fragility

Natasha Richardson died on Wednesday. Surrounded by her family, her children, her husband, her mother. In the hospital. Although she really was dead from the moment she fell and hit her head - surrounded by snow, and mountains, and trees. Things beautiful. That is really when she died.

That is how we all die - surrounded by beauty. That is how we live, too. I'm not sure who made the rules, who wrote the specific parameters of our existence, but I think we need a re-write. On most days, I can avoid the sad drumbeat of mortality, surrounded as I am by people who love me, and wonders amazing.

But, death has been insistent this week, and will not rest until I give him his due. The grim reaper is persistent it would seem. So, the cost of admission to death's tea is the pit in my stomach, the gripping in my throat. It is the sensation of fragility, as if this world were only an ice sculpture - magnificent and lovely - but doomed in spite of the great beauty.

I try so very hard to ignore the coming comeuppance. I try to focus on the blue elephant in the room, so I can ignore the pink one. But my peptides and my hormones today are relentless. I am grieving.

I grieve for Darfur and for the child in public housing who sleeps on the floor to escape the nightly bullets. I grieve for rape and plunder, and ash ponds that overwhelm rivers and spread deadly toxins in once pristine meadows.

I grieve for addicts and felons, for physically unattractive people who will live and die alone because of a shallow culture that sees only beauty on the outside, and cannot see the inner wonders of a loving heart.

I grieve for me, for my children whom I love. We will all die. Hopefully, none of them will precede me - and hopefully my time comes peacefully and after a life well lived.

But there are no guarantees. It is all so tenuous. It is all so fragile. And like the newborn wings of the butterfly, or the frost painted on the winter window, I suppose it is the fragile beauty that makes it all so precious.

Today, in spite of sorrow, I will meditate on that fleeting and wonderful beauty.