What Having the Flu Showed Me About Loving My People: Everyday Magic, Day 1,123

Hanging out in real time with some of my tribe at Kat's memorial celebration

At the tail-end of a bad bout of the flu I realized what life wants to be -- or wants me to be -- now: not just present with people I love, but present without being rushed. Especially when diagnoses go south, death takes over the narrative, and what once held everything together is nowhere in sight.

Having cleared my calendar because of Sir Influenza, while keeping my commitment to finish planning my dear friend Kat's celebration of life and staying in touch with a close friend in the hospital, I relaxed into the extra padding of so much more open time and found it suited me. I don't want to just hang out with loved ones but hang out without feeling pressured.

This is a big lit-up billboard of an insight I didn't expect to be placed every 30 miles (or minutes) along the the highway of whatever this later stage of my life is. While I've lost friends and family here, there, and yonder for many years, decades even, in recent years, serious illness and mortality are outpacing my nervous system. In the last six months, in addition to losing two dear friends, I've been texting, emailing, or calling dear ones in the wee hours as they navigate everything from brain tumors to heart arrhythmia to marriage woes and many manner of big sadnesses and bigger scares. Of course, all of these people and many more have been there for me to infinity during cancer treatments and other big, bad news and passages.

"Life is like this," we say to each other. Also, mortality is a $%#$@, we don't know what's going to happen, and what is happening already shows us the propensity of time to pull the rug (as well as the floor and foundation) out from beneath us.

With Kat about ten years ago (photo by Joanne Hickey)

Because I couldn't do much but sleep, eat oatmeal, and watch Jane Austen films, I had more time to just be with loss of a friend and the love for my wonky, resilient, quirky, and creative community. I could noodle away on a poem for Kat, cutting almost all the lines and beginning again while pausing to marvel at the thousands of hackberry butterflies living it up for their short lives. I could think through where to buy Kat's favorite lantana flowers and then repot each one without paying attention to time and tasks. I also thought of Kat's propensity to sit quietly, calmly even, and listen fully, gifts she gave that live on in many of us who loved her.

By the time I arrived at Kat's celebration of life -- although carrying too many things and rushing around with others to set up the room the right way -- I felt much more calm because of the flu week leading me here.

Life is tuning me toward wanting to show up, not just when it all goes to shit, but at large swaths and in small details. If there's one thing I've felt body-sized pangs of regrets about, it's rushing myself in conversation with other on the phone or at chance meetings at the Merc because I have such a big-ass pile of THINGS TO DO in all CAPS biting at my heels.

So it's no wonder I've been off-loading THINGS TO DO into things to do in recent years. I've given up a pile of things, a trend that, while difficult at times (because I love doing most of the things), is only going to gather more speed and volume. I'm spending more time betwix and between -- part of a lifelong goal to honor the power of pause -- so I can arrive where I actually am.

Although there now tens of thousands of hackberry butterflies rushing and swirling through each other, I'm spending more time being still enough for them to land on my arms in the heat of the day because they, like the ecstatic lilac for a few days in April or the passionate peonies a few weeks ago, will not last. Neither will all the humans I love so I want to love them as well as I can.