Solstice and Santa

My girl eats mashed potatoes ten feet away, in her own world. She pokes holes in the mound then scoops a handful and dumps it into her quarry. "Mama, wook." I turn to watch as she sucks milk off her fist. And like this, I am delivered, relieved; she lifts me into just this one moment. Because when I am not in this moment, I am two nights ago.

I sit two rows behind the mother at the funeral for a beloved fifteen-month-old baby. It is clearly night, decidedly dark out. At the church but we are in a boat, three hundred of us, the parents at the helm, catching the first crush of every bank of waves. The mother goes down every few minutes, black lacey veil ancient in the way it knows how to follow her down. Seconds later the wave hits me and I bend with her. Every racking sob, we all move as the current ripples from the core, from the altar to the balcony.

But what is it about death and the depths of suffering that simultaneously exposesthe brightest form of light?

Because at the place where I hold my breath against all out grief, I hear my child's voice next to the slow-pulled exchange of air, tight in the lungs. She says, I am here and you are my mother. Come home.

The father walks up to the pulpit, long braid down his back. He says, "My boy is gone. Every night for fifteen months I lay beside him to teach him bit by bit how to sleep alone. He finally learned it...but I haven't." And then his brother-in-law, long braid, too, walks slowly behind him. He lifts the silver shears and cuts off the father's braid. He turns and walks across the altar, placing the braid on top of the casket.

The mother goes down again; she is every mother, and I go with her, brought to that place where I realize the sensation of the tenderness of life. And this is the gift out here in the storm, so far out I can't see shore, can't remember the safety of land without the knowledge of the night sea.

So I look. I look into the recesses of loss and the gravity of love.

The mother stands and I can't believe it. She walks to the altar and bows her head to gather the energy to speak. She says, "Everyone says that having a baby rocks your world. I didn't know what that meant until I birthed this child. The morning after he was born a poem came to me, over and over I heard it in my mind. The day after he died the poem came to me, over and over in my mind. I want to share it with you."

The poem is about hearing a bird's call and how, once heard, one is never the same again. And one would not wish to forfeit that knowing, even though the bird will surely leave. And finally that we are the amazement of such a sound just by being at all.

And so.

I run around buying a zillion gifts because. I force my family to go to the mall in the rain in the middle of a work day so that River can meet Santa for the first time because. Even though Santa may be on acid?!

Happy Solstice. The light is tipping the scales in outer space as we sleep tonight. Perhaps we will dream it home by morning.