SPRING 2007
arry Chapin's song "All My Life's a Circle" is rolling through my head. Maybe it's because I'm living, simultaneously, various points along life's circle. My sister is dying of advanced pancreatic cancer. One of the poets I publish regularly in Autumn Leaves is pregnant. I have a niece who is talking about marrying her boyfriend. Someone I love dearly has just recognized he is an alcoholic and joined AA (and, no, it's not Mario).
Life's joys and life's sorrows are very much with me right now. Those joys and those sorrows have always been with me. No stage of my life has been immune from death. No stage of my life has been immune from beginnings.
I remember the birth of my younger brother. I was not yet two. I felt both intense jealousy (How dare this small person usurp my role in life?) and intense love for this tiny being. My old role (the youngest and cutest in my family) had just died. A new role (being in love with another human being) had just been born.
I faced death at four. A woman I knew died giving birth to a premature baby, who also died. I felt more puzzled than sad, as I looked at the bodies, awed by their stillness. I knew, with absolute certainty, that the woman who had sung songs to me was not lying there in that casket. I did not know where she was exactly, although I sensed her form somewhere in the air around me. I knew, even at that young age, that this, too, was a beginning.
But even though life often seems a revolving circle, it is really more of a spiral, and its moments are always, to some extent, unpredictable. I do not know where my sister will go after she dies. I have learned over the years to walk a ways on the other side with the dying. So I shall see my sister's greeters as she crosses over; but knowledge of the path she follows on the other side will, inevitably, be shrouded in darkness. I do not know where life will lead that baby that is coming, although I will probably hear of her first steps and her first teeth. I do not know if my niece will marry this young man or not.
Not all of my life is even on the outside of the circle or the spiral. My sister, my niece, my husband, my friends, with their own revolving lives, all live, not on the rim of the circle of my life, but at the core, at that still point where I hold them forever, through birth and death and change, inside the center of my love.
Sondra Ball
Clerk, Salem Quarterly MeetingRETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Sunday, March 04, 2007 at 11:12 PM
