To Live With No Regrets

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There was a moment early in the morning the day after he died when, Linda says, "I felt so deeply at peace, as if something was breathing me. My body and the air were one thing. There was just the quiet and my presence in it. And that peace has stayed for me to tap back into when I get anxious or sad."

Though the hard realities of paying bills and planning a new life without Jack are often with her, so are these moments of grace. "I want to give a sense of that place to everyone, a sense of that inner quiet that just is," she says. One way she anchors that place in herself is by beginning the day with a poem or passage that embodies the qualities that she wants to cultivate in herself. For the year before his death, Jack and Linda recited together a verse written by Rudolf Steiner that begins, "Quiet I bear within me . . ." Now Linda says the St. Francis prayer: "Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace." Through intention and repetition, "the words become cellular," Linda says. "It is such a simple gift, but so powerful."

A few days ago, two months after his death, on the anniversary of her marriage to Jack, Linda went out, alone, to Kirsten's roses. She was repeating her wedding vows when a dragonfly lit on the bush she'd planted. "I have never seen a dragonfly in our garden before," she says. "And I don't care what logic says about all of this. Love is not logical. I believe in whatever created that dragonfly in that moment. I believe in the rainbow that can hold the joy and the grief as one. And I believe that we can internalize all those on the other side in this life. They are always with us, and we just have to open to them."

What is a good death? When I put that question to Linda the other day, she listed three components: lack of fear, openness to spirit, and love of community. After a moment she quietly added that, whatever our circumstances, those same qualities lie at the heart of a good life.

Nina Utne is chair and CEO of Utne. You can visit Jack and Linda's Web site at www.caringbridge.org/mn/jackheckelman/history.htm. Kirsten Savitri Bergh's book She Would Draw Flowers is available through Steiner Books (www.anthropress.com).

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