Eight years ago, my mother died from ovarian cancer. It was one of the greatest blessings of my life to be able to spend the last few weeks of her life caring for her as tenderly as she had cared for me in my earliest, most vulnerable time on earth.

Those last days I spent with her, as we drew nearer and nearer to her last breath, resembled two prior experiences in my life—waiting for a baby to be born, spliced together with caring for a new infant. It must have felt the same way to my mother. One afternoon she gestured across the room. “Something important is written on that paper on the wall! Give it to me!” “This?” I asked. “The wall calendar?” I handed to her and watched while she scoured the tiny numbered boxes. “It’s not on here!” she said. “Why isn’t my due date on here?”

Time as we normally understood it was a meaningless concept. Moments stretched into eons; days blurred into one another. There was no predicting or controlling how long the vigil would last. Only one thing was clear, stated by each hospice staff member who visited: People die when they are ready to die. There are no formulas to determine when death will happen. There was a palpable sense that we were waiting for an extraordinary moment, waiting for a gateway to open between the visible world of earthly living and the infinite world of stars and canyons, the mystery from which we are born and to which we return.

On one of my mother’s last days on earth, as her mind had already begun to diffuse, she spent several hours gazing at a photograph of herself, cheek to cheek with my daughter. The photograph was taken right after we had learned that the cancer was back with a vengeance, and she informed us that she was not going to do any more chemotherapy but was simply going to enjoy her final days. In the photo her eyes reflect that clarity and decisiveness. The face of my daughter, then five, was filled with her own decisive personality—a fierce connection to her grandmother and her own life force shone through her as well. As my mother studied this picture, she looked back and forth from one face to the other, murmuring over and over, “Coming and going. Coming and going.” After a while, she asked herself, “Who’s coming and who’s going?”

We are all coming and going, all the time. Life is a rhythm of transitions held by these two major journeys into infinity, birth and death. If you are like me, though, you miss a great deal of your life telling yourself that real life will begin after a major transition looming ahead—after you graduate from school, find a new job, get rid of a horrible roommate, meet with your parole officer, get married, get divorced—right after that, then life will begin!
That’s how we miss our lives, miss what we are given each morning as a gift, fail to notice the small moments of grace in our coming and going every day. Rumi, a Sufi poet, wrote:

The life gift is given
And then taken away.
It is not for us to know why, or how.
Grace comes with the creation word, Be.
That gate opens without hesitating.
Between the push of Buh
And the smooth launch of ee,
There is an infinite moment
When everything happens.
Grace comes with the creation word, Be.
That gate opens without  hesitating.

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Rev. Meg Riley

Senior Minister at Church of the Larger Fellowship

Meg has been a Unitarian Universalist minister for more than twenty years. As a UU kid in West Virginia, she quickly learned to enjoy being "different," which has served her well in a "different" life. Meg lives in Minneapolis, where she enjoys walking by lakes, gardening, reading and writing. She also lives online, where she enjoys hanging out, keeping up with people, and playing the occasional game of Scrabble. She is the parent of a teenager, and the companion of a number of four legged friends.

Latest posts by Rev. Meg Riley (see all)

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