Here is a story about how life and death are so entertwined.

It's been a full weekend.  An odd weekend.  A good weekend and a devastating one all within 48 hours.  Yesterday, for instance, we celebrated the impending birth of our son with a group of friends and family.  There was joy and laughter and the all around glow that a new baby brings into the world.  It was good.

And then there is today.  Today I received the news that my friends 13 year old daughter lost her battle with cancer.  She died.  And as I pause in the writing of this, I rub my belly and feel my little son moving around in my belly, full of life.  And it's strange. 

It's always amazed me how joy and pain can be such bedfellows.  Certainly, we spend most of our days hoping to avoid the latter, yet it seeps into our lives in the sneakiest of ways, shaping relationships and bodies and circumstances.  And and I've always held to the dictum that it is our human responsibility to rise above our own personal pains in the best and most graceful ways possible.  But how do you tell someone who has just lost that which is most precious to them that they must pull themselves up by their bootstraps and carry on?  I don't think you do unless you want them to shut the door in your face and never speak to you again. 

And so I'm sad beyond belief for my friend, yet at the same time relieved that her daughter's soul is no longer trapped within the confines of her broken body.  I'm filled with sorrow, knowing that the next months and in fact years will be spent in recovery of the past two years of fighting - I know that my friend and her husband will in fact most likely never recover from having lost a child - and yet there is hope and joy in their two children who are very much alive and will go on to live, to fulfill their dreams and to dance with pain all their own.

But this pain.  It is large.  It brings up the question of why.  Why a little girl?  Why someone so innocent and not some horrid person who squandered their life?  Why did she have to suffer so much?  Why did God look down and say, "I want her back," despite knowing what wreckage it would leave behind?  I have no answers for the slew of "Why's?"  What I do know is that we live in a horribly broken world where there are many things that are not fair and we have no way of understanding.  And I suppose this is where faith comes in.

I've been recently pulled into some squabbling in these past few weeks, the effects of which have made me very tired, sad and feeling as though people have lost sight of what is important.  Another dictum I hold to be true is that we are all in charge of our own happiness...to me, a lot of that is keeping peace with those at I love.  What this event has made reinforced for me is that it is never worth not telling those that you love what is bothering you in a kind and loving manner, asking for forgiveness when necessary, trying to see their side of the story and telling them that you love them.  It disrespects those that wish they just had one more day with the person that they've lost.  So let's all do those we love a solid and communicate, shall we?

Marc and I are naming our son Dylan Thomas after the poet who left behind such a beautiful body of work when he went on to drink himself to death at the Chelsea Hotel.  One might say that our son has no where to go but up from there with that legacy behind him.  But the reason Marc and I chose the name is that we each were struck by a poem of his long before we knew one another.  For Marc it was, "Do Not Go Gently Into that Goodnight" and for me it was, "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" which I will copy here.  This poem has always struck me as being about the lust of life, of love, of adversity and hunger as well as hope and joy and that mad surreality of the world in which it all takes place.  Life will succeed no matter what is done to stop it.  This is to Jensen, who will speak beyond the grave in the souls of her parents and brother and sister who will carry her through their lives.

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead mean naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.