This year I learned about life.
This year, I saw life come firsthand, and I’ve been watching it leave. I have felt it come in like a lion, roaring, and witnessed it going out like a lamb—softly, slowly. I have felt its fragility, its heaviest weight in the form of a feather-light 6 lb 1 oz baby placed on my chest. I felt it before that, even, when that 4 lb baby’s growth wasn’t keeping pace and had to prove to us it was still content inside of me, its little heart pumping and arms and legs kicking about in weekly appointments with a band around my belly. We’d breathe out in relief, and slowly hold our breath again for the next seven days. Well, 6 lb 1 oz Life roared in on April 23rd, ethereally weightless in love and light and yet the heaviest, forever-burden I’d ever carry on my heart.
I learned life can be paper thin and fleeting in the breeze without a weight to hold it down. Sometimes the fear and dread of losing it can feel as real as loss itself. What grows doesn’t grow forever. People who’ve never fallen fall. And old lives suddenly remind us of new lives again—needing to be carried, held, fed. Life is seeing the colors bloom and fade like seasons, and watching the shapes change, the sounds morph.
A fleshy little chest covered in velvety skin and rolls that mimic little biceps. Eyelids striped with new blue veins. Flushed cheeks that redden in blotches with the cold and turn pink after a full meal and a nap on a chest. Flailing arms and legs that kick and toes that wiggle. Soft, wet lips that sit in a perfect, rose colored bow. Every breath is full and content and the rise and fall of a belly is enough and is everything. A sign of tomorrow, a sign of getting bigger, air that harbors life and feeds growth. Bright blue eyes and a voice so high and light it dances as it comes out of those little lips.
Pale, soft, thin gray hair. Legs that move slowly, intentionally, and hands that shake. Clothes that hang on bones like a coat hanger, suspended from frail shoulders. Lived-in skin that’s housed a body for a lifetime of lifting and moving and carving and painting and thinking. I watch my Grandpa’s breaths rise and fall too, but in his chest, and the breaths are long and tired and full of a lifetime of breaths. Full of books and gin and laughter and hot meals and wood dust and garden soil and river wind and dark winter morning snow. And for now, their rise and fall is a sign of tomorrow. I hope the breaths are at peace, I hope they’re proud, I hope they’re ready. Bright blue eyes. Bright blue eyes that smile and love and drift in and out of sleep.
A few weeks ago, Jon asked me if it makes me scared or sad that Grace is going to grow up in a world so different from the one we grew up in. No, I said. Because the greatest joys of my life have revolved around the people I have loved with all my heart, and Grace will be able to have that. It doesn’t matter what the world looks like otherwise—she’ll be able to experience laughter and genuine, overwhelming, heart-swelling joy with people she loves and who love her back. My Grandpa and Grandma have given me that from as far back as I can remember, and when I count my blessings, I count them a million, trillion times over and the love could still never be quantified.
This year has been about love and life and losing and the blue eyed babies of 1933 and 2019, born a day apart, who will roar in my heart forever.