Elle died last week, 25 days after being told she had a month. During that time, Elle choreographed her dying with a constant flow of friends and acquaintances. Close ones came to sit with her for hours. Neighbours popped by with treats and a hug. 

I had good long days with her. 

While dying isolated was not her fate, she might have grown weary by the constant pull of shared presence. During our last visit, she said she did not enjoy feeling like she was in a casket while people looked at her as at a funereal visitation. 

‘I get to die. I worry more about those who go on,’ she said, in reference to our anticipated grief. 

A guru to the end, she discussed her dying with utterances about: 

Not being at all afraid of it, of dying

Hoping her soul joined the energy of souls

Asserting that all that matters is right now; the rest, not at all  

Her soul joining the energy of souls. We acknowledged that we cannot possibly know. I did not say aloud that her hope was but a more pallatable prospet than nullity. And nor did she.

To walk in Elle’s shoes is imponderable.

She died actively. She steered each vestige of life as it neared its end.

And she narrated it. 

I have now dreamed about my own death, which I believe means I have allowed its certain existence into my consciousness. Elle, my guide.

How time has sharpened! 

I am in a hurry to live intensely. 

When you’re older and closer to death, time is vexingly hasty. To reckon with time is to sink into the body and inhabit the senses, aware, as though to occupy a molecule of air, the spine of a single blade of grass, the void where time is true—slow, natural, fulsome. 

I can hardly wait for every second of it. 

Thus, though we cannot make our sun stand still

Yet we will make him run.

Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’