What a 91-year-old artist taught me about wholeness, aging, dignity, and the courage to remain fully alive.
Some people teach us by instruction, some by example, and a smaller number teach us simply by the way they inhabit their lives. Gunni was one of those people.
She was ninety-one when she died. Even writing that sentence gives me pause, because age has a peculiar way of swallowing identity in our culture. Once someone reaches ninety, the number itself often becomes the story. We hear “ninety-one” and begin, almost unconsciously, constructing a biography of decline: frailty, dependence, slowing, diminished capacity. But ninety-one was not who Gunni was. It was simply how long she had spent becoming herself.
She was born, raised, and educated in Sweden. Gunni was a celebrated artist, a widow, a friend, and a woman with a charismatic personality. She not only noticed beauty but created it. She loved all kinds of people. She had opinions, preferences, humor, and energy. She was fully herself, and that distinction became more important to me as I watched her approach the end of her life.
Just several months before she died, Gunni was diagnosed with inoperable Stage IV colon cancer. She declined treatment of the cancer. With that in mind, Gunni had decided she wanted to show people how to die. I have thought about that remarkable sentence many times. Death is the great disrupter of human certainty. We spend much of our life controlling, planning, treating, preventing, organizing, and preparing for death. When it eventually arrives, it exposes how limited our control has always been. How, then, can one person teach another how to die?
Watching Gunni, I came to understand that she was not teaching us a technique for dying. She was showing us the posture she had taken toward life itself. She was curious, engaged, attentive, and unwilling to withdraw from the world simply because time was growing short.
