The Cycle of Special Occasions

First there’s the cycle of children’s birthday parties and Bar/Bat Mitzvahs. Then graduations and weddings.

Then comes the funerals.

The final cycle is underway—the stage of life where you start losing your peers to natural causes. We just bid last goodbyes to a wonderful and dear friend, Louise Taub—a beacon of radiant love in life and in death.

It’s a very sobering experience. Not just the loss, but being faced with owning the fact that the last quadrant of life’s journey has indeed arrived. Also, needing to come to full acceptance that a multitude of things that I always assumed I would do just aren’t going to be happening.

On the other hand, it can be very liberating. I can—in a way that I never could before—focus on being unadulterated Me—and on having the present count for more than it ever has.

Louise, if I’m authentically going to honor you and give witness to your brilliant light, then I’ll need to dwell in this possibility for liberation rather than in the might-have-beens.