Her Mark

I just finished writing Cora's obituary. I'm sitting here accumulating experiences I never dreamed of having. Such strange times. Meetings at funeral homes, talks about funeral services, surreal and sad discussions.

But there is a tangible state of grace around everything.

I know Cora is in my heart because although she's no longer here, she's still making me and everyone else around me feel better. Sometimes I get so overwhelmed with the void her tiny little chubby body left behind, with the need to snuggle her face, pet her hair, or get those head pats I was just experiencing and writing about a few days ago. The need to see and be seen by those eyes.

To not be able to feel her little perfectness is a sad and sinking reality.

But Cora won't let me stay there for long. Each time I feel those aches acutely, she works her way in by sending me a comment, a call, a card or a story shared from a friend. Tonight someone sent me this:

I just watched the most beautiful sight of mist and fog rolling across the sky lit up by the moon.      Cora is everywhere I look. She's part of god. I feel her.

These comments, to me, aren't just condolences. They are confirmations that Cora, a child from the spiritual world, touched and changed people, and she profoundly made her mark. They say to me that her life was large, and that it still is. That it can't be measured by normal scales like time and fairness; that her sweet soul will extend far beyond her imperfect body and its painfully limited time here.

If I could string together every comment and every sentiment that essentially said, "Cora changed me," or, "Cora made me better," I feel I could wrap the earth more than once. And each one I read makes me cry.

What a tremendous gift to have been able to stand beside a person who had that kind of impact on the world. She was such a smart little baby, she knew so much more than most of us. I can only pray she carries on using her magic on me to keep making me better, and to help me learn to live in a world that is somehow still turning without her.

I keep hearing about, and I completely agree with, the idea that happiness and sadness are the two most closely related emotions. How true it is. There has been so much joy in this entire experience. Not always laughing, happy joy, but deep and primary joy. The kind that comes from profound respect for life and the quality of beauty for which our limited language has so few words to describe.

Everyone knows what it feels like to have a moment when you teeter on the fine balance between happiness and sadness. Time stops. You feel both things leaning in on you. And in our limited human capacity, we can't stay there for long before wanting to tip the scales in one direction and just decide. Is it a happy thing? Or is it a sad thing?


But I hope one day to reach a more evolved place where I can exist in those moments with everything. All the happy, all the sad; all the pain and all the heart-bursting joy.

That's the place where Cora spent her whole life.