Cycles

I’m no statistician but for each death there is a birth.  That has been my experience.  Within six months of my mother’s death my sister gave birth to nephew No.2.  That sounds like pretty limited experience but there are other examples, the most recent ones striking a cord.

Last week I met a friend’s newborn daughter.  Newborns don’t do much, and yet we’re easily enthralled as they discover light and sound and being.  We rediscover the tiny details of life through them.  That same day I got news that another friend’s mom had succumbed to cancer.
Days later another friend’s mom passed.  We had been expecting this news ever since she had been hospitalized – her body brutalized by illness for months, we knew she lacked the strength to overcome this hurdle.  That evening as a circle of friends commiserated about about Danielle’s loss, someone shared the news of yet another friend’s pregnancy.  The news was particularly poignant because this was the fifth attempt to conceive and they had waited six months to announce.   We were simultaneously happy and sad.  So much disparate emotion in one day; how much could a body bear?  But that is just it, we bear it and we carry on.   We accept that life is an amalgam of events.  For every summer there must be a spring. As Bob Marley said,

into each life a little rain must fall.

I’m not so naive as to propose that babies are an antidote to grieving.  I’m not so naive to believe anything I write in these pages is a definitive answer to anything.  But it bears reminding that we all have the same conditions in our contracts- no one gets out of here alive.  People we know will pass, people we love and rely on will leave before we are ready to let them go.  Every life must end and for every ending there is a beginning.  My nephew can never replace my mother but he’s a reminder that is life is made up of cycles, and they are ever changing.