The gift of remembrance: priceless

From time to time, The Seattle Times hosts guest columnists writing about Faith & Values. Today, we bring you Eileen Kiera, Dharma teacher.

When my friend Trev was diagnosed with breast cancer and entered into the treatment most likely to save her life, she became identified as a cancer patient. She grew wan from the radiation and lost her hair to chemo. People treated her kindly and compassionately when they met her.

And, at least initially, she succumbed to this new identity.

But two years later, when the cancer was found in her liver, she paused before treatment to recollect herself, and she literally remembered all of who she was, all of what she had experienced, all of what she loved and all the people who mattered in her life. She remembered it all as part of her and began living from a fullness of life that few of us experience — an experience of life that is always available to each of us in each moment.

She dropped fixed ideas about herself, her situation, her life and even her death, and began to live each moment anew.

Each morning's sunrise warmed her as if it was her first sunrise. Each golden big-leaf maple in autumn astounded her as if it were the first autumn maple. Each friend's smile she enjoyed as the first meeting. Or perhaps as the last. She said it was the gift of remembrance, a remembering from the fullness of who she was that left nothing out — that included the pleasant along with the unpleasant.

In this remembering she found her life.

She touched the joy of the red-winged blackbird arriving at her bird feeder in the dark days of January. She felt enlivened by the chill winds off Puget Sound.

She gave the gift of remembering to us as well.

She gave us the miracle of the first purple crocus in spring, and the thrill of the ascending trill of the Swainson's thrush. She gave us the remembrance of cherishing the people we love, right now, even in the midst of the clatter of dishes being washed.

With no fixed ideas of what was right and wrong, she showed us that a smile to a surly cashier brightened everyone's day. Why hold on to resentment and judgment, she'd ask. Who does this help, anyway?

She gave us the gift of remembering the preciousness of each moment and the knowledge that we choose how to greet each one.

And through this remembering, Trev saw that each time she dropped preconceived ideas to greet the unfolding moment with the fullness of life, a connection was formed. Perhaps the connection was always there, and she just began to notice it. When she opened herself to the first rose in June it bloomed in her heart, and when she smiled at the doctor, they both felt courage.

Trev died this past July. She smiled with death, something rare, a hospice nurse told me.

And now every time I remember to let the breeze kiss my cheek, or to smile with love at my spouse, I remember Trev, and she is, in a very real sense, there in that moment with me. Perhaps I should say here in this moment with me. Her joy is my joy when the spring-planted seed blossomed in August, and my smile is her smile when I offer it to you.

Though she is not far from me, I miss her still.