Celebrating Life
If you’ve followed my blog, you’ll know that each January my family comes up with a word for the year. Since the pandemic started, our words have been action-oriented: (build) resilience, embrace (change). This year, after mulling over several words, we settled on one that felt a little lighter and held some hope.
Celebrate.
It still requires action, like being intentional about noticing the small things worth celebrating: a beautiful sunset or getting a difficult task out of the way. It’s acknowledging the effort to try new things, learn a skill, achieve a personal goal. It’s also about speaking forth the desire to celebrate reuniting with our family in South Africa later this year.
While this might sound a little Pollyanna-ish, even to me, we’re attempting to rewire our brains to focus on the good things that can so easily get drowned out by the negativity surrounding us. My hope is that it cultivates an awareness of the present moment, an appreciation of the gems worth finding in each waking day, and the self-compassion to let the little niggles go.
We had hardly decided on the word when the whole family got struck by Covid and I developed a frozen shoulder within the first week of the new year. Hardly something to celebrate. But instead of changing the word, we decided to press in. We celebrated our quick recovery and I chose to be grateful that I found a good physical therapist.
The harder challenge this month has been accepting the passing of my friend, Hilary. She was my first friend in Austin, having moved from San Francisco at the same time we arrived from London. I remember meeting on a too-hot August day at the preschool for our then 4- and 1-year-olds. We each had a look on our face that screamed: “How the #@*% did we get here?” - something we laughed about again just over a week ago, as we repeated the phrase in disbelief of her failing body.
It is with profound sadness that I let go of my sister-friend who raised children with me, walked alongside me as we each lost a parent to Alzheimer’s, and sat next to me in coffee shops writing down the bones of our stories, Bird by Bird. We shared a love for books, for people, and for life - even with the surprising things it would throw our way, like the cancer she lived with and fought back against for eight long years.
And so, while this is probably one of the hardest things I’ve had to do, I know she would want me to celebrate the years we had together. All of them. The good ones and the harder ones. Because to celebrate is to remember, to acknowledge, to honor and there’s nothing overly optimistic about that. It is often in the wake of death that we truly see what a gift life is.