What are you feeling?

The other day I started a message to a beloved friend. I typed “how are you feeling?”

Hang on, I thought. Is this the question I really want to ask?

Is this the question I want to ask to this man I love?

This man does not live with me. We are separated by an ocean–and different beliefs and hurts that haven’t healed, despite the decades that have passed. And yet our hearts know each other and still call to one another across the ocean and across the years. One calls and the other answers.

This man has had a hard year. He spent the pandemic caring for a beloved friend who was dying. He sat by her bed, kept vigil, witnessed her last breath, respected and honored her wishes until the end, the beginning.

This time last year, my father was in the hospital, two hospitals. Doctors performed procedure after failed procedure. My dad was fighting to get home; we were fighting to get him home. He made it home. Back to his family. Exactly where he wanted to be. And where he died.

Not long before my father died, my sister received her diagnosis. She fought, too. Howled in pain–and in fury. My younger sister didn’t want to leave. We couldn’t accompany her to the hospital either. Not for her surgery, her procedures, her chemo.

One day the doctors stopped the chemo. There’s nothing more we can do. My sister didn’t want to hear those words. She wanted to stay. We prepared her home, where she wanted to be.

When they took my father’s body from the house, my mom said, “There goes my whole life out the front door.”

When they came for my sister’s body, it was dark. The attendants told us to take all the time we needed; they would wait. We stayed in the darkness and the silence near her bed. We left the room when they came to remove her body.

We returned to follow her body from her home. We noticed the attendants had left a rose on her pillow. Such an unexpected gift of beauty. Earlier in the day, the hospice women had spread red and yellow rose petals from her front door and around the trunk and roots of her favorite, gnarly oak tree.

We stood together on the porch, under the faint glow of one bulb. The rose petals were still on the ground. I will carry with me until my dying day the silhouetted image of my brother with two strong women on either side of him. To his right, his mother. To his left, his wife. I stood apart and observed the light that haloed them in the hallowed moment.

In barely four months, my father and sister had died.

We usually ask someone: how are you feeling? My response is usually reflexive and inaccurate. Fine. I’m fine, when I am often not fine at all. I’m OK. When I really want to scream in pain or anger or frustration. I’m here. That’s my answer when I push myself closer to the truth. Barely here, present but in pain and working to keep it to myself.

So I asked my friend: what are you feeling?

And I waited for his response.

He wrote that he is feeling very different on different levels. He addressed his feelings as they are held or experienced in his body. He feels fear in some parts of his body. His whole body shakes sometimes. And when he hears the birds, his heart feels wide open and he notices the touch of quietness. His eyes, mouth and throat are sad–he’s quietly crying.

I must sometimes remind myself that these are the moments I live for, frankly, and I want to live for. To be brave enough to sit quietly and receive the pain, the love, the sadness, the joy, the beauty. In my life and in the lives of those I love.

As I finish writing here, I realize I’d be wise to ask myself the same question.

What are you feeling?