“Be of love and life a little more careful than of everything.”

2 ways to live – 2 ways to die

I was struck by this excellent commentary by Peter Bregman. His insights into how different people live their lives and the way they die really struck me. I’ve heard it say often that the way you live is the way you will die also.

I don’t know if that is exactly correct but I think it has a great deal to do with the way we live the last portions of our lives. Dying and death are not totally different things from that a living really. It is a continuation of how we express ourselves every moment of our life including our dying experience.

I was struck at the funeral coverage for Farrah Fawcett. There was a lot of ceremony, religious ritual and loads of friends and family there to say goodby.

Yet even though Farrah Fawcett had been on many if not most bedroom walls or and school locker doors of young boys in 1976 and the envy of many a young gal of that time period. There was no pin-up celebrity status hype of this beautiful woman at the end.

Instead it was her personal beauty of self that so many are now admiring. It is no longer about hair or that sexy to-die for body in a swim suit. It is now about a woman who died adorned with character, integrity and inner strength to face all of life’s struggles from that of cancer to a son in jail. She did it with her best grace and dignity.

Both her only son and her companion – life partner of 20 years helped to carry her those last steps of her journey on the surface of this earth. With all the riches and privileges that stardom can offer, it seems to me that the best gift we have in the end is our integrity, selfhood and the love and affection of those special to us as we take those final moments to our eternal resting place.

I don’t know what all will be the funeral ceremony for Michael Jackson. My hunch is that it will be much different than that of Farrah Fawcett.

Two very different people – two very different causes of death. But both unfortunately eaten up by two different kinds of cancer. Farrah Fawcett’s cancer was anal cancer. Michael Jackson’s cancer was emotional ‘grander than life cancer.’

We have come to learn both can be painful killers.

It is not enough for us to read the obituary and then turn the page of our lives onto something else. Many will do that but for the few I hope we will take some time as part of our tribute to these very talented people to reflect on how we want to live our lives so we may also have the sort of final farewell that will be reflected on the type of life we want to be remembered for.

“Be of love and life a little more careful than of everything.”

Until our next visit together ~ Enjoy Life!

Doc T

Dr. Terrie Modesto

Chief Thanatologist and Learning Officer
TEAR Center

Website: http://www.tearcenter.com/
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/theresemodesto
Personal website: www.drterriemodesto.com

Commentary: Why we grieve for Michael, Farrah

By Peter Bregman Special to CNN
Editor's note: Peter Bregman is chief executive of Bregman Partners Inc., a global management consulting firm, and the author of "Point B: A Short Guide to Leading a Big Change". He writes a weekly column, How We Work, for HarvardBusiness.org.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Last Thursday my wife, Eleanor, flew to Houston, Texas, to see her grandmother, Nana, who had just suffered a debilitating stroke.
Nana is 93 years old with few friends left. As she lay in a hospital bed barely able to speak, family members gathered around her to tell her they love her and to say goodbye.
Saying goodbye to a loved one is an intensely personal and emotional moment. The memories of time spent together linger as we feel the love, the sadness, the loss.
The same day Eleanor gathered with her family, people around the world gathered -- in person and online -- to say goodbye to two outsized public figures to whom they felt connected: Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett.
Michael Jackson brought us closer to life itself. We sang with him, danced with him and were amazed by his youthful exuberance and musical talent. He was the original; I still remember watching "Billie Jean" on MTV thinking, "Maybe there is something to this music video thing." He sold over 800 million albums and "Thriller" is still the No. 1 selling album of all time. He was a young man with extraordinary talent.
We loved him as a young man because he remained real, with his personality shining through his music. But then something happened. As he grew up, he grew away. From himself and from us. We lost touch with his humanness, his personality, his vulnerability. And when we couldn't see that, we couldn't see him.
A few years ago, Anthony Robbins, a motivational speaker who teaches about success in relationships, got divorced. People wondered if this would be the end of his career. Would his audiences abandon him when they found out? After all, how good was his advice if he couldn't hold together his own marriage? But when he spoke publicly about his divorce, people were amazingly supportive of him. The divorce, his failures, his vulnerabilities, didn't diminish him. They made him human.
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We can't identify with perfection. We can admire it from afar, maybe aspire to it. But we can't relate to it because we know, deep down, that we ourselves are flawed. So we trust others who recognize that about themselves, too.
Michael Jackson's tragedy was the second half of his life -- when he hid behind surgery and the high walls of Neverland. Of course, trying to cover up his vulnerability was itself a vulnerability. But, in hiding, he lost himself. And so we lost him, too.
That is the exact opposite of what Farrah Fawcett did. In the depths of a horrible, potentially embarrassing illness, Farrah Fawcett came out of hiding. When most of us would shoo the cameras away, she invited us in. She let us see her pain and suffering and fear and sadness. She let us see her self.
So many of us fell in love with her all over again. Not for her youthful beauty or her perfection or because she represented some ideal to which we aspired. No, we fell in love with her because we saw the real her. The raw, uncut, painful her. And in her, we saw ourselves. We fell in love with her because we identified with her.
Farrah's youthful beauty transformed through illness and suffering is a dark reminder of the inevitable progression of life, a reminder that we usually try to avoid. She herself tried to avoid aging for a while, with face-lifts and botox. And in her pursuit to retain her perfection, she began to lose us. But then she got real and reached out and we reached back. We reached back because of her vulnerability, not despite it.
Between my starting this article and finishing the final draft, Eleanor's grandmother Nana died. Death is one of the few times in life when something is irrevocably taken from us.
It's impossible to go back and relive the period of our lives when she was with us, when she was younger, when we were younger. Time moves only in one direction. And with her passing we are reminded of a time that has passed in our own lives, of moments we will never relive.
It's a little bit like that with Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett.
We feel something deep for them too. Because they, too, touched our lives and changed us. They inspired us, excited us, empowered us. They lived with us. And with their passing, we are reminded of a part of our lives that is gone forever.