I am currently on the drive back home from a weekend spent celebrating the life of one Linda Dunn. A wife, mom, librarian, and lover of New Mexico and its culture. Her runway with us was short when she was diagnosed with dementia. As a friend put it to me yesterday, “Dementia takes them before they’re even gone. It’s like you lose them twice.” 

While we gathered and celebrated her life with us, the familiar path that rises during such times appeared, asking What am I making of this life? How will I be remembered? These are questions I hope all of us ask ourselves in the midst of a busy, chaotic life.

When the dishes and mess surrounding us feel more important than setting out the blanket in the backyard against a setting sun, and plopping our chubby baby down to just be. Allowing the seven-year-old to run around us with a friend, and breathing in the very existence we are given here and now.

It was also during this weekend that I found myself sitting in a Catholic Mass, listening to the priest guide people through the Eucharist. The one thing in Christianity and Catholicism that does not lose its meaning — no matter the schism — the body and blood of Christ given over for us and to us.

And at that moment, I held my nursing baby against my chest. My very blood used, extracting nutrients from my bones and being, to give him life. I stood in a stillness knowing, actually, it’s women who do this. And we do this every good God damn day and night to sustain, protect, and give life. I had to wonder, that perhaps really, this is a riddle from Jesus to all the women who keep the world turning over pages to itself, generation after generation.

While I’m not necessarily a Bible gal any longer, one of my favorite verses is when Jesus was born and the Shepherds went their way, it is written that Mary “treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.” I think it speaks to the quiet, meditative work of mothering. She knew what was to come and held tight. My guess is then, before the chaos, she lifted her son to her chest and fed him.

I thank Aunt Linda for that stillness, to be reminded that when one woman leaves us, another is giving and enduring. And reminding us all that death comes with a lot of our own reflection. Through and through.