Something is always dying.

“It takes a minute,” I say to the mom who with a slight sheen of tears in her eyes, tells me this is her daughter’s last year of dance, and also, her son graduates this year.

We both know the feeling as mothers–that moment you know something is coming to an end and you try to soak up those last precious moments. As if to be present in the final breath of this chapter you can make up for all the moments you took for granted, but you know you can’t. It will end all the same.

I look back at her to wave goodbye as I leave the dance studio, but she doesn’t see me. She is discreetly wiping the tears with her sleeve. I feel my heart go sit beside her knowing this feeling will visit me too, maybe not so long from now. Because sometimes you know when the end is coming, and sometimes you just don’t.

I love to run under a canopy of Maple trees in my neighborhood. In the winter, when I look up into the skeletal branches bare of their leaves, I see all the nests, now abandoned. They dot the canopy like a little constellation of stars, a whole little neighborhood above my neighborhood.

It reminds me of our neighborhood, how my house is another family’s abandoned nest, and now it’s my children’s nest. I think of the woman across the street who left her house last winter in an ambulance–she had been there for decades, raised her children there. The house is sold now, a new young family moved in.

As I write this, a mama duck swims by with her five little ducklings. One stops to nibble some leaves then practically runs across the water in his haste to catch up with his mom. How quickly this will change, I think.

I am struck by the many ways and times we leave home in our lives, sometimes never to return. Other times we come back again, but we are changed and home is not the same, home is no longer home.

As I reflect on all these beginnings and endings, I am aware of both the rush and anticipation of new things coming and the grief that this time is over; that this chapter is gone. It is painful to be aware of time.

As mothers, we live through so many figurative “deaths” and new beginnings with our kids. I realize that I too have lived through many of my own deaths as a person. You could call them something else, maybe something less dramatic, but nevertheless, it’s what it feels like. It’s a loss. It often opens a door to a new place, but the loss is part of it. It’s part of developing and growing. 

I think again of that mother duck. It’s so easy to begn imagining what’s next for those baby ducks and what they will grow into. My gaze goes to the mama, and I am in awe of her. Look at you. Look at who you have become through this journey of being a mother,l. Who are you becoming now? Mothers don’t just stand still in their growth and stay steady as they raise their young, they do miraculous things and become mature people through their lives as mothers. So, as I imagine the ducklings growing up and leaving their mother, I imagine too this wise mother duck heading into new places to more fully inhabit her place in the world. 

We journey on together, apart, and interconnected always in the ways we help each other grow through the deaths we survive together.