I encountered a butterfly migration once, twenty years ago. I hadn't planned it. I was in Southern California for a friend’s wedding and there they were. They were all over the highway as I drove with my uncle from the airport. and they flew up out of the sea, from where I could not tell (underwater? Not possible), their wings banging hard against the air to move them, while I sat on the sand nursing a broken heart for a boy whose name I can barely recall. Forward. Up. Up. And away. That day, I wrote a letter to that boy as I felt the sun on my shoulders and the tiniest breeze built from the beating of the tiniest wings. I was so sad. And it was all so beautiful. I finished the letter and mailed it and wept.
I will never not feel this way. I will be sad, forever.
I thought.
And then, time.
Two years later I got a text from an unknown number that read, simply: Remembering Butterflies.
And I remembered the butterflies but I’d been alone on that beach and so I texted back
Who is this?
And it was the heart-squeeze-boy of that moment, who’d received the letter and kept it and thought about it for years. I’d forgotten all about him. And the letter too, if I’m honest.
Yesterday was Father’s Day. But that is not the point today.
As I type this , someone else I love is dying. I call her my West Coast Mom. She is my mother’s oldest friend (since kindergarten in Indiana in the 50’s) and she is slowly suffocating, dying of lung cancer. Standing in my mother’s living room Saturday after hearing the news that this person we love was probably beginning the process of dying my mother looked at me and said, “Other than your Uncle Marty, she is the last person I am close to who knew my parents.” And I looked at my mother’s face and knew her parents in that moment and knew I could also never know them or her or anyone really. I felt so much love for her as I read the map of her face; the story of her and her past (which is also mine and also not).
I was so sad. And it was so beautiful.
Life is. So beautiful.
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The lifespan of a Monarch Butterfly is between 2 and 6 weeks. When they flew up out of the sea (or seemed to) that long ago day, I watched them fight the wind and be buoyed by it. I watched them race the cars and be crushed against them. I watched them become specks and then nothing but memory.
Yesterday was Father's Day. May 30th marked the year anniversary of my father’s passing.
His Yarzheit. His Death Day.
Yesterday was Father’s Day but that is not the point today.
I am thinking about SueAnn (who is dying) and my mother and feeling a sadness unrelated to my father or butterflies but completely related to time and what it does and how it goes and bends and how every ending touches the beginning of something, sometimes even the beginning of itself.
A friend texted me yesterday:
Happy Father’s Day How’s your personal Father’s Day vibe?
Peaceful I wrote.
When I blink I can feel the breeze built by the beating of thousands of small wings and a twenty year old heart break and a year old grief and an inhale toward the next sad thing which is only there to remind me that I have so much love in my life and aren’t I lucky.
I will always feel this way.
Everything is everything. Life is so beautiful.