"I am not my wound, or my defense of my wound. I am my journey."- James Hollis

I was taken by surprise by the depth of my grief on my elder daughter's birthday yesterday. It is impossible to celebrate one child without the other children also welling up in the heart: every mother knows this.

I did not mention it until she did, then we briefly noted that this, too, has brought what we call a Corey moment.

it was so important that our beloved family friend Heather had made the drive up from another city.

Driving home after the homemade meal and cake and presents for Julia, and of course Corey remembrances, right in front of me in the sky a yellow falling star arcing slowly, earthward.

It is still so real and so unreal, especially when we look at photographs from our visit last year with Corey.

The only way out of this is through expansion, as Lucy McIver points out in Pendle Hill pamphlet #340, which I discovered last night at the local Quaker meeting. It waited patiently in the "free" pile, which is next to the "lost and found" pile, and the only reason I now have the pamphlet is because I spotted my gloves, which I did not know I had lost.

"We fear the place after death," McIver writes, in her essay, A Song of Death, Our Spiritual Birth: A Quaker Way of Dying. "We forget to ask what was before birth. And failing to approach those unknowns, we generally limit our perceptions of how full and powerful life can be. Our awareness can be expanded, however, as we worshipfully gather with others in these sacred events."

I am better...for the most part. But then comes a wave out of nowhere, forcing me down into the pit of an unanswerable question: why aren't you here?"

For that there is no cure, no salve.

And so I look to the falling glory of early November mountain scape, drenching in beauty amidst the pain of loss.