Dear Maria,
Rain and cold, rain and cold, rain and cold is the story for
now. Sometimes a little more of one and less of the other, or more of both. Wrestling
with the season’s weather, I guess, is a matter of temperament. The winter
birds edge back this way when we see a slight warming, and then off for points
south they go with a new cold front. Around here, often a bright sun
accompanies the coldest day. Lighted with false fire, I suppose.
In the past few weeks, I was reminded of when Shakespeare’s
King Claudius lamented that sorrows often come not singly but in battalions,
but we learned of late that a single sorrow is grief enough. So many friends
and family members took a deep thrust to the heart this Christmas season.
I was reminded, too, even if in so very much a different
context, of when Macduff, impatient for news from his home in Scotland, asked, “What concern they? The general
cause, or is it a fee-grief due to some single breast”.
Our drawing
together for a memorial service—although each one of us there with our own particular
emotions, our own set of memories—allows us to bear witness to a very singular
element of our humanity, our physical mortality. We take pains to comfort one another,
and we say by our very presence at such a time, “Look, as you are wounded, so
too are we”.
Perhaps we also assemble
as we do because we know the time will come when the slings and arrows of
personal loss will strike us a hard blow and the gathering of friends and
family to embrace our sorrow will ease our burden to a degree.
The general
cause, or a fee-grief? Ross, the bearer of horrific news for Macduff, gets it
right, I think: “No mind that’s honest but in it shares some woe…”.
And then we
awake to a new day, a new month. A new year. I read we are picking up two dozen
seconds more daylight with each sunrise, and out front the Easter elm, as I
call it, holds most of its leaves still green.
May you and your
family be blessed throughout this new year.
Yours, srk
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