All Moments are Sacred: Cultivating the Mood of Gratitude During Life Transitions

Earlier this week, I woke in a mood of deep gratitude. A good friend recently gave me a well-made pair of pants she wasn’t able to use. They have a silky lining and the fabric on the outside is pebbled with thick brown and black threads. At first, she and I didn’t know if we liked them or not because they are so unusual. (She had gotten them from someone else.) We finally decided these pants were beautiful, and I was full of gratitude to have them. I was grateful for the pants, yes, and also for the friendship with this person. Although we’ve known each other three years, I sometimes still think of her as a “new” friend because many of my friends have been in my life for more than 20 years.

I was also thinking how my new daughter wakes up excited and happy every day. She greets each day full of joy and appreciates having another light-filled day to spend. That’s how I felt on this morning – full of joy and excited about my family and my work. I had a pile of clothes in my hand and was on my way to take a shower; I was the only one awake and the sky was still dark, so I had the feeling of being the only one awake in the whole world and felt a peaceful stillness. I detoured from the shower to grab a glass of water. When I walked into the kitchen, I found my cat dead in the doorway.

Only a few hours earlier, she’d been on top of me to petition for breakfast. At 3:30 am, I got up for water and fed her. Now she was dead. At first, I felt all the clichés: Seamus was like part of the family, and so on. Mostly I felt deep sadness, deep grief, deep gratitude that it was relatively fast, that we’d had a good 11 years together, that she’d died while we were in town, that I could see her, that we could bury her in the western part of the yard near the small hill where the sun will set over her.

She used to lie on top of one of us and then place her paw carefully on the other one as though to include us both by her touch. She placed a paw on our faces – gently – to wake us or on our laps to request more food. When I moved to Florida, she was my only friend in town at first. She rode with me – sitting in the passenger seat – down I-95 to Florida and back numerous times and drew stares as she sunned herself in the back window. She warned me of palmetto bugs. She didn’t warn me away – as I thought she might – from odd men. Instead, she loved them all.

This gratitude and grief turned into a time for nurturing. The three of us took long walks. The other night, we got to the lake just before sunset. The light seemed to burn streaks into the water. The honking geese cruised in with grace, and I could hear their bodies cutting into the lake surface as they landed. The herons looked regal with elegant necks and watchful eyes. We spotted a beaver and it crashed its way through the water in high contrast to the elegance and reserve of birds. The light at the lake started to fade and we headed home – just the three of us now.

Deborah Ager is a poet, writer, life transition coach, mother, and internet marketer and helps people embrace change and their creativity in adventurous ways. You can learn more about her work at lifespacecoach.com.

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