to assist in her work, and volunteering to do so was not something that anyone had even to
ask me to do.
Nearly a year after that first meeting, Bill and I were in Boston setting up another lecture.
Following her talk, a few of us found ourselves in a quiet corner of a restaurant, enjoying a
few rare moments of private conversation with Elisabeth. I’d had two or three such
conversations with her before, so she’d already heard what I told her again that night: I would
do anything to join in her work
Elisabeth was at the time presenting Life, Death, and Transition Workshops around the
country, interacting with terminally ill people and their families, and others who were doing
what she called “grief work.” I’d never seen anything like it. (She later wrote a book, To Live
Until We Say Goodbye, describing with great emotional force what went on at these retreats.)
This woman was touching people’s lives in ways that were meaningful and profound, and I
could see that her work made sense of her own life.
My work did not. I was just doing what I thought I had to do in order to survive (or make sure
that others survived). One of the things I learned from Elisabeth is that none of us has to do
that. Elisabeth would teach such gargantuan lessons in the simplest way: single-sentence
observations with which she permitted no argument. At the restaurant in Boston that night, I
was gifted with one of these.
“I just don’t know,” I was whining, “there’s nothing exciting about my job anymore, and it feels
as if my life is wasting away, but I guess I’ll be working there until I’m sixty-five, and get my
pension.”
Elisabeth looked at me as if I were crazy. “You don’t have to do that,” she said very quietly.
“Why do you do that?”
“If it were just me, I wouldn’t, believe me. I’d be out of there tomorrow. But I have a family to
support.
“And tell me, what would they do, this family of yours, if you died tomorrow?” Elisabeth
asked.
“That’s beside the point,” I bickered. “I am not dead. I’m still living.”
“You call that living?” she replied, and turned away to talk with someone else, as if it was
perfectly obvious that there was nothing more to say.
The next morning over coffee at her hotel with her Boston helpers, she turned to me abruptly.
“You drive me to the airport,” she said.
“Oh, okay,” I agreed. Bill and I had driven up from Annapolis, and my car was right outside.
On the drive, Elisabeth told me she was headed to Poughkeepsie, New York, for another
five-day intensive workshop. “Come with me inside,” she said. “Don’t just drop me off. I need
help with my bags.”
“Sure,” I said, and we wheeled into the parking lot.
At the ticket counter Elisabeth presented her own ticket, then laid down a credit card. “I need
another seat on this flight,” she told the agent.