What My Friend’s Death Taught Me About Life

Keeping the heart open can be arduous because it involves being present. It means feeling deep sorrow. But there will also be many delights.

As a conduit for healing, I provide hands-on reiki energy and deep listening as a life coach. Over the years, I’ve been blessed to witness some of life’s most amazingly tender, joyous, and agonizing moments in the lives of friends, beloveds, and strangers who later became close friends.

Often, my clients are right on the cusp of life, tasting everything, still open to possibility, and planning bright futures. Others are facing impending death and are helping their beloveds plan lives without them.

I often think of no matter what stage of life I’m in, how I, too, am part of what the poet Anne Sexton called “that awful rowing toward God.” The concept of death frightens many of us on a primal level. I smile whenever I say, “if something ever happens to me….” When, in fact, the if is genuinely not an if but a when—when I die.

I believe in the desire to live a long time is normal.. What we often find abnormal (although it happens all the time) is when parents outlive their children or when young people die.

Several years ago, I mourned my miscarriage with a grief that shook me with its intensity. Getting up close and personal with death took some getting used to. Finally, to make peace with dying, I had to refrain from comparing life to death, for death is not life.

Yes, I will die, so why not live each day with gratitude, just in case it’s my last?

What helped most, though, was when one of my best friends of over a decade told me she had terminal brain cancer. She was young, in her early fifties, and coincidentally, we shared the same name. Her name was also “Michelle Berry.” I shared portions of the story below in my TEDx talk at Ithaca College.

I felt deep anguish but vowed to see her regularly once she was out of remission. A year later, as we realized her appointment with death was at hand, I sat beside her and said, “Michelle, I have so much to say….”

She nodded, took my hands in hers, and said, “I only have this to say, thank God for you.” “No, thank God for you,” I insisted as we playfully argued about which of us was thanking God more for the other. Tears streamed hotly down my cheeks as we laughed heartily.

Fortunately, Michelle kept an online journal expressing deep gratitude. She recorded humorous stories for her sons, husband, family, and friends. Her writing was filled with love, hope, and humor.

From births to deathbeds and all things in between, keeping the heart open can be arduous, mainly because it involves being present. It means feeling deep sorrow. But there will also be many delights. You will fall in love with the world again.

As she died, Michelle taught me so much about living. I learned to accept my mortality (because people always said, “Michelle Berry died).” I stopped thinking, “the other Michelle Berry died,” and instead, I think, “Yes, I’m going to die, so why not live each day with gratitude, just in case it’s my last?”

(A version of this post was published online in Grateful.org)