Willow’s heart-centred end-of-life planning has a fabulous feedback loop that might surprise you. It’s true that all that matters in the end, matters nowand what’s also true is that and all that matters now, matters in the end.
Whether you have days or decades to live— and who’s to know?—I promise that if you take time to consider what matters to you about the end of your life, you’ll get clarity about who and what matter to you now.
In these tumultuous and tiring days of disruption and disorder, the sources we turn to for wisdom and nourishment, talk an awful lot about love.
In these tumultuous and tiring days of disruption and disorder, the sources we turn to for wisdom and nourishment, talk an awful lot about love.
The global pandemic has resulted in a tough year for most of us. Faced with so much loss, grief and mental health challenges, the world is looking forward to closing the chapter on 2020. What if we put this year to rest, like we lay a loved one to rest?
As you may know from Reena’s recent blog post, Momento Mori and Don’t Forget to Live, my vibrant 82-year-old mother-in-law with whom we shared our home of 12.5 years, died suddenly a month ago. It was yet another reminder of the constant presence of life and death, and how unpredictable the human experience is.
Memento mori is latin for “remember that you [have to] die” and is also an artistic or symbolic reminder of the inevitability of death. And while we’re all going to die and we all know we’re going to die, most people don’t think about it at all.
Do you too have life lessons that keep showing up—same message, different day? One of the recurring messages in my life is that grief is a pathway to healing. Actually, let me rephrase that. My recent experience of fall-on-my-knees grief revealed, once again, that grief is a pathway to living and loving fully.
My first memorial service took place on Zoom, just a couple weeks ago. We were honouring the life of a dear friend from my church, who died of complications related to a cancer he had been living with these last few years. I suppose I’m fortunate to have gone through nearly thirty years of life without anyone close to me dying. In fact, I’ve only been to one funeral, that of someone I can’t say I knew very well. This is all to say, I still feel quite new to realities of mortality and the rituals that fall under what we at Willow call “Departure Directions.”
