Peace My Heart

Laura Basha

Peace, my heart, let the time for the parting be sweet.

Let it not be a death but completeness.

Let love melt into memory and pain into songs.

Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of the wings over the nest.

Let the last touch of your hands be gentle like the flower of the night.

Stand still, O Beautiful End, for a moment,

and say your last words in silence.

I bow to you and hold up my lamp to light your way.

~  by Rabindranath Tagore

This morning we said goodbye to an old and dear friend.

I met Jim when I was 27 years old. His wife Joan became my dearest friend, a friendship that has now lasted decades. We studied together, worshipped together, traveled together, our husbands were friends and our children have now grown up to raise their own families.

There is something so sacred in the grieving process of loss. When my children’s father who was also Jim’s friend died, the impact felt like devastation, as it was sudden and unexpected.

I remember going for a walk during that first week between hearing the news and setting up the memorial, and I stopped on the path and looked up at the sky, listening, and it was if the world would never be the same, as his precious soul had left this physical plane. A thread in the tapestry of life had been pulled out all the way, and the tapestry was now forever changed.

Listening from a deeper inquiry of how to make sense of the larger order of things, a quiet thunder of love resonates with no interruption, cracking open the constraints of loss and grief and the past. Timeless, it unfolds like the deep guttural chantings with overtone singing of the Lamas from the famous Gaden Shartse Monastery.

Blessings to you in your journey onward, Jim. We shall meet now in the in-between, where we shall soon laugh at the thought that we were ever apart.