This morning, I went to a mass in St. John’s Catholic Church in Worcester for my friend, Cynthia Taberner. Cynthia was a Zen teacher; at the same time, she’d been raised Catholic, and that was the religious affiliation of her family, so she’d asked for a mass to be held at the church with which she’d already worked when she provided services to prevent homelessness in Worcester. She’d loved that work but had to stop when she got too sick.

I hadn’t planned on going. The usual excuses: the distance, the many, many things of life. And I had felt weighed down. I would find myself looking out the window, unenchanted by the last orange leaves still on the trees as they were hit by the sun at sunset and left glittering. Unenchanted by the 80-degree weather yesterday (it went down 25 degrees by this morning) and the dogs prancing around in the layers of colorful leaves in back. I think we must have a foot of them on the ground. They love to roll in them, accompanied by the dry, crispy music the leaves make.

I went to hear the Gazan Palestinian poet, Mosab Abu Toha, recite poetry from his new book on Thursday night. I’d read some of his poetry before and thought he’d be at the usual bookstore with the usual 20 people in attendance.

Instead, at least 200 people, mostly students and faculty of Mt. Holyoke College, crowded into the First Congregational Church of South Hadley to listen and to cheer. It was my first chance to witness college students’ backing of Palestinians in the Middle East, which I appreciated notwithstanding its partisanship and, most important, that there was no opportunity for me to meet and have an exchange with Abu Toha. It was a somber drive home.

Monday is Bernie’s memorial; Tuesday is election day. Enough said.

But I got up this morning and, suddenly, I knew I had to go to Cindy’s memorial service.

Fr. Madden, who conducted the service and was greatly respected by Cindy for his and the church’s work with the poor, quoted Ecclesiastes, who starts out saying that life is vanity, all is vanity, but ends up reminding us that everything has a season.

I think that everyone and everything is a season unto itself; Dogen says as much. We are parts of the big cycle, nothing more. I found this reminder of the cyclical nature of things a comfort as I thought of Cindy and her struggle for health. I thought of her love for her family and her sangha, and how we’d both roar with laughter as she repeated to me what her grandson Julian said.

“I want to create memories for him these final months,” she told me. Towards the end she wanted to be home, look out at the bay, be with her dogs. But the pain management hospice provided at home couldn’t alleviate the pain she suffered, and she had to finally go to a hospice facility, and there she died.

“Cindy was in pain every single day of her life since she was 40,” her husband, Bryan, told me today as we met in the church’s parking lot after the service (before her cancer diagnosis, she had suffered from Ehlers-Dano Syndrome for decades). I felt particularly bad that she couldn’t spend her final days at home.

I can feel the pain of war from afar, but, ironically, it’s when I grieve for someone close that I come closest to witnessing the universality of loss and death.

Fr. Madden quoted a Hafiz verse, including his reference to our life as an ocean of dreams. It may be an ocean of dreams, but Cindy fought all her life for this dream. Over and over, she said to me, “Eve, I want to live!” I never saw anyone fight for life as she did, never met anyone with such a drive for life. Others would have given up long ago, but not she. “I love life,” she told me over and over.

Driving home, I thought of Joanna Macy’s words:  Like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So don’t be afraid of the anguish you feel, or the anger or fear, because these responses arise from the depth of your caring and the truth of your interconnectedness with all beings.

There’s an aliveness in feeling deeply the life and death of other people and beings. There’s no self there, just the one bow quivering across the strings, playing out a melody we all feel. Bernie used to say that people want to awaken because this will provide a blissful state. Instead, he said, you will feel the suffering of others more because now you will be aware of how we’re all one. In that sense, no one person’s suffering is just his or hers, it’s everyone’s.

And even as we feel that, there’s an aliveness there. For him, that was certainly true. The circumstances are different, the nations are different, the religions and ceremonies are different, but in the end, there’s one instrument that we all play, one instrument that plays us, one great snow that falls all over the world, as Joyce wrote. And just like it does to his hero in the end of The Dead, it sets us off on a journey.