Open closed open. Before
we are born, everything is open
in the universe
without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed
within us. And when we
die, everything is open again.
Open closed open. That’s
all we are.
—Yehuda
Amichai
I love this piece of poetry and I think about it all the
time—the way before our existence we are part of the limitless pulse of energy,
and how we are returned to it after the short parenthesis that is our
individual bounded life. In this vision, death is like a new breath, a
universal exhale, a release back into the all.
Lenore Lefer taught me how to die. Which is to say, she
taught me and twelve other young women with cancer how to live while dying—which is what we’re all doing, by the way, cancer or no. I met her at a weekend
retreat at Commonweal, an extraordinary organization right here in Bolinas,
that runs Cancer Support Retreats, which integrate the best comprehensive
knowledge on healing, from cutting-edge medical research to supportive
nutrition and techniques for stress reduction. The center does advocacy work on
the links to carcinogens in the environment. But when one is there for a
retreat, their work is utterly different: to coax you out of your shell of
grief and shock, to appeal to what you most want your life to be about, and by
helping you envision it, to bring it in to being, for whatever time you have.
