The Many Faces of Death

People tend to be uncomfortable with endings, because every ending is a little death. That's why in many languages, the word for "good-bye" means "see you again."
Whenever an experience comes to an end - a gathering of friends, a vacation, your children leaving home - you die a little death. A "form" that appeared in your consciousness as that experience dissolves. Often this leaves behind a feeling of emptiness that most people try hard not to feel, not to face.
If you can learn to accept, and even welcome the endings in your life, you may find that the feeling of emptiness that initially felt uncomfortable turns into a sense of inner spaciousness that is deeply peaceful.
By learning to die daily in this way, you can open yourself to Life.
-Eckhart Tolle, Death and the Eternal, Common Ground 158 Sept 2004

This was a totally cool thing for me to read recently, as I was pondering death in it's many forms (mind you, I do that frequently, so this doesn't exactly qualify as a synchronicy). I had returned from a vacation in which I stayed for several days with a woman I love and her boyfriend. During that trip I realized that I hadn't quite made the transtion to thinking of her primarily as a friend - I still harbored hopes that we could be more one day. This was also the first time I saw them together for an extended period of time, and as a result I realized at a more visceral level that they are very much together, very into each other. I also got to know him well enough to realize he is a great guy and a good partner for her. I'm glad she's with a good man, it's easier for me than if she was with a jerk. My primary concern is that she be happy and fulfilled, and if I don't get the chance to be a good partner for her, I'm glad she's with someone else who treats her well and appreciates her.

Toward the end of my visit, and in the days following, I realized that I was in mourning - grieving the death of hope that she and I might be together. It's true that part of me still harbors hope - I have a hard time letting go of that completely - but essentially I realized that it's not going to happen, and so the part of me which dreamed of that was dying. My job is to accept that and to let it go as gently and lovingly and completely as I can. Fortunately the love and strong connection that she and I share is still there, and as a friend she will always love me and be there for me. She said as much and I have complete trust in that (this ability to trust such a connection is something I've developed over a long period of personal growth. As Martha Stewart would say, it's a good thing).

That loss lead me into thinking about other forms of death. There is the literal death of the body, and I've had one major experience of losing someone that way so far, when Kalindi died by suicide in 2001 and my world exploded. A few months after she died, the world we had been living in went through an explosive phase change as jets were flown into the World Trade Center - and as horrified as I was by what was happening, I felt that the world had caught up with the existential hell I'd been in since she died. That event started with the death of thousands of people, and tens of thousands more have died at the hands of American soldiers and terrorists since then; but on a deeper level it is significant in terms of the death of one world and the bloody birth of a new one.

There would be no chance at all of getting to know death if it happened only once. But fortunately, life is nothing but a continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change. Every time I hear the rush of a mountain stream, or the waves crashing on the shore, or my own heartbeat, I hear the sound of impermanence. These changes, these small deaths, are our living links with death. They are death's pulse, death's heartbeat, prompting us to let go of all the things we cling to.
So let us then work with these changes now, in life: that is the real way to prepare for death. Life may be full of pain, suffering and difficulty, but all of these are opportunities handed to us to help us move toward and emotional acceptance of death. It is only when we believe things to be permanent that we shut off the possibility of learning from change...
Since impermanence to us spells anguish, we grasp on to things desparately, even though all things change. We are terrified to let go, terrified, in fact, of living at all, since learning to live is learning to let go.
-Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (Revised and Updated Edition, 2002), p. 33. (emphasis in original)

It's so much better to let the hopes I had for my relationship with S. die, so that I can more deeply cherish the rich relationship that we do have, and so that I can get on with my life and find someone else to be with - or learn to be happy on my own, which is a direction I've been going in for some time anyway. Life goes so much better when you stop fighting it and let it flow. I'm slowly learning to do that.
Fortuntely life gives me no shortage of lessons and reminders on this subject.