Upon referencing my favorite author, Eckhart Tolle, to a good friend, I came across something he said about death. He says,
"Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to 'die before you die' -- and to find that there is no death."
This is especially meaningful to me as I watch someone so close to me 'die' of cancer and is near the end of her form.
We've all seen images of dead people or people in pain but to literally watch someone die little by little for two years is, I've realized, only an illusion.
Because how they choose to deal with their mortality is very different from how I watch them 'die'.
This is precisely because you can not lose what you are - only what you have.
Only you know what you are - that is, only your consciousness knows.
What I see in another is my perception, a phantom of what truly IS.
I am not losing her or what she means to me. I am losing the form of her, not her formless energy that is her 'life,' the energy that I have come to love because it is also within me.
"To love is to recognize your self in another."
~E. Tolle~
All forms fade with time, some more prematurely than others. And when these forms are placed in the earth, the marker which marks their form eventually also fades with time.
She will never fade away in me as long as I am.
We. Are.
Peacefully. Together.
