And…

A friend died this week. Well, maybe “colleague” is more accurate. I don’t know how to label our relationship. I only know what I feel when I think of her and her passing. We shared a common alumnae association as well as having worked together on a small committee as Trustees of Wheaton College in Massachusetts.

She was a dancer and an internationally acclaimed dance educator. Elegant, graceful with an easy smile and infectious laugh. We worked mostly by telephone and sometimes in person. I don’t think we spent more than a week’s worth of days together in three years all told, if you add up the conversation time and meeting times. Yet, her death hit me hard because the connection was so natural and so appreciated.

I find myself thinking about the gift of people who saunter into our lives for brief moments, touch something so deep that the mere mention of their name conjures only a smile and warm memory, and then they are gone. When I was much younger, I remember being puzzled by adults who told me that if I couldn’t stay for a period of time, please don’t visit. What is it that causes us to decide how we will receive people into our lives and then think we control how long they will stay, as if their presence were not the gift in itself for however long it lasts?

Perhaps having a bit of faith that a power greater than we are has blessed our lives with multiple invitations to be touched by different people offering different gifts could allow us to simply appreciate and enjoy the gift—for however long it lasts? Whatever the case, people who walk into and out of our lives offer us not only the gift of what they allow us to share with them, but they also offer us the gift of being touched by them. AND that gift may be the key that allows each of us to reawaken a part of ourselves that may be important for our own individual journey.

Thank you, my friend, for coming into my life. I will miss you.