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Today’s blog

March 5, 2025

Lynn Murphy Mark

Another transition

The other day I asked my Prayer Chaplain group to pray for a friend close to leaving this earth, and to pray for her daughter and the four women who were holding the high watch at her house. My friend had fought – and I mean that literally – her cancer for over five years. It was not an easy journey for her or for the people who love her. Chemotherapy played havoc with her systems and she had to have several rounds just to keep the tumors under some kind of control. 

While she lived with the cancer she moved several times. Once to California, and then to two places in Colorado. It seemed to me that she might have been trying to outrun her disease. I know she left a cadre of close friends behind when she moved away from Santa Fe. These women are the same ones that stepped up time after time to help in any way they could. They helped her move, they visited as often as possible, they offered support in a thousand different ways to her and her partner. And, at her end, some stayed by her bedside.

I did not know her that well. But a couple of years ago she published a book of poems and I found out more about her in those pages than I ever did in her company. I keep that little book close by and have quoted from it at several meetings. My favorite poem is called “Light Bearers”. Here it is:

“Live more fully, she said,

Audacious, dynamic light-bearers that you are

And always have been.

The time is now,

The day is here, the moment

Has arrived, your transformation

Stands boldly before you,

Beckoning you to open doors and

Windows long shuttered and bolted

By doubts and fears.

Ride on the waves that take us out to sea,

And know that you

Are one with every drop in the ocean, 

Every molecule of sky and air,

Each current of wind that encircles you with 

The spirit of truth and wisdom.

Fear does not live in these

Environs, this domain of reality

Calling us.

A union that cannot be divided,

A purpose unlimited and 

Infinite.”

Her book has thirty-six poems. Through them she brings her spirituality to life as she exposes emotions and beliefs full circle in her writing, spread truthfully across the pages. I have to believe that writing this book had to be a catharsis for her – there is too much of her personal beliefs contained within. In another poem she writes, 

“Spontaneous words fall out on the page

And energize me.

I am exalted and transported to a place far

Away from searching and struggle.”

One of my friends texted me from her bedside. “She’s gone”, were the two words that came to me – sad but not unexpected. That a simple phrase captures the essence of a transition. She’s gone from sight, her voyage on this blue planet at an end. Free from illness and pain and discomfort, she takes with her all the love that surrounds her in so many hearts.