Life And Death In The Desert – An Eternal Cycle

Spring is near. I can smell it in the air. Here in the desert, it smells of wet dust and humidity, stale wind, and decaying foliage. It’s a time when we desert dwellers feel an urgency to get outside before the oppressive heat bleeds into our lives and has us drawing our curtains by noon.

Here, winter is the time for getting outside. It’s the time when food and flowers bloom, and bird songs fill the vastness above our heads. But as the temperatures steadily rise, already hovering at 80 most afternoons, I can feel that hollow feeling that March often brings. Not exclusively about the loss of our time outdoors, the anniversary of my mother’s passing has arrived.

March 4, 2008, was a day unlike any other in my life.

It was a day that felt elongated into years and compressed like a diamond – pure, crystalized, and precious. The sting of that day, that moment when the EMT put my mom’s head down on her pillow for the last time, is less acute. Time has added layers like tissue paper around the prick of a needle. Dull as it has become, it can still draw blood.

Death for my mother was much like the feel of the impending heat of a desert summer – imminent, inevitable, woeful. Perhaps that’s why being here in our vast sandpit makes her absence feel stronger. Like the exponentially rising temperature, scorching the sand so entirely that you must hop if you’re barefoot, my mother’s years with cancer were slow yet urgent. As time progressed, cancer gathered momentum and endured relentlessly until all we could do was draw the shades and make our peace with what was to come. Perhaps the difference is that in the desert, we know winter will return.

But maybe death is more similar to the seasons than we care to believe. Perhaps the lives of our loved ones are more cyclical than we recognize. To view life beyond birth and death is to discover a much larger cycle, often too infinite for us to comprehend.

I wasn’t raised to believe in an endpoint to life, nor heaven or hell. Life was not presented as destination-driven. Instead, it was a process, a never-ending cycle. To live and die was merely the beginnings and endings of chapters and, subsequently, the beginning of another. Whether it’s true or not is moot. The point is this: 

As much as I mourn the loss of my mother every March, I also believe that it’s an impermanent loss. Nature doesn’t lie.

Still, there are times when this lengthy cycle can get the best of me. My firstborn and my mom never met, which still brings tears to my eyes. But I like to believe that she passed the baton to him as they moved, like ships in the night, from cosmos to Earth, ethereal to human. Perhaps she whispered in his ear, I’ll see you soon, little one. Enjoy your life with my daughter. She’s a hoot! Then watched him float to Earth, adjusting his tether just enough to ensure his arrival was in step with her birthday – a gift as much as it was an inevitability.

March can be a challenging month for me. There’s no candy-coating it. But when I look at my son, born the same day as my mama, it’s evident that this is just one loop in the ever-flowing cycle we call life. No parting is ever permanent, nor is any coming together. Instead of grasping for what was or wishing something else could have come to pass, I take comfort in the fact that winter will come and go. The cycles of my life are mirrored in the desert landscape, one chapter of a much larger story.

This week’s post was intentionally not recorded. Fact: I couldn’t have read this post without crying. In its place, please enjoy my mom’s favorite song, Hallelujah, by Leonard Cohen, which I cannot listen to without crying. Her favorite version was sung by Jeff Buckley. My second favorite version was sung by Brandi Carlile.