a season of endings

dying is a mean and difficult business.

we are ill equipped, most of us for that journey, despite the ubiquity and inevitability of it.

We are all, always losing someone. Whether we realize it or not.

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The red rocks are stunning. They rear up from a flat desert outline, monuments to the past. clean lines span their width, straighter than any artist’s hand could possibly draw. Each line a few human centuries thick, maybe a few feet. Their craggy faces were battere'd by some genius hand, what remains behind tells us stories, a thousand stories.

The lack tells a story too.

How many eons stretched across each face of these enduring plateaus? They keep record, as the wind, water, and time carve their beauty more clearly. A history told by what is no longer. Did someone once stand on top of you and stare out across a lush plain or river? are her bones buried in that line of sediment?

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Time comes for us all. Eventually we face the dwindling moments.

You tell me you lived a simple life. You drove a truck. You provided for your family. You listened to the radio. You did your best.

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A few floors up a baby makes the first appeal, he cries, the first time he hears his own voice. The first time he shakes the air. A mother holds her baby, sweating, exhausted, a father stares, finding a new feeling stir in his chest, not something he has ever felt before. An unbelievable love, an unconditional love blooming in what had always felt like dry ground.

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Why do we die this way? Clinging with tubes, and wires, and drips and lines, with ventilators and epinephrine to meager mortal moments? Why do we die clawing for mortality this way?

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Is there such a thiing as a simple life?

I don’t think so. The number of inscrutible mechanisms that have to deploy themselves in the exact right time and place, the incredible synchrony of your life, the exquisite timing of the symphony of your bowels, your heaving chest defies he wildest engineer’s imagination. My job is largely appreciating the millions of ways things have gone right, for you to stand here, breathing. And as a cancer smolders away inside you, beyond our capacity to heal, I recognize this over and over again.

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this dying business, it is a heavy horror. it stoops low in the corner of our lives, ever present, like the door to an attic we know exists but have never seen. a monster of stupendous terror that we have grown accustomed to by virtue of its inevitability, and ubiquity. It seems wrong, that such a marvelous thing as a life should ever have an ending. Shouldn’t a good book just go on and on? But all our favorite things are this way, beginning, middle, end.

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I speak to my mom on the phone, I saw a graph the other day, it outlined the amount of time we give to our loved ones over time. The headline was “You may have called your mom for the last time” or something terrible like that. I call my mom a lot. She jokes about death, she knows it hovers around the corner for all of us, she works in a hospital. “When I die, bury me with that Louis Vuitton purse.” Alright, mom.