David's Passing

So many of you have asked about how my friend is, the one mentioned in the blog entry Stepping Into Life. David passed September 9, 2010 and has had several memorials and tributes written for him. I thought I would share mine, published in Homeopathy Today, the newsletter of the National Center for Homeopathy and in the Simillimum, the journal of the Homeopathic Academy of naturopathic Physicians.

Many will write of David’s software contribution, revolutionizing the face of homeopathy so significantly. Others will speak of David’s openness to myriad methods and authors and how this fair-minded and unbiased trait helped to build collaboration in the homeopathic community. And someone else will write of his great love of poetry, rafting and kayaking.

But what I want to pay tribute to is the beautiful way he died. I believe we die as we live and I was deeply touched by the gift of David’s transparency particularly during his first weeks of illness. He would write daily, describing how it felt to be watching death approach. Having been told he may have two weeks to live he felt enlivened by the preciousness of life, and curious about his journey towards death.

David wrote, “I can feel that I am different. …There's space for something new… I just am… filled with light and transparence. This whole process is very strange. Loss of many simple things and a glimpse of vastness. It seems so full of deep tragedy. And magnificence. … I have this time, every day, to see it, [to] keep the door open… appreciate… revel… [and] collapse in it.”

Facing death can uproot all our previous ideas that were safely sheltered by an imagined long life. David continued to examine who he was, finding wonder in life, and marveling at the unknown, as he did through all the years I knew him: “Then I say, seemingly out of the blue, "Am I dying?" and start sobbing - too much mucus, saliva, tongue, incoordination to breathe… am I going to die? … the story to look at now is this one - more than my easier resistance to letting love come close.” I love this admission by him. David wondered many times if he had loved well, if what he had done in this life was valued, which baffled many of us—how surprising, yet poignantly human, that he was uncertain of his gifts we admired and loved so deeply.

One of his last emails posed a question that I now keep close to my own heart:

I am alive and not alive, awake and not awake.

Bright, sudden sparking and dull, gray, isolated, constructed, homogenous, controlled.

Ah, I haven't come alive yet.

Ah

And it is clear these - how many days? - are the end days.

Can I risk coming alive, really alive?