I lost a friend.
She chose “intelligent euthanasia” in Switzerland because she wanted to live her life on her terms, right down to the terminology of her final choice.
She was the kind of playful person who’s hard to forget, her bright-colored clothing, iridescent hair strands, amazing art in the most incredible neon colors. She was also a private person, holding her past and her private life and her spirituality quietly.
We are lucky because she left behind a recording for Storycorps about her choice. She told just a very few people in person before she departed. I think that she knew that we would want her stay, and she knew that her life needed to end. In the interview, she tried to explain that she wasn’t afraid of death like most people because she had aligned herself with the overall presence of energy in the world. Plus, pragmatically, she said, “We’re all going to die.”
She wanted everyone to be able to cuddle up to death which would help them choose better how to spend their time now. To get the “me” out of the way in order to foster a deeper relationship with the world, to quiet one’s inner voice to allow a bigger voice to move through.
At the end of the interview, she talked about Agape, unconditional love that transcends the individual, suggesting that each small act of love, even as small a smile to cashier, is a drop. And all those drops add up to a cosmic ocean of love that will heal the world.
In the morning after I found out, I wrote this scrap of poem…
Keep loving.
~Jo Going’s last words in her message to us all.
Each morning, the sky vivids itself pinker,
like a bet placed by some benevolent god
who doesn’t even believe in themselves but
loves us all just the same. It’s hard not to think
that somewhere there is a big party and the
breathing aren’t invited. Jo always wanted
to make space for animals. Revered and reveled
their bones. So many people don’t even think
of what once lived here. There’s a snowshoe hare
sleeping under my greenhouse. Jo could
close her blue eyes and still see the tundra.
But in the end, she didn’t want that method to be
the only method. I have to admire a person
who lives on their own terms. Who loves
themselves and their way in the world
more than they want others to love them.
That pink sky is a kind of love I understand.
The hare understands it as she searches
for breakfast beneath the snow made blue by
morning. I can just about hear that party.
It sounds like the creek laughing under ice.
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