Saturday, May 16, 2009

Pretty in Pink

About a year and a half ago, I wrote an entry as a guest blogger on the Cognitive Edge site. The title of the piece was "Brainbows to Black Holes" but it was really about the connectedness of things. You can find the original piece here: http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2007/11/brainbows_to_black_holes.php

This week, the friend I reference in that article died. Today I attended her funeral. I live in such a small town that I was able to walk to the funeral from my house, walk from the church to the cemetary, and walk from the cemetary back to my house. While I was making those walks, I was thinking about a lot of things, but mostly I was looking directly down at my pink and green shoes and thinking about my friend.

She requested that her friends wear pink to her funeral. There were hundreds of people there and it was quite a sight to see a sea of pink at a funeral. Even many of the men were sporting pink ribbons on their lapels and pink ties.

The result of this very simple but elegant gesture was that we were all smiling when we saw each other and her spirit seemed all the more present. So, in the end, it was just as I had said about a year earlier -- her spirit was as vibrant as the colors I mentioned. What I didn't count on was her figuring out a way to remind us of that after she left us. She has taught me a new lesson in connectedness.

3 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Recently, a friend of mine told me that today connections and friendships are built in smaller slices of time because the one thing we can't get any more of is time. He is right reading your post, I feel connected to your friend. Thanks for sharing Mary.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Susan, for some reason, I missed your post here. Thank you for posting and I'm so glad you feel that connection to Katharine. She was an amazing person.

    ReplyDelete