Some time ago, when his funeral was still in the future, Dad was pushing his walker across the Menno Home parking lot. Slowly he shuffled to the little cafe.

“Are you still thinking of selling your house in Sechelt?” he asked, as I helped him settle into a chair on the patio.

“I’ll be right back and tell you,” I said and went to get our coffees and a couple of oatmeal cookies. I wasn’t gone long and when I came back he was hunched forward over the newspaper. For a split second I was thrilled that he was reading, until I remembered that his macular degeneration had long ago ended that pleasure.

I sat beside him. His stare was blank. His lower lip hung slack. He stared, unseeing. I stroked his cheek.

“Dad?” No response. I spoke louder and louder and then I yelled for help. A doctor appeared. She called 911. Minutes went by, maybe 15, while he sat, there, but not there, as if someone had flipped a switch. By the time the ambulance arrived, Dad had returned from wherever he’d been.

He looked at me and said, “But you still like living by the ocean, right?”

Hours later, I was back at the coffee shop for the lunch I’d missed. A woman at the table next to mine asked, “Is your dad okay?” She told me a that she was a care aide. Every day she walked a very spry old lady up and down the halls while they carried on a spirited discussion of current events. “We have fabulous conversations,” she said, “but every once in awhile, she stops mid-step and mid-sentence, and it’s like her power source has been killed. She freezes in place while still standing. Minutes pass, and then, her legs start moving and the conversation resumes from where we left off.”

Are we all just circuits and wires? Electrical impulses? Binary systems? And even if you subscribe to a strictly mechanistic view, what then, is the force field that animates us?

I was sitting beside my mother when she died. It was a slow process. There had been long rattling breaths and then impossible silences. I would think, this is it, she’s gone…but then, there’d be another shuddering exhalation and we’d ride that crazy train further into the dark.

And then, one moment, a moment that was seemingly just like the others, a singular second where, in spite of never having experienced death before, I instantly recognized its arrival and my mother’s simultaneous departure.

Was that the soul leaving? What determines whether we are only temporarily stalled and allowed to start back up again or if we are destined to truly leave? What is that ineffable ‘is-ness’ that qualifies us as present? And what happens when disease distorts the wiring? Who are we then? What is real and what is imagined? How can we know if our current reality is right? Are we only defined by the health of our brain tissue?  What do we mean when we say ‘that’s not really her’?

Life is a strange and unfathomable process. I wish I believed that our suffering enobled us or was some higher calling. But I’m not buying that particular world view either.  However, I do think that life and suffering are entwined and inevitable. You don’t get one without the other.  I only have to look at everything that’s alive to see that. Birds, trees, dogs, lions and us…everything lives, suffers and dies.

But in between the shit storms of life, those little birds fill the air with beautiful songs, the trees flutter impossibly green leaves, our faithful companions fetch sticks with wagging tails, and those lords of the savannah roar like hell while the rest of us dance, dance and sing and laugh like there’s no tomorrow.

There will always be pain. But sandwiched between the vicissitudes of life are those exquisite moments of joy that somehow make it all worthwhile.

So. In spite of my Mennonite heritage that insisted dancing and anything remotely resembling fun was a sin; I’m choosing to dance.

Look for me. I’ll be the one twirling in the middle of the floor, laughing like a crazy person.