{"id":202,"date":"2010-07-01T02:41:22","date_gmt":"2010-07-01T02:41:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.katrinakenison.com\/2010\/07\/01\/hello-good-bye\/"},"modified":"2010-07-01T02:41:22","modified_gmt":"2010-07-01T02:41:22","slug":"hello-good-bye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/hello-good-bye\/","title":{"rendered":"Hello, good-bye"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span><\/span>There were lots of ribbons and bows.\u00a0 But it wasn\u2019t about the gifts.\u00a0 It was about the pure, untrammeled beauty of a little girl celebrating her first birthday,\u00a0 just waking up to the pleasures of pink party hats, presents to open, a spoonful of ice cream, a bite of cake.\u00a0 We gathered round the living room, cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents, neighbors and friends, snapping photos and marveling:\u00a0 just a year ago, Angelique arrived in our midst; today she is an essential member of the family, this powerful pint-sized personality exquisitely packaged and growing up before our eyes.\u00a0 On the verge of walking, tossing her new red ball, laughing at her three-year-old big brother Gabriel, reveling in her moment.\u00a0 Brief as my tiny niece\u2019s time on earth has been, it\u2019s hard to even remember what the world was like before she was in it.<\/p>\n

Then: my husband\u2019s buzzing cell phone, a relentless caller, Steve finally giving in, disappearing down the hall, returning with news to whisper in my ear.\u00a0 A car crash, an eighteen-year-old girl dead.<\/p>\n

Two weeks ago, Steve gave the graduation speech at High Mowing, Henry\u2019s alma mater.\u00a0 Huddled under umbrellas, our family watched as the soaked, exuberant seniors tossed their caps in the air, whooped, and hugged one another before turning to receive congratulations from the crowd.<\/p>\n

How quickly a moment turns upon itself, from joy to grief, from light to dark, from life to death.\u00a0 How to hold, on the bright summer afternoon of a child\u2019s first birthday, the sudden, senseless death of another child, just coming into her young adulthood?<\/p>\n

You put an arm around your own seventeen-year-old son, pull him close, and give silent thanks for his life.\u00a0 You say a private, wordless prayer for a family devastated by loss.\u00a0 You see in your mind\u2019s eye a photograph of a lovely girl with long brown hair, laughing as she danced with her classmates around the May Pole.\u00a0 You try to understand how it is that such a girl, with all her life to live before her, could so suddenly be gone.\u00a0 You carry forks and plates out to the porch,\u00a0 hug your dad, and watch your kid brother, now a father of two, cook the burgers on the grill.\u00a0 You smile when your sister-in-law sweeps her beautiful children into her arms and kisses their round, fat cheeks, and you choose to spare her the day\u2019s dose of grief.<\/p>\n

All week, I\u2019ve been wondering: how are we meant to do this?\u00a0 How can we learn to carry both the preciousness of life and the inevitability of death in our hearts at the same time?\u00a0 At the end of Thornton Wilder\u2019s play \u201cOur Town,\u201d Emily, who has died in childbirth, is given the opportunity to return to earth and live one day of her life over again.\u00a0 She deliberately chooses an ordinary day, her twelfth birthday — a day of eggs and bacon cooking, sunflowers in the garden, a postcard album from the boy next door, something on the table wrapped in yellow paper that once belonged to her grandmother.\u00a0 To Emily, now an outsider looking in at the life she once took for granted, every minute detail of this long-since forgotten day is cause for delight and heartbreak.\u00a0 So clearly does she see the fleeting, ineffable beauty of what is.\u00a0 So urgent is her wish for connection, meaning, recognition.\u00a0 But her distracted mother — rushing around to get breakfast on the table and her children hustled off to school — is oblivious.\u00a0 Gently, appealing to her mother to wake up and really see her, Emily implores, \u201cJust for a moment now we\u2019re all together–Mama, just for a moment, let\u2019s be happy.\u00a0 Let\u2019s look at one another.\u201d<\/p>\n

I have read this soliloquy so many times over the years — never without tears in my eyes — that I pretty much know it by heart.\u00a0 And yet, again and again, I have to remind myself:\u00a0 Just for a moment now, we\u2019re all here.\u00a0 Just for a moment, let\u2019s be happy.\u00a0 Let\u2019s look at each other.<\/p>\n

And so on Sunday afternoon, with a\u00a0 heart full of sadness and confusion and gratitude all mixed up together, I did the best I could.\u00a0 I looked at our big extended family — my brother and sister-in-law and all her folks; my petite, feisty niece and my earnest, easy-going nephew, my own dear parents, my husband of twenty-two years, our six-foot-tall son.\u00a0 When Henry called in from his summer job in Maine, we passed the phone around.\u00a0 Three-year-old Gabriel ate the first hamburger of his life.\u00a0 Angelique tolerated her party hat. Plates were filled, food eaten, pink frosted cupcakes handed out to all takers.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh earth,\u201d Emily cries when she can bear the poignance of her visit no longer, \u201cyou\u2019re too wonderful for anyone to realize you!\u201d Turning to the wise, omniscient Stage Manager, she asks, \u201cDo any human beings ever realize life while they live it–every, every minute?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d he says quietly.\u00a0 And then, \u201cSaints and poets maybe–they do some.\u201d<\/p>\n

How I aspire to be one of those poets.\u00a0 To allow myself to know the ache of sadness, but to remember as well that life offers us good reason in each and every day to be lovestruck. To learn to see by learning to write. To \u201crealize life,\u201d as Emily would say, by truly inhabiting every moment that\u2019s granted me, without ever holding on too tight to what\u2019s already passing, changing, turning into some new, endlessly surprising present.<\/p>\n

Mary Oliver is surely our patron saint and poet both.\u00a0 Reading her words, I get a sense of what it might mean to let experience flow freely through an open heart, suffused with the tenderness of true compassion.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

T<\/span>o live in this world<\/p>\n

you must be able<\/p>\n

to do three things<\/p>\n

to love what is mortal;<\/p>\n

to hold it<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

against your bones knowing<\/p>\n

your own life depends on it;<\/p>\n

and, when the time comes to let it go,<\/p>\n

to let it go<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Happy first birthday dear Angelique.\u00a0 Peace be with you dear Abby.\u00a0 And the world spins on.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There were lots of ribbons and bows.\u00a0 But it wasn\u2019t about the gifts.\u00a0 It was about the pure, untrammeled beauty of a little girl celebrating her first birthday,\u00a0 just waking up to the pleasures of pink party hats, presents to open, a spoonful of ice cream, a bite of cake.\u00a0 We gathered round the living […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,24,31,32,33,35,40,8,14],"tags":[130,201,227,285,319,441],"class_list":{"0":"post-202","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-compassion","8":"category-connection","9":"category-grief","10":"category-healing","11":"category-impermanence-soul-work","12":"category-letting-go","13":"category-mindfulness","14":"category-parenting","15":"category-soul-work","16":"tag-compassion-2","17":"tag-grief-2","18":"tag-inhabiting-the-moment","19":"tag-mary-oliver","20":"tag-our-town","21":"tag-thornton-wilder","22":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/600x600.png?fit=600%2C600","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}