Tadpoles
Not long ago, I had the bittersweet honor of lying in bed with one of my dear friend as he neared his death from Leukemia. I averted my eyes from the bedside table full of pill bottles, tinctures, and tissues boxes, and instead we settled in to sift through the thirty years of memories that we shared. I was 10 and he was over 40 when we met, and our unusual relationship blossomed partly because I was essentially fatherless, and his children had grown and moved away. We both loved dogs and long walks in the woods, so we ended up spending a tremendous amount of time together, pondering the big questions while throwing sticks and splashing in the fresh waters of rural Connecticut. Among our many shared memories, we recalled the numerous tadpoles and frogs we had gently caught, admired, and released.
As we chatted and reminisced, another wave of grief rushed over me as I realized how I had let so many sweet moments pass by without stopping to fully appreciate, and how few photos we had together, despite our years of mutual admiration. The thought occurred to me to take a selfie right then, but there was no making up for all those lost photo ops. I couldn’t decide if it was appropriate to cry while I laid with him that day, knowing it would probably be our last time together. The decision was made for me, as my tears broke through their flimsy levees and splashed down my cheeks. He smiled and squeezed my hand just the way a father would, “Ah, my little tadpole girl, now all grown up! I’m glad we had so many years together.” Even without a photo to capture the moment, I remember the warmth and tenderness of our last moments together, and painful as they are, I revisit those memories often.
After my friend passed away, I pledged to try and do better at savoring mundane moments, appreciating the smallest of blessings, even as they co-mingled with pain, sadness, loss. Moreover, I appointed myself an unofficial documentarian, vowing to remember to relish time with the people that I love. No matter how small the outing, no matter how messy my hair, I would be the one to snap a selfie or gather everyone for a group photo. I’m the shameless nudnik that pauses conversations to capture the moment of togetherness before its gone and relegated to our murky collective memories.
Now that our Nation is deep in the grips of this terrible virus, the ways that we connect may be far less close or fun, but potentially so much more meaningful. Yesterday, I met with an old friend at dusk for a neighborhood walk with to-go cups full of wine. While we bemoaned the absence of hugs at our greeting and the wide spread between us as we strolled and chatted, I’ve never felt closer to her, or more comforted to see her beautiful eyes twinkling above her mask. Yes, I made sure to snap a blurry selfie in the rapidly fading early evening light, even as we stood over 6 feet apart.
Love, after all, is about being present, paying attention, and showing up, even when we stand apart or must instead appear on a screen. I keep hearing that people want this time to be over, they want to fast forward and get back to life. Yet, life has always been fraught, and will always be, to varying degrees. We owe it to each other and ourselves to stay present right now, even though it’s imperfect, even with a mask on, even while things feel so uncertain and hard. Actually, we owe it to each other to stay connected with even greater attention and purpose precisely because of those very factors!
I just noticed that my approach to committing to practicing a small sense of awe and gratitude is akin to my relationship with mindfulness. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist, teaches us that to meditate, “We bring our full attention to what is within and around us. We let our mind become spacious and our heart soft and kind.” Even when our minds are overloaded with worries and stressors, our loved ones deserve our full attention and our soft hearts. We must keep working on staying present, even if we fail over and over. According to the meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg, “The healing is in the return, not in never having wandered to begin with”.
We all forget to pay attention, we can easily get distracted from staying conscious of our surroundings, blessings, and those that we love. But we can always come back, again and again, before these precious imperfect moments gently slip through our fingers like tadpoles returning to the water. Stay with us, stay here, stay present, because this flawed and beautiful scary life right now is all we have together.
