Life/Death

There's a line in the movie Elizabethtown when the main character--who's in town for a funeral and ends up in the hotel room next to a 3-day wedding bash--is comforted by the drunk groom, who feels quite badly about the main character's predicament. "Life and death, death and life...right next door to each other," is what the groom says. Which is sometimes exactly how it happens.

M became a first-time uncle this week. Yesterday, to be precise. If you knew M at all, you'd know that he has been waiting for this his whole life. In other baby news, one of his best friends was set to become a first-time dad this week, only tragedy struck the delivery, and his friend's wife passed away during childbirth. One can't help but cry at hearing stories like this, because even if you didn't know the family, there is now one more wifeless man in the world. One more baby who will never know his mother.

And so I left work early yesterday to accompany M to the wake of his friend's wife, P. P & C had only been married for just over a year, and I'm not sure if the brand new baby makes me feel better about the situation or worse, but I don't think anything could have really prepared me for how awful I would feel seeing this broken man standing in front of his wife's open casket.

From the wake we headed straight to the hospital where we were able to hold M's brand new niece, sweet baby A. I guess the contrast of it all is what ultimately did me in. Or maybe no one can really be expected to take in so much on the emotional spectrum in such a short amount of time, but by the time I was alone with my thoughts on the way home, I began to weep. Because life is horrible. And life is wonderful. You just don't know which one you'll get on any given day. And sometimes that seems like too much of a gamble. Yet other times it seems totally worth it.