Life, death and everything in between.
It was 3 o’clock in the morning and thundering under dark skies.
You could hear large drops of rain pounding on the pavement and bursting open..
The loud roar made the entire house shake.
As her wild, free-spirited nature does what it does, she said, “let’s take off all our clothes and go running in the rain.”
She was always the one to come up with the craziest ideas—the kind of ideas that create memories you would relive and replay all over again like they just happened yesterday.
So while her parents were sleeping, we walked into her brother’s room - the only room with a window to the back of the house - told him to shut his eyes- she opened the window and jumped out the house.
I stripped down to nothing but a hair tie on my wrist and followed along while my belly is hurting from all the uncontrollable laughter along the way.
“You guys are f*cking crazy!!!” her brother shouts.
With no shoes on, our bare feet hit the pavement of the road and as the adrenaline rushed through our bodies, we ran down the street like nothing or no one else existed. We screamed at the top of our lungs, hair drenched, told each other to shut up too many times and laughed too hard that I peed myself.
This was a normal occurrence when I was around my cousin Lyna. She had that kind of affect on me. We could have deep conversations about God one moment and I could be peeing my pants from laughing the next.
We made it to the other side of the street where she shouted, “I’m stuck!”
Lyna ran through a pile of mud near our favorite weeping willow tree and she was struggling to move her feet. It was like she was walking through a thick pool of molasses.
I stared at her and laughed so hard that I peed myself again.
I held her arms trying to pull her out but the laughter made my entire body shake like the thunder that was rumbling and I couldn’t pull myself together. I was weak from bursting with laughter.
“Hurry upp Sandy!!!”
She cussed me out like a maniac though she couldn’t help but laugh herself. We finally got out and ran the ally ways of this small town in Virginia until we saw cop lights. It was our signal to run back home.
We knocked on her brother’s window, told him to shut his eyes again and climbed in; leaving behind messy indistinguishable wet footprints on the floor.
We stayed up until the crack of dawn when all the laughter and shenanigans eventually tired us out.
5 years later, I found out that Lyna was diagnosed with Leukemia.
8 years later, Lyna’s battle with cancer ended and she passed on.
I didn’t know it then but this moment would become a funny story Lyna would ask me to tell everyone at her funeral– where the entire audience including her parents, shared the same belly laughs we did that night.
It was my first time speaking publicly on a stage and my last time sitting in a room with Lyna’s body.
Today, she would have been 35 years old.
One night, we were lying down on a mattress topping the hardwood floors in her room. She was on my left and the door was cracked open just enough that the light from the living room reflected a part of her face. We were both lying flat on our backs, facing the ceiling as I turned over to Lyna nearly 9 months into her battle with cancer. She said to me,
“I’m scared to die.”
For a moment, we laid there in silence.
I held my breath.
My face covered by the paint of darkness in the room made it easy for me to hide my true expression. I felt a glob of emotions rising in my throat. I mustered up the strength to tell her, “I know it’s scary but it’s going to be okay. We will all die one day and some of us will never know when or how it’s going to happen. God must love you enough to tell you first so you can have time to prepare and do everything you’ve ever wanted to do.”
I fought to choke back the tears as they started racing down my face. She took a deep exhale and I sensed a feeling of relief. Lyna was older than me by a couple years and she was always the one who had wise words that would ease my worries but this time, I was glad that in some small way, I could return the support.
Plus I didn’t want her to see me cry because in typical Lyna-fashion, it would crack her up and she would tell me how ugly my face looks when I’m crying.
Perhaps what we fear the most isn’t death but the fear of what we don’t know.
What a gift it was that she got to cross off some of her bucket list items.
What a gift it was that she got to plan her own funeral.
There were towers of colorful cupcakes and everyone was instructed to show up in color.
There were selected friends and family sharing stories upon stories.
A few months before Lyna died, she went skydiving — even though she was tired and frail.
The light in my world became dimmer after she left.
A tidal wave of darkness took over my life and I didn’t think it would ever be possible to find my way out.
For mother’s day, I shared a story in a post about the stranger on the plane who impacted my journey in motherhood from one conversation.
I hadn’t heard from her in weeks and I started to feel worried.
I reached out to her sisters, the ones she raved so much about.
