My wife Rebecca and I celebrated our 26th anniversary while she was getting in-patient care at a hospice center for pain management for her colon cancer. Well, “celebrated” is not quite right, though we certainly tried.
Rebecca had actually told me all of this dozens of times. She’d been staring down death for nearly three years — since we’d learned that the cancer had spread to her lungs and was almost certainly fatal. Rebecca had done fieldwork for her economics Ph.D. in the highlands of Ecuador, trying to help the country’s indigenous people get titles to their lands for credit. Later, she worked for the U.N. in Rome and consulted in Africa and South America. Even now, in the past year, she’d done extensive training with the Red Cross to assist people put out of their homes after fires.
Condolences came in from people all over the world: old colleagues in Rome, Ecuador, and Tanzania; friends from four continents; an elderly couple she’d recently met at a fire; lives she’d touched. We pulled off the complex memorial service, which Rebecca had planned in considerable detail. The service turned out well, but then the crowd was gone, and I was back to sleeping in the same bed, in the exact spot where she’d struggled — and where she’d at last found peace.
In April, I received a call from Rebecca’s close friend Deb, who’d helped us pick out the spot for her bench. Deb told me that Rebecca had asked her to call me six months after her death to encourage me to get out and meet new people — including women.Even after she was gone, she was still finding a way to show me how much she cared. She taught me so much about courage, compassion and love. For her, love was a form of generosity.
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