Active Waiting

It’s been awhile. Quite awhile. Kinda. Our family had a three year spate of grief – one after another left us, most suddenly. It was hard. Still is some days.

They are two different kinds of blows and I’m not sure which one is worse: to lose someone suddenly or to watch them slip away before your eyes. Oddly enough, each has its own gifts. Either way I wasn’t ready.

Today as I reached out to a sister-friend who is faced with her beloved father’s very real mortality, I reflected on the gift of active waiting. It doesn’t seem like much of a gift when you are in the middle of it – pretty hard to appreciate.

Active waiting requires you to do just that.  When you get the news that there are only a few days or a few hours and so you must come now, you are also required to stop everything else. Everything. And because the doctors and the therapists and the specialists have done everything that can be done, there is nothing to be busy about.

And so you wait. But it is a different kind of waiting because you want to soak up every minute you can and you have absolutely no idea how many of those minutes are left. Everyone arrives. Everyone stays. No one says you must leave now because rest is needed. The room is full.

When they say that someone passed away surrounded by their loved ones, it misses the mark of just what that means. It is a nice benign little phrase until you live it. Being part of the surrounding. Being one of the loved ones.

I remember laughing and crying and talking and remembering. And no one cared if you faded out of one conversation and slipped into another one because there was a lot of fading and slipping going on all over that room.

Everyone is present. That is the gift of active waiting. Presence. Focused presence. There is a richness in the weaving and the intersections.

So my friend, treasure this difficult gift. Savor and participate but don’t miss out.