Remembering Death 8 - Meg

I wrote in this blog a bit about Meg when she died 6 years ago. Tonight, what's on my mind about Meg is something fairly specific.

Meg was the choir director at the church where I was a member at the time. She was the first person I really connected to there and when, early in my time there, she was diagnosed with a type of lung cancer, it was a blow. I think I may have started singing in her choir more out of a desire to do something for her when I was feeling powerless to do anything. (Choral singing isn't, generally, one of my passions.)

After the usual harshness of chemo, she rallied a bit for a few years. She and I talked about doing something collaboratively, with my background in theater.

But as Roseanne Roseannadanna taught us 40 years ago, it's always something. If it wasn't her health, it was her husband's, and if it wasn't that, I was busy with one project or another of my own. The only joint project that ever had the very earliest of beginnings was a production of Amahl and the Night Visitors, an opera she'd loved and we had a teenager in the congregation who could have played the title character. She was hoping to enlist my directing skills in helping her stage it---a task I was more than  little bit interested in. She got as far as ordering music scores, even distributed a couple of copies (I got one, at least).

And then she had a recurrence of the cancer. She fought it but then there were other complications that compromised her health and, obviously, she died.

This is one of the ways that death is a thief. Hopes and plans are irrevocably crushed by death. Grief of a friend includes so many layers and with Meg, one of those layers is the creativity we never had a chance to explore together.

Part of living an abundant life is that there are always more possibilities, more ways to engage creatively with the world, but I contend that loss of an opportunity is still a real loss and worthy of mourning. There will always be grief around what Meg and I never got to accomplish.