***Content note: this week’s issue mentions and quotes from memoirs about child loss. Please take care while reading.***

Hello, sweet friends. I’ve had the privilege this month of participating in a beautiful creative container for advent. The friends who created it share a prompt each day and the community of participants can choose to drop an artifact response in a shared folder. There have been paintings and photographs and videos, poetry and creative nonfiction and resource sharing. Quite simply, it has been a delight. I have surprised myself by having most of my contributions revolve around matrilineal heritage. I’ve written about my grandmother’s penchant for travel, my mother’s devotion and love of coffee, and my children. I’ve written a lot about my children. I’m still figuring out how to be a person/parent (I’m guessing this may be my lifelong work) and I’m finding that writing my process down offers immense release, healing, and discovery.

This year I’ve read two memoirs that have forever changed my perspective on both parenthood and personhood. Both are grief memoirs, both about child loss. Both devastating and profound in completely different ways. Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li was written after the second of Li’s two sons, James, died by suicide. A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney was written after his toddler son, Henry, died of brain cancer. 

You might ask why I put myself through the reading of such books. Recently I was talking to my partner about how different the world would be if we walked through it assuming we know only a sliver of strangers’ and even acquaintances' experiences. How different it might be if we truly acknowledged that everyone we meet is fighting a hard battle that we likely know nothing of and acted accordingly. How much more gentle we’d be, how much more kind, how much more forgiving, how much more tender. 

I think I read these books as an exercise in keeping my heart open to this very notion. To the painful and beautiful realities of being a human. The survival. The creation as hope that these parents engaged in by writing odes to their beloved children. To the concept of sonder.

Sonder is the profound realization that every other person in the world is occupying a life as vivid and complex as your own. When I walk through the world with this concept as my guide, I am so much more of all of the attributes I want to be. I am curious and brave and gentle and thoughtful and loving and tender and connected and kind.

Sometimes I find this easier to apply to strangers than to my own children. I forget that, as Sweet Honey in the Rock says in their poetic song, On Children, “Your children are not your children; they are the sons and the daughters of life’s longing for itself. They come through you, but they are not from you and though they are with you, they belong not to you.”

Yiyun Li embraces this concept so well. When reflecting on losing both of her sons, Li says, “It seemed to me that to honor the sensitivity and peculiarity of my children — so that each could have as much space as possible to grow into his individual self — was the best I could do as a mother. Yes, I loved them, and I still love them, but more important than loving is understanding and respecting them, and this includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives.”

This is the striving work of parenthood and personhood, I think. To love, yes, and also to understand and respect both our children and fellow humans. To give them autonomy. To recognize that they are separate from and interconnected with us. To cultivate belonging without claiming ownership. To let go again and again. To hold grief and devotion in open palms. To not cling so tightly. To remember the hard battles, seen and unseen. And, if we can, to go on living amidst it all, side by side. 

I’m so glad you’re here, going on living with me. I’m so glad you’re here, reading these words. What wild luck to have found my way into your day. What an honor to spend this time with you. Poet Ariel Yelen’s poem, Poem Toward People, reminds me of “the light pressure of an other’s existence, which in turn grows me,” and of the power of “thinking with and through people, dead and alive, without whom I’d be a different person, think different thoughts.” What a wonder to get to know you and think these thoughts with and through you. What a pleasure to grow through your presence in my life.