Darkness is a good and necessary teacher.

I took this photo of Ed about a week ago. Ed does not look like this now, and I miss him.  When I saw this look, it always meant we were about to mix it up a bit, challenge one another, stir the pot.

Since we are both story tellers and pot stirrers, this was a gift.

The minutes after I took this photo marked the last time we really spoke with one another, and the last time I saw the creative spark of life in his eyes.

I believe if flickered and went out that day, I saw it happening. The spirit of the Ed I knew as a friend went off to a better place, the body remains on its own path.

Some of his brightest lights went out.

This was when we  said goodbye to each other.

Watching my friend die in this way is painful, much more for his wife and family than for me. Ed and I said our goodbyes, we talked about this moment, we both knew it was close and would inevitably come. After that, he said, he would simply accept what was next.

What was next is now.

I believe Ed has been as good as his word. People complain more about their cat’s vet bills than Ed has complained about his brain cancer.

Sitting with Ed and Carol, spending time with their family, I have had time to think about how I feel about all this, what the darkness is teaching me, and about how the death of someone close to me will affect me.

First, I realized that I was getting angry. If Ed had been kicked in the head by a cow or fallen off the roof of his barn, it would have been awful, but it would have made some sense to me.

That was the life he chose, and even expected. He had no complaints about the life he chose.

But cancer is different, it is such an insidious thing, so sneaky and venal,  it had been working away steadily on his brain, spirit and his body, perhaps for years. All winter, he was speaking of unusual fatigue and disorientation.

But what really made me angry, I realized, was the incessant whining and complaining I hear all the time from people who do not have cancer, are healthy and well and living their lives, even if they can’t quite take responsibility for them.

I remember somewhere in the Bible where Ezekiel the Prophet was ordered to eat the scroll that is “lamentation, wailing and moaning” and that lived in his belly. It would eventually, and with God’s help, turn into honey.

I know someone who laments and wails and moans more in a single e-mail than Ed Gulley has lamented his cancer in all of the weeks since he was diagnosed. I thought on that. My friends tell me I a not a whiner, and I hope this is so.  Because I would hate that.

There are two kinds of people I find I  simply have no respect at all for, hypocrites and whiners.

When people tell me they are stunned with their dog dies, I think, “well what did you expect? That they would live forever?”  It seems hard to me that I feel this way, but it’s how I react to whining.

A friend messaged me and said she had been crying all day because her car need two new tires, and she just hadn’t planed on spending that extra money. “How could this happen to me?,” she asked. How would you feel about brain cancer?, I wondered.

Do you have the money? I asked. Yes, of course, she said, I am not a pauper. I wanted to say, then shut up and go get your tires, but instead I just decided I didn’t really need to be her friend any more. She will need new tires too often.

I have another friend, a good friend I always thought, who can’t open his mouth without whining, moaning and lamenting. Ed helped me to see that I don’t need this person in my life.

I hope I learn not to be angry at the whiners and moaners, they, like me, are just trying to make their own way. I am just not there yet.

Sitting with Ed, I find that darkness is a good and necessary teacher. I can’t avoid it, run from it, rationalize it or always explain it. I can’t hide from it. When I am in darkness, I find inspiration, not defeat.

The light has to come next, it has to be close, it is never far away.

Ed has taught me a lot, he is teaching me something every day.

These days, he is teaching me about patient endurance. Once he understood what was happening to him, he rolled his eyes and winked at it.

Okay, he said to the cancer, you do your thing and I’ll do mine, I know where this is going. Sometimes, at night, he has cried out in anger as his tumors move through his brain. But that is not his voice, the cancer can talk.

When the light came, he returned to form. The creative spark in his face always came back. Now, it is gone, and he is in the final chapter. Ed was always learning from the  darkness, he was trying to outthink his illness, if he couldn’t stomp it down  outright.

But he never fled from it or pretended it wasn’t there. Perhaps he can walk away in peace now.

Patient endurance is the process of  enduring difficult circumstances with an even temper, and without drama or self-pity, it is the art of accepting delay or disappointment with equanimity, it is about persevering rather than lamenting.

Patient endurance is important to me. I think it was – is – something Ed and I share.

I first encountered it consciously when I was being rolled into the operating room for my Open Heart Surgery four years ago. I was expecting to be terrified, but was surprised to see that I was not. I wasn’t frightened at all.

This is life, I thought, grace is not about having no troubles, it is about how i handle them.

We can not expect a perfect life, I remembered thinking as I held Maria’s hand for what i thought just might be the last time. I think the prophets call this redemptive suffering.

True patience comes from the desire to hold together the always mixed reality of joy and suffering, hope and fear, loss and gain.

I learned earlier in my life not to expect a perfect life, and later on not to be angry or resentful when it wasn’t perfect. Is it ever? Yearning for a perfect life would only make me angry and resentful, since it is not possible for mortal humans.

The philosopher Nietzsche said he could never trust deeply religious people because they seemed to him to be full of resentment. False expectations create resentful people.

Of course, when I sit and look at Ed, it occurs to me that this could be me one day. If these mysterious killer could strike down  this vibrant and powerful man,  it could easily find me.

Ed’s kind of darkness is very different from needing new tires or perpetually moaning about your life and blaming other people for your troubles. He can only hope for something he doesn’t know and cannot ever see.

When I find myself in darkness now, I ask myself: “what can I learn from this? What does this tell me about my life?”

I always take a gift back home with me from the darkness.

I learn something about being a grateful person emerging in a world thoughtfully and accurately defined, where the darkness is not an awful shock, but a precious opportunity as well.