Where the Spirit Is

Photo by nine koepfer on Unsplash

Ten years ago, the twenty-two-year-old son of a dear friend of mine died.  He was a junior at U.C. Davis and had just attended dance lessons the night before he died.  Alex also was intelligent, kind, and thoughtful, and full of an essence that made his face glow.

Six years ago, I went to a memorial for the twenty-five-year-old son some other dear friends of mine.  Max died while he was teaching English in Cambodia.  He was a spiritual, thoughtful, charitable, and intelligent young man.  On his last day, he had helped some friends rebuild their house after a storm.

What sense can be found in these losses?  How can such young people die before they have lived long enough to have children of their own?  How can parents endure the loss of a child?  It seems impossible to figure out the meaning of life when some lives end so early and abruptly.

At church one day, the priest told the congregation that the Hebrew word for spirit “ruach” also means “breath.”  When I heard this, I first thought that it meant that the spirit was alive as long as a person was breathing.  When the breath stopped, the spirit ceased.

But I kept thinking about this.  I know people that have died.  My dad died nine years ago and he is still alive in my life.  I breath thoughts about him or like him or with him at least once a week.  My friend Leona died even longer ago, and I still laugh every time I get lost because she and I got lost all the time.  We never worried because it was so much fun and we were too busy laughing.

My friend Henry died ten years ago.  Henry had lung cancer but he had also a heart attack while walking down the street.  When they put him on life support in the hospital, he registered as brain dead, and eventually died from organ failure.  As I sat next to him in the hospital for three weeks, I slowly realized that it was his time to go and nothing was going to stop him.

Now Henry lives for me in the pearly gold sunshine that bathes the granite face of Half Dome in Yosemite.  On spring afternoons, he walks with me up the mountain path behind my house where the wild flowers meet the even blue sky.  He fills my eyes with memories as I plant new flowers in my back yard.

My mother died last month. I remember her reading to me when I was a tiny, little girl. We sat on the edge of my bed, and her voice brought words to my life for the first time. She bought me pastries when I took the bus with her to the market on Saturdays. I still feel the greasy warmth of these pastries in my hands, and I think of those moments whenever I eat pastries today. During the last year before she died, she called me at least once a week to tell me she loved both me and my husband, Bob. I wondered, at the time, if she had experienced a spiritual enlightenment that instructed her to end her legacy of motherhood with the three most important words a mother could ever say to a child. In fact, the last three words she said to me were “I love you.”

These days, my mother doesn’t appear to me like a bird or a butterfly. I just feel the brush of her arm alongside mine as I go about my daily tasks and find out how to live a life without her pillar in the background. I turn to my phone to call her, and, then, I remember that her new phone number is “unlisted.”

So, what about these young people?  Will they live on like my dad, mom, Leona, and Henry, but come back in a different form?  Has their spirit been transformed from “breath” into something else?

I think these souls have something new to do.  I suspect that they were more evolved than I am and they had already achieved all they needed on this level of existence.  And if this is true, then I am happy that they got promoted.  Nothing is worse than being stuck in a dead-end job where you can already perform every task both forwards and backwards, and you’re yearning for a new experience.

Maybe the meaning of life is that life does have meaning.  Maybe it’s not important that we know where the spirit goes after life, but that we think about where the spirit is while we’re here, while we can sense the “ruach” through every breath.

Surely, the breath is tangible evidence and a good enough reminder that our spirit is alive and well.  I’m grateful for this because I often get caught up in less important details that don’t matter to anyone or anything, except to me for a brief, particular moment.  I need a reminder, like the habitual ticking of a clock or the consistent in and out of my breath to keep me balanced and focused.

But the souls that have stopped breathing don’t need the practice of yoga or any other rituals.  They don’t need the same constant reminders to stay focused on the essential essence of their purpose.  Now, I bet they’re working with a higher form of contemplation.

They make me a little jealous, and a lot inspired.

What should I do? Just what I now am doing. Focus on my “ruach” and make sure that my life has meaning. I’m not alone, after all. I have all of my beloved spirits brushing my arm.