What a blessing to enjoy the gifts of mortality and death.

Before you write me off as morbid, consider that life is precious precisely because it ends. If life were to stretch on indefinitely, there would be an all-too-human tendency to take it entirely for granted as hedonic adaptation and even boredom settles in. After all, it’s an easy mental pitfall to fail to recognize the miraculous in the mundane.

How much of what you have done today will you remember or think important 5 or 10 years from now? Did you take something or leave a blessing or gift in your wake? How is someone or something in your sphere of influence better for your having been there or have you left things worse than the way you found them? What’s the measure of your life? Is what you are choosing to do a reflection of your values?

Not a day goes by without some variation of these questions running through my head and conscience.

To pull a quote from Eliot Cowan’s Plant Spirit Medicine: “Grief gets our values straight. It teaches respect. If grief has been deeply felt, a person who has just lost a loved one is clear about what is important and about how precious life is. Our main problem with grief is that we don’t like to feel it. We think we have to be strong in the conventional masculine sense instead.” I felt grief, alright. That and a lot more.

The short version of my story is that in early June 2014, I lost my fiancé Steve Hernandez after a short but devastating illness and then his family saw to it that I lost much more than just him. Five days after the funeral, Steve’s family forcibly evicted me entirely without notice and illegally locked me out of the premises of the rental property that his parents own. During the subsequent two weeks, Steve’s family ransacked my belongings for all they wanted. The fetid icing on the rotting cake was that they helped themselves to my social security card, my birth certificate, and my passport – all taken with intent to fraudulently claim a potential life insurance payout through identity theft. After Steve folded his CA natives landscaping business, he briefly sold life insurance and bought a policy, which may or may not have lapsed. We were in a slow motion economic tailspin due to a combination of our respective chronic illnesses and tandem protracted career transitions, so it’s very likely that Steve did not pay his premium in the last few months of his life. Because I don’t think like his family does, the reason for stealing my personal documents baffled me for months until I figured out this disgustingly venal motive. For never having harbored ill-will towards his family and for treating them for several years as well as I would have wanted to be treated myself, Steve’s family’s behavior after his death was a rudely jarring shock to my sense of fairness, kindness, and reciprocity.

When I reflect upon the contrast in values between Steve and his family of origin, I am amazed. My sense of being blessed by his presence in my life is heightened. Steve may well have been the white sheep in a family of black ones, a stark contrast of personal values and ethical integrity that defies the warped and hypocritical moral system that guides his family’s choices.

At his funeral, his family fixated on images showing Steve in his 20s, a frame of years that included AmeriCorps and attending Sonoma State University as an undergrad. Steve’s family’s image of him was frozen in time, as if he had never aged or evolved. Their perspective framed his life in terms of a significant crossroad, just when Steve was beginning to extricate himself from the suffocating Gordian knot of his familial system. Steve’s family could not grasp the man he had become, a person alien to them in values, goals, and perspective whereas I had the privileged view of the man Steve was becoming. I could sense his potential and trajectory in the wake of his failed landscaping business. Indeed, I was complicit in helping him set his sights.

At the time of his death, we had been collaborating on the creation of a nonprofit that we hoped to launch as the vehicle for conducting a natural capital assessment for the City of Los Angeles. Our interests dovetailed at the convergence of his interest in ecological economics and mine in the ongoing development of a systemically integrated model of ecological, economic, and social sustainability. Bringing this vision into manifestation was a Life Intention, a long-haul commitment and still is, now interweaving ecological economics in Steve’s honor and memory. Here’s to you, Steve! Thank you for being you.