July

Symmetry from Everynone on Vimeo.

I don't find myself having favorites of any one thing but if I did, I believe July could end up as my favorite month out of the year, for reasons too abstract to get into right now. July of 2011, though, is proving quite melancholic. Two great artists whose work I find immeasurably great, Cy Twombly and Lucian Freud, passed on. More importantly, one of the handful of relatives I could conceivably describe as close passed on as well. The news came sudden, as these things are wont to be, and made more poignant for the fact that his death did not afford his loved ones the luxury of time for a proper farewell. Farewells are sad, and farewells without utterances of goodbyes all the more heartbreaking.

I often wonder at our amazing ability to recover from grief. In my darker hours, it seemed to me that life will never quite be the same but once emerged, life somehow always is. I suppose that's the thing about life, isn't it? That it goes on? And if we are to take the smallest token of consolation from that tenet, perhaps it is this –– that for every goodbye, there is a hello, and from death, there is life?

Dear A and family, 節哀順變.