And a few weeks later, I got a message back saying that in the beginning of June, Becky had lost her battle with cancer.
I felt heartbroken for her family, her husband and her children.
How do you make sense of it all, when it’s often the brightest souls that get taken away from us too soon?
And yet, when I step away from it all, I can say that nothing prepares you for living an extraordinary Life more than facing Death itself.
People like Lyna and Becky — they are the courageous ones.
Everyday we wake up, taking the smallest aspects of our lives for granted as if we are guaranteed tomorrow.
Lyna has taught me a lot about the meaning of death.
For so long, I imagined death as this scary dark void that took the people we love away from us and we'd never see them again. But just as living is part of our journey, so is death. In the book Sacred Journey: Living Purposefully and Dying Gracefully by Swami Rama, he writes about an ancient Indian text called The Upanishads. It shares the story of a young boy named Nachiketa who is forced to face Yama, the King of Death. In his journey, he learned that "death is not the end of life, but simply a pause in a continuing story." Just like a period at the end of a sentence of one chapter, leads to another. Just like the Amtrak— we get off one train to prepare for another.
Another kind of miracle.
It compels me to think about us.. the ones who are still physically here.
About how much of a phenomenon that we are; that we have eyes to see, ears to hear, lips that can smile, a body that moves, can lift, can hug, can hold, can touch, a mind that thinks, innovates and creates and lungs that pump as our breath keeps us alive. How when we bleed, our wound somehow heals itself. How when we sleep at night, every cell in our being is getting loved and nurtured. How (we get to choose) if we want to laugh or if we want to cry.
We are a miracle.
It is in facing death that we learn how to live,
it is in facing life, that we learn how to die.
In a sense, you and I are no different from those who have been diagnosed with a dis-ease and given a timeline of their mortality. We have our own forms of cancer; the cancer of thinking negatively, the cancer of allowing our fears to control how we live, the cancer of living a life of mediocrity because getting out of our comfort zone is too unbearable, the cancer of settling for less when we know we deserve more, the cancer of not wanting to really get to know ourselves because we are afraid of our own greatness, the cancer of doubting our success, the cancer of self sabotaging beliefs that debilitate who we are made to become.
We are either slowly dying or we are fully living.
We are here now.
Making the most of it is all we've got.
It is in accepting our own mortality that we begin to use our time more wisely and welcome a more fulfilling life.
Death is only a habit of the body; not the soul.
The soul lives on.
Even Einstein, the genius himself says, “Energy cannot be created or destroyed but it can be transformed”.
As I’m writing this, it is June 29th — 14 years ago on this day, was the day she died.
As I’m writing this, there is a storm outside and it is thundering.
The large drops of rain pound on the pavement and burst open outside.
I feel a sense of peace and gratitude in my heart.
It is no longer aching from the sadness and pain of losing someone so close to me.
I feel peace from the acceptance of death that took me years to understand.
It was death that drove me to find a deeper meaning in life.
I feel gratitude that I was blessed enough to meet such kindred Spirits in this life time.
I feel gratitude for this human experience everyday.
I found my life’s purpose.
Life and death are partners —
one complimenting the other.
It is in facing death that we find purpose in life.
I mean who would have thought that I would discover my love for public speaking at my own cousin’s funeral?
To this day, thunderstorms bring me a deep sense of nostalgia, warmth and sometimes I feel the temptation to strip it all the way down and go for a butt naked hoo-rah run in the rain again.
Well…
Maybe I should.
Maybe I will. 🍵
Warmly,
Sandy
“Life’s purpose is to know the distinction between what is outside and fleeting, and what is inside and eternal, and to discover through practice and experience the infinite value of one to the other. Once this distinction is realized life takes on a joyful meaning and the fear of death evaporates.”
-Swami Rama of the Himalayas
“Life is like a blank canvas, you can paint it whatever you want.
I say, make it COLORFUL!!!”
-Lyna Nguyen
In loving memory of Lyna Nguyen,
July 21, 1989 - June 29th, 2010
*Every year on June 29th, I try to create something in her memory. If you loved this post, you may enjoy listening to this podcast episode called Live Your Life.
It’s about how facing death, teaches you to live more fully and more stories about Lyna.
