5 years back: Ava turning 7 Since mid-May when I left my friend Marcy's bedside expecting her to die the next day, and got on a plane bound for my family's ancestral home in Italy, my life has been soaked in intensity: joy and sorrow, the simultaneous uplift and ache of conscious endings.
The work for Freedom to Marry that I've done part-time for nearly 5 years: done. The women's music festival I've been a part of for nearly 20 years: I leave tomorrow for the 40th and final Michfest. Every day I steward a small piece of Marcy's legacy as I prepare for her public memorial celebration later this summer, as I help make arrangements for her gravemarker, as I tell her story - our story - to the bereavement chaplain and the friends who are good enough to want to hear about it as often as I need to speak about it.
In the midst of these endings, I've been privileged to mark other milestones, no less rich in meaning: the 12th birthday of my goddaughter Ava, and the 80th of my father-in-law, Dean.
For the first time since I was present for Ava's birth, I missed her birthday (I was in Italy). I'm not sure 12 is a big deal for her, but it was for me. On my 12th birthday (on December 12th) I got my period for the first time, and my parents got divorced. The self-inflicted risky behaviors that serve as a proxy for the coming-of-age rites we no longer observe in our dominant culture began, for me, way too early.
Beholding my innocent Ava and imagining her now, going through what I went through at that age, brings my heart into my throat. How to protect her childhood while acknowledging the threshold on which she stands? How to honor her innocence while preparing her for the wider world?
I proposed to her moms that they allow me to take her on a trip out of town, the first without them, outside the protective bubble of their mini-van. We took the train to Seattle and bumbled our way around town on public transportation. We did a bunch of fun kid stuff - the Space Needle, a Star Wars costume exhibit, making fantasy maps at the Experience Music Project. And we had a few brief forays into topics that belong to the world of adults.
One the other end of life's fragile cord, Amber's dad turned 80. The lead-up was fraught with emotion for my spouse, an only child, as she reviewed a lifetime of family photos and plotted how to celebrate her dad. We made a book of images from his life going back several generations (including the gravestones that he and Amber have been visiting in cemeteries from Camas, WA to Roseburg, OR); presented him with magazines from the week of his birth, one for each decade; and threw him a party at our home.
Life is full and rich and good.
The work for Freedom to Marry that I've done part-time for nearly 5 years: done. The women's music festival I've been a part of for nearly 20 years: I leave tomorrow for the 40th and final Michfest. Every day I steward a small piece of Marcy's legacy as I prepare for her public memorial celebration later this summer, as I help make arrangements for her gravemarker, as I tell her story - our story - to the bereavement chaplain and the friends who are good enough to want to hear about it as often as I need to speak about it.
In the midst of these endings, I've been privileged to mark other milestones, no less rich in meaning: the 12th birthday of my goddaughter Ava, and the 80th of my father-in-law, Dean.
For the first time since I was present for Ava's birth, I missed her birthday (I was in Italy). I'm not sure 12 is a big deal for her, but it was for me. On my 12th birthday (on December 12th) I got my period for the first time, and my parents got divorced. The self-inflicted risky behaviors that serve as a proxy for the coming-of-age rites we no longer observe in our dominant culture began, for me, way too early.
Beholding my innocent Ava and imagining her now, going through what I went through at that age, brings my heart into my throat. How to protect her childhood while acknowledging the threshold on which she stands? How to honor her innocence while preparing her for the wider world?
I proposed to her moms that they allow me to take her on a trip out of town, the first without them, outside the protective bubble of their mini-van. We took the train to Seattle and bumbled our way around town on public transportation. We did a bunch of fun kid stuff - the Space Needle, a Star Wars costume exhibit, making fantasy maps at the Experience Music Project. And we had a few brief forays into topics that belong to the world of adults.
One the other end of life's fragile cord, Amber's dad turned 80. The lead-up was fraught with emotion for my spouse, an only child, as she reviewed a lifetime of family photos and plotted how to celebrate her dad. We made a book of images from his life going back several generations (including the gravestones that he and Amber have been visiting in cemeteries from Camas, WA to Roseburg, OR); presented him with magazines from the week of his birth, one for each decade; and threw him a party at our home.
Life is full and rich and good.
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