Birth and Death in the Same Week

Two Saturdays ago, I touched the tiny hand of my newborn nephew.

One Saturday ago, I touched the gravestone of my 44-year-old sister-in-law.

These are opposite sides of my family.

It is one family inside of me.

To be so close to birth and death—to approximate them—in a 7-day period felt strange and normal and electric and also… deeply woven into my bones. Generations before me, a ways back, have known it to be familiar so some part of me knows it too. Birth. Death. They happen. A lot. Modern western culture has sanitized these two portals with such success that a person can grow into adulthood without ever having witnessed a baby enter or a person leave this world. Let alone an animal even.

How is that?

Cousin love, More cousin love, and the one and only Valerie

I watch as my daughters navigate this arrival of their cousin. Elation. Devotion: “When can I carry him?” They have committed. They are his for life and he is theirs. Just like they are 100% in with their cousin Isa and very attuned to her loss of her mother. The death of their full-of-life aunt has jarred them, awakened them, stoked anxiety about parental death, opened all the questions and still, despite the occasional nightmares, they are okay. They weather it. I see how talking about it and feeling it freely, naming it, not hiding it makes it less oppressive. Not as a concept. As a lived experience.

The more I live, the less interested I am in theory.

I want the felt-sense.

I want the memory of listening to my dignified brother speak about his wife to 150 people who flew in from the farthest reaches of the globe and hearing, behind me, my Uncle John whisper-ask my husband (who was heave crying) if he was doing okay. That. That there. I want the giggles of my daughters and cousin Lauren from the back of the uber as we delighted in the costumed man grooving on the street corner with a sign “Honk if ur weird.” I want the feeling of my niece’s warm sweaty hand in mine, and the way Nattacha, her beloved-to-all-of-us nanny, is short enough to fit right under my clavicle when we hug each other. I want the sound of the elders sitting together at dinner—their stories tucked into my pocket to pass along. I want that night out with my 30-something cousins talking about dolphins and AI and underground pyramids and life after death. I want the smell of my cousin Elena’s hair as she hugged me as said, “Just in case it goes unnoticed, you are doing an amazing job as a mom.” And I want the honey balm moment of hearing my sister-in-law Colleen tell us about the birth of her son, how his name came to her, and watching my brother-in-law, who I’ve known for 25 years, bask in his child.

No theory.

Bye theory.

Give me life.

Thank you for life.

Love,