Dying people have the power to heal the rest of us in unusual ways. Years afterwards, many people can remember what a dying person has said to them and carry it with them through their lives. Perhaps dying people give a sort of darshan to the rest of us in the same way that spiritual teachers do.

The practice of darshan is very moving. The guru sits before his disciples and throws out a shower of small pieces of candy and glazed fruits, symbolic of the wisdom of his enlightened state. The students who catch the candies eat them and incorporate the sweetness of the guru's wisdom into themselves. The darshan we eat is woven into our fabric as it were and becomes a part of who we are.

The sayings and perspectives of a dying person are often carried in this way, woven into our fabric, changing us from then on, helping us to live better.

I carry in this way the death of a woman who in life had never been my friend. She was outspoken and somewhat judgmental and I had found her edge intimidating. Although I admired her work and we traveled in the same circles I had always kept my distance. Even when I was told she had been diagnosed with cancer, I did not personally call but kept in touch with her struggle by calling mutual friends. Our paths had been converging for many years but I had not known this and so I was surprised when her husband, called me to say that Mary was dying and wanted to see me. Uncertain of why she had called, I went.

The woman who welcomed me to her bedroom was no one I had met before. Thin and completely bald, obviously gravely ill, her beauty was magnetic. As gracious as a queen, she patted her bed, indicating that I was to climb in and sit. I remember the four hours that followed as one of the most intimate, strengthening and healing times I have experienced. We spoke of illness and pain, and she said with simplicity that she was no longer suffering. We spoke of the complexity which had characterized her life and all of her relationships, both family and friends. We told each other jokes. At one point her husband joined us and we read Proverbs 31, A Woman of Valor together. It was a favorite of hers. Certain of the lines are with me still. "She layeth her hands to the spindle and her hands hold the distaff." "She is not afraid of the snow for her household, for all her household are clothed in scarlet." We all drank Snapple, rolling it around in our mouths as if it were fine wine.

Part of our discussion turned around the power of this time of dying in a person's life. She had experienced a liberation from some lifelong limitations and self-doubts and felt that she could now reach others in ways not previously possible. She felt grateful for this and for the clarity of vision that seemed to allow her to release her habit of anger and judgment and see the beauty in others. She wondered why this gift had been given her at this time and if it was to be used in some way. I told her that I felt that if it was, she would be shown how to use it. As our time together ended I felt reluctant to go as if I had been granted an audience with a high lama. But it was only Mary. Eventually she fell asleep in the middle of a sentence and I left.

A few days later, her husband called to say that she had gone into coma and asked me if I wanted to come and say good-bye. Her house was very still and peaceful. Climbing the stairs to her bedroom, I had the sense of a holy silence that she had somehow drawn around her. Mary lay in her bed in a deep coma, breathing shallowly. I took her hand and sat with her for a while, thinking of our last conversation. Suddenly her eyes were open. They were as clear as a young child's and as honest. In the intensity of her gaze I felt naked, seen in all my particulars and incompleteness. Yet I did not feel embarrassed or even vulnerable. She looked at me in this way for a long while and then she smiled gently and said "I love you." Closing her eyes, she slipped back into coma.

I have carried the moment with me as a sort of touchstone. Her husband tells me that many of the people who came to see her after she went into coma had experiences similar to mine. She had opened her eyes and met with them in the same singular way, delivering the same last message. In looking back on it, it was a pure moment of intimacy and the power of it is not easily describable. I think of it as a sort of null hypothesis. The null hypothesis is a research principle that applies only when one is studying universal laws and principles, forces that hold in all circumstances and at all times. It states that should one find only a single instance in which the law does not hold, the law itself has been invalidated.

There are laws of our inner world that bind each of us as firmly as gravity, beliefs we carry about ourselves and about life in general that we experience as true in all conditions and at all times. A feeling of personal unworthiness is one such inner law. One moment of unconditional love may call into question a lifetime of feeling unworthy and invalidate it.