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Today, at Teresa’s eulogy, I learned much more about her life.

In a large room opening onto the hall, Teresa’s artwork had been displayed: paintings, knitted pieces, and embroidered works. All of them were filled with bright and beautiful colours.

From the speech of a friend who had known her for thirty years, I learned that in her youth Teresa had been a Miss Australia candidate and that, despite being diagnosed with scleroderma and losing her hearing, she had completed university studies in education and continued teaching children until the final day when teaching became physically impossible for her.

Her friend had been Teresa’s first teacher of sign language for the deaf. She said that after all these years she had still never met anyone who learned the language as quickly as Teresa. Again and again she spoke of Teresa’s innate intelligence and capacity to learn, and of how she never stopped reading or educating herself. She spoke of her determination, of how two years earlier—despite the objections of all her doctors—Teresa had travelled to Japan, a country she had always wanted to see, for her final overseas journey, and of how ten years earlier she had launched a campaign that raised tens of thousands of dollars in Australia and New Zealand for people with scleroderma.

When the audience was asked whether anyone wished to speak about Teresa, I too was ready to say something about her and what I had learned from her. But when I raised my hand, I was astonished to see almost the entire room raise theirs. I wondered whether there can be anything more beautiful at the end of a life than for dozens of people, after we are gone, to be ready to speak with love about the effect our life had upon theirs. This is what remains from a life lived wholeheartedly, deliberately and reflectively.

Several of Teresa’s deaf friends stood in front of her coffin and, facing both her and the gathering, spoke in sign language about the effect her life had had upon them and upon the way they understood their own physical limitations. They spoke of the lessons in joy and resistance they had learned from her. The final words of each person who spoke, directed toward Teresa’s still and long-suffering body, were that they loved her and would remember her with love until the end of their lives.

I looked at this scene and thought of Joseph Campbell’s phrase, and of how death upon the magnificent tree of Teresa’s life had become only a beautiful ornament inviting us to remember and celebrate the beauty of her life—a height from which even the immense tragedy of her illness and pain appeared smaller than the beauty of the life she had lived.

Death is a black curtain that makes the beautiful colours of life shine a hundred times more brightly. Even if death is a final and sorrowful event, there is something more frightening than death: the thought that we might be condemned to immortality forever, unable ever to leave this life on this planet.

Immortality may at first seem a seductive temptation, but perhaps we should ask how compelling that temptation would remain after one hundred years, two hundred years, five hundred years, one thousand years, ten thousand years.

Perhaps only then would we feel how good it is that we are not condemned to eternal life with all its suffering and repetition. The limited time of life allows us to give meaning to our living, to live intensely, to love, to experience, and to create from our fleeting life on this planet an image worthy of remembrance—an image whose influence may travel from us to others and through them into a future in which we are no longer present, but whose beauty we have helped to create.