Tears—big, fat tears; the kind that make some men uncomfortable, and many women sigh—rolled down his cheeks. He lay on a hospital bed, his life nearing the end, spending precious moments with his daughter who sat next to him—this daughter who wasn’t his and was always his.

He was only in his sixties.

He talked about his wife—the woman he loved so much. He asked his daughter to watch out for her. Of course, she said she would.

The daughter held his, now frail, hand as he talked about the years of smoking that started when he was in the Navy; about the cancer that would kill him even though he quit ten years before he lay there dying.

He talked about death, about dreams that would never—in this life at least—be fulfilled. He talked about his (very) few regrets. He talked about life.

An expansive heart is one that is not closed off. It’s open to possibility, change and adaptation. That adaptation is something many of us don’t do well. We get stuck in the expected; in the “this is how life is going to play out”. Then, when something unexpected happens, we’re caught off guard.

We anticipated a typical outcome. We became comfortable in the here and now. We forgot how very fragile every single moment is.

I, too often, lose sight of how very fragile
e v e r y
s i n g l e
m o m e n t
i s.

I forget to allow, yea invite, a different way of thinking, a new way of being, a path of expansiveness that considers all possibilities. An expansiveness that is aware of the delicacy of life. An expansiveness that remembers to be open, free and unrestrained by the things of this world. An expansiveness that invites God into every day.

The years in a human life pass so quickly before it ends. We forget, along the journey, that the dreams we weave, and the paths we choose, change other lives that we touch—lives that we enrich, and lives that we sometimes, unwittingly, shatter. Sometimes those broken lives can’t be mended.

So, how do we manage to journey through life with open, embracing, expansive hearts—hearts and spirits that are not shrinking and closed in, but rather reaching out? How do we become like the ocean: tides coming in and going out, ebbing and flowing, breathing and growing? I think that’s a question we need God to help us answer.

We need help in the creation of the stories that we’ll tell at the end of our lives; stories that matters—like the one told by an amazing man who left, too early, an indelible mark on our earth; a story that balanced the reality of human life with the fragility of humanity; a story that honored his expansive heart.

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