Our trip to the ocean was delayed a bit by bad weather, so we finally got there today (2/22/15) instead of his birthday (2/17/15). We stopped for lunch first, at a Mexican restaurant, and got fried ice cream with a birthday candle, for tradition's sake. We blew it out together. But I felt pulled to the ocean for this celebration of life, and didn't really understand why until we got there. The vastness of the ocean as a symbol made sense...as he is our star-child, dancing among the celestial realms in a vastness I cannot comprehend. So we went.
When we arrived there was a calmness. A silence in the roar of the ocean. And it all suddenly felt right...the salty water, holding all the tears of all the women who have ever lost a child in all of time...held there together by a common sorrow and a common witness to their lives, their importance. I read off a short list of names of babies gone too soon. (We've all been touched it sometimes seems.) The pull and release of those magnificent waves, slow and steady, like grief and joy: one so completely dependent on the other to be understood fully. There was peace there, and motion, the past and the future and hopes and sorrows and all the complicated messiness of life held into something quite simple. There were several lighthouses within view of that little cliff, all promising to guide us home, to help us navigate a difficult journey.
We cried, and huddled together in the face of the salty wind, a family bound by love.
We laughed and chased bubbles and Scarlet squealed with delight at the flock of birds, and the clouds glimmered in the sun and the snow was blinding.
All that space felt so intimate, like a small chapel hidden in the woods, empty and smelling of cedar and old books. Those smells make me think of Orion, and I can't explain why. Or how those smells were there, on this winter cliff overlooking the ocean. Or how those smells were there the night he was born in that antiseptic hospital room. But somehow they belong to him. And he was there with us, our little family of five.
