Don’t Let The Fire Go Out Pt.2

In loving memory of Deirdre Sulke-Meister 

My quintessential memory of Deirdre is from long ago, during her first round of cancer diagnosis, surgery and treatment. In my memory she is gaunt, clearly intimate with the shadow of death, and feeding tangerines to little children in my kitchen. It was as though she were feeding them the sweetness of both life and death—an initiatic knowledge of the night that is always at the underside of day, like an underground aquifer that nourishes the flowers. She was feeding us tangerines, and the unseen World that sustains us until it claims us. 

Later that day she would read stories about Baba Yaga to the group. All of us, even those of us much older than her, were little children listening to her—she whose intimacy with the valley of the shadow taught us not to fear, but to know. 

It was 11 years from Deirdre’s first cancer diagnosis until her death. Some of that time was gruelling, though much of it was thriving. It was a thriving that did not ignore the shadow; it was a thriving that lived n the midst of the knowledge of death as a companion to life. As Deirdre said, during a particular time of thriving, “My lover, Death, is always snuggled up close, whispering in my ear.”  

In Deirdre’s presence, life and death were not a binary,  

nor even merely a flowing continuum. 

As a playmate for old and young children, as a guiding presence at the bedside of the many people in her cancer support group who died long before she did, Deirdre lived in the place where life gave birth to death, and death gave birth to life. 

During one of the last online classes that included Deirdre, we worked with the Divine Name Al Muhiyy, and Deirdre read out loud to us from Divine Names: The 99 Healing Names of the One Love by Dr. Rosina-Fawzia Al-Rawi: 

Muhiyy, the one who gives life. 

At the beginning, there was nothing but Allah, who made the creation from nought, and who wrote death on each living being, and from the Circle of Death, life flowed into the creatures. Thus death precedes life, and life follows death.  

We human beings are forever bound by the cycle of life and death.

Repeating this name gives us the strength to embed ourselves into the cycle. When human beings repeat this name often, their heart comes to life, and their strengths and abilities manifest both on the inner and outer level.  

Al Muhiyy is the divine regenerative force, in us and around us, that we feel especially after a crisis or an illness. Indeed, do we not come out feeling stronger? When we reach the critical point of a serious illness, or the turning point in a major life crisis, we have no strength or space left for the non-essential. The ego is stripped bare, and the heart frees itself of all desires. We are seized by an unusual feeling of freedom and lightness, a radiant calm quietness akin to the light of dawn, and our soul attunes to a higher energy. The sun hidden within us rises.  

We often witness this quiet state of the soul a few days before people pass on. We then believe that they might go on living. It’s a special honor and a deep nourishment to experience such moments with our fellow human beings, because their sun nurtures us too, and leads us to the depths of our being.  

This is how it felt to have Deirdre in our midst, during her extended time of living into death and dying into life. Those “few days before people pass on, when we believe that they might go on living” lasted 11 years for Deirdre—and for us.  

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