We All Live a Complete Life
My mother once told me, “No matter how long you live, you lived a complete life.”
This pearl of wisdom has stuck in my mind over the years and provided comfort as I’ve bid people I’ve known, and not known, farewell unto The Great Beyond. It has caused me to ponder the meaning of a complete life, what we expect from Life and what Life gives us. In a purely mathematical sense, our lives are very finite and any finite number divided by infinity (i.e. eternity) is essentially zero. In other words, measured against eternity, one second or 99 years are exactly the same. A Mayfly lives its life in the course of a day but who’s to say that day wasn’t as good as any month or year or 99 years?
I would never deny grief for a loss, nor has this idea helped me particularly well at a moment of personal bereavement, even for a pet dog, let alone a person I love. This pain is the burden of Love and separation between the living and the passed. I’m compelled to write this at a most sad time. A dear, kind family friend has lost her child at the moment of her birth, a baby girl named Frances, a name which means free one. A sweet child she and her loving husband will never know. Our hearts ache for them. As a father of two, it gives me extra sorrow to write this on a Father’s Day because I know there are fathers out there, a special father, who is grieving not only a lost child but also a lost fatherhood but I want to reassure them your fatherhood is not lost!
We have no power over such a moment and can only be humbled by the fragility and the incalculable odds of a person being born in the first place. But that is a different philosophical matter. I woke up the day after this tragic loss, being today, Father’s Day, and these strange words appeared in my mind: Frances lived a perfect life. This thought at first offended me but I wanted to understand why it would occur or what it might possibly mean.
Upon reflection, I realized that perfect Frances had lived the entirety of her life in the womb, a place of ultimate comfort with all her needs provided by her Loving mother, even including the need to breathe or eat. This I can imagine to be the purest, most innocent form of conscious existence—free of language, free of crying or troubles or wants, pure being. Knowing her mother and father to be joy-filled, creative people, I know that Frances was beamed a steady stream of good will, lullabies, beautiful thoughts, stories and interesting music and vibrations. A psychic bond of Love was formed. On top of this, her mother is a great dancer, so Frances also got to dance and sway which must have been heavenly. Frances had delicious and healthy foods prepared for her and that comforted her. She lived in the only home she ever needed for her brief, complete moment on Earth and it was a glorious and perfect home filled with Love.
We would have all much preferred Frances lived a less perfect life and entered the chaotic, messy world at large and got to see more of the Earth. But maybe she’d seen it before and just wanted to have that perfection and picked the most perfect mother to live her complete, perfect life in. Who are we to second guess wise, old soul Frances? Anyway, this is how I chose to interpret my waking thought and it gives me some comfort to think this.
We can’t have more of something we never owned and for all of us, that includes our lives, which belong to the Cosmos from which we are fabricated. We get what we are given and do our best and ride the waves and even the wealthiest or most mighty can’t another second buy when our allotted time is over. Let us not judge our lives by the quantity of seconds lived but by the quality. For quality may provide, in even the briefest of moments, everything we will ever need out of life or can rightfully expect, being subjects to the Cosmic Will.
So much remains a Mystery and we will never fully understand these comings and goings we call life but we can, with proper love, appreciate all we are given in the finite quantities, such as they are. We certainly don’t even know whether these lives are as finite as they seem or what our own souls are capable of over many eons of timeless being. This fragment, no matter the size, is all we know and it must be enough.
Not all parenting is done outside the womb, at least with good parents. Frances’ mother and father are and will always be good, if not perfect parents and whether they know it or not—the Free One knows.
