Lessons from Martha

Creative nonfiction
by SuzAnne C. Cole

The day after I learned of the death of my dear friend Martha, I flew back to Houston from Washington, DC, and on the plane read my Zen meditation for the day, a mondo:
       Tozan asked Sozan: "Where are you going?"
       "To an unchanging place," Sozan said.
       "If it's unchanging, how could there be any going?" asked Tozan.
       Sozan said: "Going, too, is unchanging."

Despite some study of Zen, I'm usually befuddled by the mondos. But this one I understood. Going can be unchanging is true in a purely philosophical sense, even for the exit or "going" that we call death. Martha herself will now forever be unchanged, and those parts of me that reflect her wisdom and courage, her good sense and laughter, will also always remain.

With those thoughts in my heart, I was able to speak later at her memorial service, primarily about the Women Writers Wolf Pack, a writing group of five of us, which she founded and named more than fifteen years ago. Over time, the Wolf Pack became so important to all of us that we met once a month for all that time without anyone ever missing a meeting. At the service, I finished my remarks in tears, saying that although Martha had probably been prepared to die, I was not ready to let her go.

A few days later, Martha reached out again from the great unknown where she now exists, to me, heavy on the earth, trapped in the trivial she had gone beyond. I dreamed I was in a dental office where I had just reluctantly paid for a younger woman to have a tooth pulled. I turned and there was Martha, wearing the simple blue dress I remembered she wore to her former husband's funeral a few years ago. She looked young and healthy, not as I last saw her in the ICU before my Washington trip, oxygen pouring into her body to help her remaining lung cope with pneumonia. In the dream, I rushed to her, hugged her, and said joyfully, "Oh Martha, you're back, you're back."

"No," she said, kind but firm. "I'm not back. I'm just here to reassure you. I want you to know I'm fine. I have everything I need. Nothing more and nothing less. I even have a job. I'm going to work in the city speaker's office."

A multitude of questions swarmed my brain, but somehow I knew I shouldn't ask them, that I would have to be content with the information she had already given me. Given just as she'd been given, no more and no less than exactly what we needed.

As the dream faded, I woke feeling easier in spirit, the heavy weight of Martha's loss lessened just a bit. I thought that when I die, I want to go where Martha is, a place where needs are balanced and met in just proportion, where everyone has exactly what they need, including meaningful work, right work, work that can truthfully be called a vocation. I want to exist in that place where Martha's talents were so quickly realized (or always known?) that she was immediately summoned to work in the office of the "speaker." For who could be better for that position than Martha, the one who always, in our more-than-thirty-year friendship, spoke her truth? And what a model she was for me, for I see myself as the younger woman in that dream, someone for whom speaking the truth was sometimes harder than pulling teeth. And often, it was with grudging reluctance that I paid the price for that truth.

I've never been too certain of whether a literal heaven exists or not. I quit believing in the physical resurrection of the body about the same time I accepted that cremation was the only acceptable means of burial. And yet, since nowhere in nature does creation waste anything, and God knows, we work so hard to learn so little in one lifetime, it seems that something beyond the physical body must survive our last breath, whether our soul or our accumulated knowledge, or, as it seems in Martha's case, our talents.

On almost the last day of that year, I dreamed again of Martha. I was in a basement room where she had written her goals for the new year in pale turquoise paint on a wall. But now the goals had been mostly covered with a warm, dark, reddish-brown paint. The only goal that remained clearly visible was "to go on beyond." How quickly, this dream seemed to say, our to-do lists can be erased—and perhaps should be. Changed simply to "the future." A new year, a new beginning, a new way of being, for Martha and for me.

Copyright 2007 by SuzAnne C. Cole