#40 Beautiful things
We shake with joy / we shake with grief
I spent November at home, this time the grief expands and yet, the joy is felt more acutely, so they say, and
the world is still made of beautiful things.
My oldest sister and one of our youngest cousins are, for the first time in their lives, going to therapy, grieving loss more openly, holding their hands, and
the world is still made of beautiful things.
My grandmother turned 90 and her memory is fading. When I kiss her goodbye, she asks me “where are you going? why have you left?” I tell her I must go back to work, she tells me she hopes I’ll return soon, that she will wait for me, and
the world is still made of beautiful things.
My oldest sister had a miscarriage years ago, already almost a decade, but I hear the story behind it for the first time only as December marks its first day, on the terrace, and
the world is still made of beautiful things.
I reconcile the two lives that I’ve been given — I don’t think of what I am missing in either place, for once I tell myself, nothing and no place is perfect — and believe it, and
the world is still made of beautiful things.
I begin to see that part of loving something also means accepting it, that the urge to improve it is still an urge to change it, it’s still the urge for control. Loving something also accepting it, even when you don’t understand it, and
the world is still made of beautiful things.
For every thing that fades and dwindles, every thing that slows and ends. For every thing that lived and died — it gave us equal measures of joy and pain. For bringing life into the world, for being birthed, for trading off the love you feel for the day that will come when their body is no longer here,
the world is still made of beautiful things.
I tell my dad it’s hard to accept he’s getting older on my birthday. I am terrified of a world where he will no longer be in. “You cannot cheat time,” he tells me, “As you get older, so will I — this is the natural order of things,” he says, 59, having lost his best friend and brother when he was 18. They never found his body, and
the world is still made of beautiful things.
For every sunken body and every thing that’s been lost, for the pain and the tears and the injustice, for every thing that has died,
the world is still made of beautiful things.
you have to believe it.