Today’s theme is birth and death.

A whole bunch of birthdays to celebrate today: my dad's, my brother's, a friend in Wyoming's, the beautiful Rev. Martin Luther King's, and my former husband's. (Love and Cheer!)

We celebrated my dad’s birthday in my mother’s room at the nursing home. Now, from the moment of conception, we are all speeding along on the path to death; my mother is just farther along. Her body is clenched up, her hands and feet like crab claws. She is oozing from tears in her fragile skin, deteriorating before our eyes. Her wastes escape her without control. Fortunately, she seems to feel no pain now, and even expresses some sense of humor. My dad spoonfed her vanilla ice cream today. Yesterday, she was neither eating nor drinking.

I've thought I’d rather keep company with newborns than people approaching death. But during these months, I’ve met a number of people, people beautiful in their dying. Something is clearly blooming from the ruins of the shell. Perhaps their souls are less obscured by the trappings of the body.

Just as something is blooming from the painful contortions of a mother in labor, something is blooming in my mother.

Many have expressed this before me: Birth and death; transitions, not endings…

That's not to say there haven't been plenty of bouts of tears regarding the changes in this one body we have known through our lives…

Here’s a link my sister sent me that perhaps connects to this theme:

People in Order

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUHLa1qSy24