extreme circumstances as well as in their daily rounds, there is perhaps a greater responsibility. My friend heads south where the fabric is failing. Around his mother stand a circle of helpless — and in this moment — hopeless humans, members of the immediate family and friends. Because he is less afraid of his own departure, his heart is strong, and he can help the passage be smooth. Instead of clawing at the spirit of his passing mother, he can help to separate the spirit from the decaying body, allow the decaying body to rest and the returning spirit to rise. He can — and because he is able to, really he must — help soften the destruction caused by the fantasy of cloth, gently begin tying up loose strands here and there to bridge the opening, let his siblings and their families find grief and also find solid footing.

"As much as this life has been struggle, I wish never to leave it…" "It hurts, it hurts…" "I remember climbing to the second limbs of the cherry tree, to pick the brightest cherries…" "Hold me closer, closer…" A kiss. A slap. Strange dreams. A spark of sunrise through the trees.

*

In 1974 we lived in an apartment complex for one year. My father returned to school on sabbatical, and we waded through our belongings, two adults and four children in a space meant for half as many — or so it felt. Early in the year, my great uncle Olaf Berg had realized a lifelong dream, visiting his parents' homeland in Norway. Two months later he complained of malaise and visited his doctor. Six months later he was dead.

There is a clinical eye that we develop, in this world of instant media, a world that destroys our humanity by deadening our senses and drying our tears. We can watch hideous scripts enacted on television, wince and squirm, get comfortable again, and in our powerlessness over corruptions at home and abroad, never face full-on what mortality means. In waves of history, it's happening again. As the world works to correct itself and to balance what is unbalanced, the callous and the jaded will continue to heap on atrocities — don't pretend the war in Iraq is anything else — until another great bloodletting takes place to help us feel our way back to reality. The clinical eye. Perhaps it is a cultural constant, while individuals grow up and out of it, as events of their lives force them to see and feel what they preferred to keep in visual and emotional darkness.

Thirty-three years ago I still watched Walt Disney on Sundays, often with a bowl of oatmeal and raisins as a TV-side dinner, with milk stirred in and brown sugar sprinkled on top. America was in Viet Nam, but I wasn't. I had spent summers with the Bergs in their small town in North Dakota, where Olaf taught me to drive a truck, buy at auction, manage money, and make daily stops for "coffee", which for me consisted of a doughnut and either an orange or grape crush. Olaf smoked his whole life, and sprayed pesticides and herbicides on his grain fields several times a year, back in the day when results outweighed risks. He travelled to Norway and saw the land of his parents, and felt ill while on the return voyage. The cancer of the kidney was quick by some standards. Still, when you are watching someone die, time moves with a different grace.

I remember seeing Olaf once near the end. He and Hazel had driven down from Souris to one of the main hospitals in Minneapolis for a last chance consultation; but there were no more chances. He had lost most of his weight and was no longer eating. He stayed at his sister-in-laws house, on 51st near Lake Nokomis, my mother's childhood home. A small cot or couch had been made up in the living room and he was sitting on the edge of it when we arrived. I don't remember much of what was said, and perhaps there was nothing. When the fabric rips, the facile and superficial topics of conversation that fill our days are no longer adequate; and no one will talk about the one topic which is left.

Olaf's body was shrunken and inward. But more than that, his spirit had already begun to depart as well. Or maybe it was his mind that could not live past the edge of the horizon, so retreated, backing away, backing away, until it occupied a corner of his self, and he longer could reach the windows of his eyes, or the door of his mouth, to make contact with you. As an early teen, I found nothing to say, and for many years regretted that. But then, there probably was nothing to be said. Death is a teacher, did not ask any questions, simply spoke through Olaf's eyes.

Two months later I was standing in the kitchen of that little apartment — I remember my mother had made some of her delicious granola (this was the early seventies) and I had taken a small bowl of it to the table. There was that avenue of linoleum the led from the door past the little bay which was the cooking area, and beside it a beach of carpeting that spread out over the living area to the windows. My mother — did she touch my arm? did she hold me? I can't remember — told me softly that Olaf had passed away. Olaf like a second father. Olaf whose soft laughter let me know when I had found my first girlfriend. Who gave me his green ocean of winter wheat. Who gave me a watch with no hands in it.

I cried for a few seconds. That's all I had available to cry, back then, too young to have practiced real tears. I have more to offer these days, and maybe my world is a little bit softer for that. Maybe I am more skilled at fixing holes in the fabric. But like most repairs, like scars, you can fix it "good as new", but you know, and everyone else knows, that if you look you can still see there's a patch.