Yesterday, after being out of town for a week, I took Juliet out for a special mother-daughter lunch so that we could reconnect. We went to Potbelly, where she ordered chili and then chose a table right in front of a young man who was playing guitar. Juliet has always been drawn to music, so periodically our conversation would come to a lull and she was content to just sit and watch the musician. At one point she turned her gaze from the guitarist to me and asked “Is that my Uncle Paulie?”

“Uncle Paulie” was my brother, Paul, who died just four days before Juliet was born. Even though Paul isn’t with us physically, we’ve tried hard to keep his memory alive in our family by talking about him often and showing the kids pictures of their uncle. Juliet will sometimes brings up Uncle Paul out of the blue, so the question in and of itself didn’t surprise me. The interesting thing, which Juliet has never been told, is that Paul was very drawn to music himself. In fact, Mike and I inherited his record player and record collection when he died. He had eclectic taste, but particularly enjoyed the work of Bob Dylan.

I told Juliet that no, this wasn’t Uncle Paulie, to which she asked “Who is my Uncle Paulie?”. How do I answer that? How do I tell her who this person is – this person who is so fully formed in my memory, and yet she has never met. She’ll never have the opportunity to establish her own relationship with him. We’ll never know what kind of an uncle he would have made. Juliet will never know her Uncle Paulie outside of what I choose to tell her about him. As I’m thinking the guitarist starts playing the first few chords to a song that sounds vaguely familiar. He begins to sing…

Mama, take this badge off of me…
I can’t use it anymore.

I fight back the tears and try to figure out how to tell Juliet just who her Uncle Paul was – who he still is to me. I struggle to fit an entire life into the space of a single sentence that will be digestible to a three year old.

It’s gettin dark, too dark to see.
I feel I’m knockin’ on Heaven’s door.

But before I can find the words, the question is gone as soon as it has come.  Juliet is saying “This was a really good lunch. What was your favorite part?”

Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door.
Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door.
Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door.
Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door.

This week I posted a link on the Seeds of Support page to this article, written by a mom whose 18-month old son will likely die within the coming months or years.  It is a sad and touching story, and a harsh reminder that death is an inevitable part of every life.

This is the sadder side of life: the ugly truth that most religions prefer to skip over – they preach living without sin so that you might have a happy afterlife, without saying a word about the fact that you will, indeed, die. New Thought authors and motivational speakers also steer clear of the topic of death. They teach about using affirmations and positive thinking to heal, as though it will somehow help you to avoid death altogether. And while the power of a positive attitude and the advances of scientific medicine have both certainly proven themselves useful in postponing death, the fact remains that death is an unavoidable part of life.

Still, I feel that affirmations and positive language are useful tools that certainly have a well-earned place within spiritual living. When Juliet is feeling less than 100% we try to say that she is “healing” rather than using the word “sick”. Mike and I feel it is a small but important distinction: “sick” is a label, an indefinite state of being, whereas “healing” implies a transient and temporary state of action.

I’ve had my own share of “healing” experiences, starting from my very first breath, when I was born with a dislocated hip. My parents had to learn how to care for a newborn in a full body cast. When the cast was removed I remained in a large metal brace for the first year of my life. In second grade a virus settled into my hip and I spent weeks (months? I honestly can’t remember now) on crutches waiting for the bone to heal and muscle strength to be regained. A few years after that it was discovered that I had scoliosis – a curvature of the spine – and I had to spend those already excruciating pre-teen years wearing a hard plastic back brace. A few more years and we found a fracture in my lower spine – it’s still there today. And some day I will die. I don’t have a terminal illness (not that I’m aware of, at least), and I didn’t have a prophetic dream of my demise. But as far as I know everyone dies eventually, and I have no compelling reason to believe my story will end any differently.

Yet, affirming wholeness is a huge part of my spiritual practice. But wholeness is not perfect health. My affirmation isn’t about trying to avoid the unavoidable. Rather, it’s about accepting the totality that is my life. Just as I strive to accept my short stature, wide hips, and discolored teeth, I also strive to accept that aging, illness, and yes, even death, are parts of my life experience.

Of course, none of that attitude helped much when kids were teasing me in middle school because of my strange posture (yes, I did have that whole zen-spiritual-positive attitude thing in middle school – just not in the middle of being tormented). Nor did it do me much good when I was entering my 48th hour of labor with my firstborn (no, I am not exaggerating). But throughout both of those ordeals, and countless others throughout my life that I’ve conveniently forgotten, I still knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I was whole: that my life was perfect, even in the midst of this seemingly imperfect situation. Because life is perfectly imperfect. I am perfectly imperfect.

I am whole. Even when it feels like there are holes in me. Because I AM more than I am. If I can remember this one simple concept and model it for my children, then I’ll have done my job as a mother.