the impermanence of permanent being

Billions of years for a short stint at living. Grief is difficult without religion.

I take comfort in the familiar: day and night and soil cycles. NH3 to NO2 to NO3 to N2. Decades of life metabolized. You assimilate into the atmosphere; you integrate into other beings. Call it reincarnation. The body is a rental. The earth is not a setting; it is that which constitutes you.

I do not know about spirituality. I am not very spiritual in the cultural sense. But I know that my lola thumbed her rosary beads every morning, and I would rather her be right.

Relatives in Bicol said that she waited for the arrival of my mother on March 19th. She was still alive that dawn when my mama took the plane. I cannot imagine mama’s shock opening the door. Prayers and prayers. Her and her bible. A photo hung tilted. I prayed that afternoon even though I do not pray. A plea for heaven, a sanctuary afloat in lightness.

Grief is difficult without religion, so I cling to the old adage that energy is neither created nor destroyed.

The universe is not a setting. It is soil, stars; it is my lola. Her existence, concentrated then in Bicol, now travels, now crosses time and place, boundless, now remains everywhere.

What a beautiful experience it is to be eternal and then one; in a short period of time, become one, and then return to be infinite. For a moment, this piece of the universe has loved me, and that love transcends physicality, that love that is returned and recycled, over the wind and out into the cosmos, that love which has a name, my lola Dalen.

When before she caressed me with hands, now she will hold my face with droplets the next time it rains. She will curl as a leaf on my finger in a visit to a garden. She is air and ocean. And she is sky.

When I look up, my lola Dalen is sky.