May 17th
Death teaches us how to live.
Every year on Luca’s birthday, we take our three girls out to each pick a gift for themselves. They love it and we love getting to honor Luca by bringing more joy into our family. This year, both the girls’ Grammy and aunt are each going through some tough medical stuff, and so—upon Willa’s suggestion—the girls decided to pick out a big gift for them, instead. Luca means “bringer of light,” and I am reminded, time after time, of the light he continues to bring. The fact that our young daughters think about others on a day that has traditionally been about themselves (well, their brother, but has, in proxy, become about themselves and receiving), makes me smile.
For TJ and myself, Luca’s day is about giving, and this year it was also about giving for our daughters. Death teaches us how to live. Teaches us that death isn’t an ending after all. Teaches us that light shows up in places we had thought were only ever going to be dark.
Anyway, I shared this on social media, but wanted to share the words I wrote for Luca this year here, as well.
May 17th.
There is a dog chewing on a toy to my right, another dog sleeping at my feet. My three daughters are playing downstairs. TJ is in the other room on the computer, organizing all the snippets of music I’ve written and sent his way over the years (both sides of his brain fire away and I am so in love).
I woke up this morning knowing, knowing, knowing it’s Luca’s birthday. It’s like I swallowed an ember that burns with the knowledge of this day. There was a time I thought my existence would always be the earth, circling the sun of Luca’s life and death. And when my therapist told me that someday Luca’s presence in my life would make me smile, I thought she was full of it. Super kind and encouraging, but no more a soothsayer than my own grief. And when my grief was new, it loudly told me otherwise.
Turns out, Luca helps to comprise the sun in my life—but not his death, necessarily. Him. How he is with me.
Recently, I got to meet a beautiful woman who lost her daughter full term, also born sleeping. We have mutual friends, and I have prayed for her from a distance, but had never spoken to her until now. I got to tell her about Luca, about the co-destiny I share with him, about how social scientists have proven a phenomena known as bouncing forward. Rather than the best case scenario being to simply claw our way back to how we were before grief and loss, walking through grief can actually catapult our hearts into greater resilience, compassion, grit, love, vision, and clarity.
And I smiled when I told her about Luca. (Apologies to my therapist, who was right.)
My heart aches for Luca. It is not fine that he isn’t here in the way he should be. And I am well. The ache in my bones reminds me that this world is broken. It makes the suffering around me—on the news, over there and over here—a sort of mirror. We are all here, and here can be really terribly hard sometimes.
Also, the joy. It continues to confound my decision that life is unbearably hard. Because there are these ridiculous flowers-that-bloom-out-of-the-city-cracks moments. Gosh, when I get to make music. When my entire body is given over to a beat, to a rhythm that must have been similar to what God used to first coax every living thing awake—I am so deeply alive. When my girls are close, having crawled into my bed in the morning, before the day has reminded us of anything but each other. When TJ is my home, no matter where we are. When I get to witness my friends, strangers—all of us—discover the weight of our value, the kind of love that makes me believe in God and anchors my soul to hope.
When grief beckons, it’s okay to answer. Life demands it. It’s okay to feel the softness of our own finite selves, to trace where we end. I have found God in this place. I have found others here, too, binding themselves to me in ways that have felt like resurrection. And when joy comes—well, like Mary Oliver wrote, If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it.
Give into it. Joy does its sacred work, too. Right alongside grief. Right alongside all the days in between that don’t feel particularly deep or clever or break-through-ish, but are soul-making as well.
Happy birthday, Luca. I am grateful to be yours. Until I see you, this remains: I will see you soon.
My book, Monochromatic Heart, is a journal I kept through that time.