Goodbye Maria.
It was an odd sound,
somewhere between moan and deep pain.
I looked up,
Celia’s face was crumpled,
staring numbly at the computer screen,
tears rivering down her face.
She’d received an email, that last Thursday, Maria,
her bestest friend had passed away. Silently in her sleep.
She was 40.
_______________________________________
Celia & Maria were inseparables in college.
The wild ones. The kind that danced against all rules.
What we remember most about her was her wide smile.
So big it could swallow up a sun.
40 is way young to go.
And yet in the 40 odd years she lived many lifetimes.
Some with a searing intensity, some with inner depth.
Like a meteor, she blazed bright & brilliant.
Like many who charge fierce through life, arms open wide,
she got an unfair share of magic.
And muck.
Some muck you can wash off.
Some muck sticks deep.
Maria closed shop.
Put away her smiles.
Buried herself in a nowhere job.
9-5. Then she’d go into her room.
And wouldn’t come out.
Wouldn’t take calls.
She took a golden handshake.
And sat at home.
If she went out it was to church.
Church helped.
She made the motions of life.
The bright bold Maria, Celia knew in college, disappeared.
Only in rare moments did the Sunflower girl peek out.
In her 40 odd years she packed raging life,
and also deep shame, terrible festering hurt and extreme peace.
I’d like to tell you that things turned around.
That rainbows burst in her sky again.
Did the blue win?
We think that just maybe she needed to touch both sides,
the blazing yellows, and the Mother Mary blues.
A sun went out.
After a long twilight it went beneath the ocean.
I'd like to think that her light was needed in another place,
like God felt maybe he needed a light, a smile to cheer him up,
what with the world being so depressing and all.
But maybe the answer is simpler.
She’d lived with such fierceness. Been hurt so deep.
She could take only so much.
___________________________________________
We are healers.
And the last thing we could gift her,
has been to help free her from the dark claws that encircled her.
I cannot say it was easy,
that the darkness wasn't real,
that the jaws that held were not iron black.
We escorted her spirit -- she looked like a brilliant white bird,
as she encountered the light.
Yeah she looked like a brilliant white bird.
________________________________________
Most of you reading this have lost someone, you hold dear.
A best friend, a father, a mother, a sister, brother…
or worse a child.
Now unlike a Van Gogh Maria has not left paintings behind.
Or like the singer she once wanted to be,
there’s no Janice Joplin songs, trailing through the air
to celebrate her free spirit.
No.
But what she left behind however was something deeper
than Janice’s songs or Van Gogh’s sunflowers.
It’s a memory of sunshine in human form.
And here’s an excerpt of what Celia sent Maria’s family:
"Maria is no longer with us,
but her smile is.
I promise to smile a great Maria smile more often,
to live more as Maria I loved did, arms wide open.
"I suggest you do so too. "
Go ahead smile a Maria smile.
Go ahead smile the smiles they couldn’t,
dance the dances they can’t.
Live for two.
Love & Light,
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