Walk On

Sunday afternoon I opened up an email from a friend I have known since high school. While the message itself was brief, the content was weighty: The wife of one of our fellow classmates had died. Having attended a private school, my graduating class was intimate; there were merely fifteen of us. Over the years, I lost contact with the majority of the people with whom I graduated until we were reassembled in the spring of 2005 for our fifteen year reunion. Gathered together in a small wine room at a local Italian restaurant, we rehashed past memories and reconnected by catching up on the goings on of our lives post high school.

As you can imagine, after fifteen years, there was much to discuss. Besides, there were spouses to meet and pictures of children to ooh and aah over. Due to a conflict in his schedule, Andy Grizzle was not able to attend our dinner but was able to dash in for a mere half hour. In that short amount of time, I learned that he was married and teaching at a local private school. Knowing that Jared and I were in the midst of an adoption, he shared with me that he and his wife were also attempting to launch a family by adopting a child, but that they had recently suffered a failed adoption. Andy's wife, Regina, was absent, and I never had the opportunity to meet her.

Regina Meyers-Grizzle was only 38 years old when she departed this life last Saturday. She and Andy celebrated their eleventh wedding anniversary on the day she died. According to her obituary, Regina liked to fish, sing, spend time with her family, and play practical jokes. From the comments left online by those who knew her, Regina was a joyful woman who made others laugh in spite of the fact that she herself lived with pain and bore the burden of poor health.

"What is your life?" St. James the apostle queried. "It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away." Even though I never had the opportunity to meet Regina, her death is sobering; a wake up call and reminder that life is grievously terse, withering and fading like grass, and that I am so often guilty of allowing little, irrelevant cares, like dirty kitchen floors and fingerprint smudged windows, to weigh me down. Truly, these are paltry and of no real consequence.

Each of us has been given a vocation, Mother Teresa once conveyed while being interviewed by Malcolm Muggeridge. We are all called to "take the little we have and make it beautiful for God." Regina Meyers-Grizzle suffered in this life and could have easily and perhaps even justifiably chosen to become an angry, bitter, contemptuous human being, diffusing the seeds of her despondency upon those around her. But instead, she chose to walk the narrow path - the path of joy, hope, and love - knowing that these are the only things you can't leave behind. May her memory be eternal!

O Me! O Life!

Walt Whitman

O ME! O life! of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill' with the foolish,

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I,

and who more faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle

ever renew'd,

Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see

around me,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,

The question, O me! so sad, recurring-What good amid these, O me,

O life?

Answer.

That you are here-that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.