Mother's Day is complicated, especially this year when we are looking for ways to be together apart. My daughter-in-law, a month from delivering their second child, is grieving the loss of her grandmother; she said goodbye over the phone. No kiss, no hug, no squeezing of hands.Ah, the circle of life. There is truth, and modest comfort, in the thought that the decline and death of some is balanced by the arrival and activity of others; family trees lose decaying limbs even while buds are forming.
Surely the great-grandmother and the infant exist together in this interval, in a place where it isn't air that sustains life, but love, since her breath has been suspended and the breath of the baby not yet persuaded to begin. p.58 adapted