in this season of quiet, I am grateful to be a guest on the mudroomblog.com today, sharing a post that uncovers the magic of my season on the Sound this year………….
sandwich generation
December 7. Pearl Harbor Day.
On this day, 77 years ago, the day that would live infamy, bombs stormed over Pearl Harbor.
Several hours later, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.
My Father was a Philippine Scout being trained under the command of the United States Army at Fort Stotsenberg the day that Japanese fighters appeared in the sky, firing over troops that had only few hours earlier received word about the attack on Pearl Harbor.
“The bombing and raiding of Fort Stotsenburg and Clark Field within hours of the raid on Pearl Harbor went virtually unnoticed by the average person in the United States. The attack occured at little after noon, while all our planes—the bombers and P-40s—were lined up in a row on Clark Field. Finally after what seemed like hours of bombing and strafing, everything became quiet, except for the cries and screams of the wounded lying intermingled with the dead all over the field. The history books associate Pearl Harbor withe “the day of infamy,” but for those of us in the Philippines it was our day of infamy also.” Lester I. Tenney, My Hitch in Hell, pg 21
I visited Pearl Harbor last month, gaining a greater appreciation why, growing up, my father would announce on this day, “Today is December 7. Pearl Harbor Day.”
Scratching the surface these past months of my father’s written records of the military service he never verbalized, I understand now why he was quiet. Why he was silent. What visages must have remained in his dreams and memories that haunted him.
How much in meant, in December 1946, one year after World War II was over, that my father was granted citizenship to the United States of America for his service during the war and for surviving and escaping the brutalities of the Bataan Death March.
It is because of his sacrifice that his name lives on, BERMUDEZ, here in the United States of America, even through three grandnephews who carry on his service today as officers in the United States Army and the United States Air Force. To you, Julian Bermudez, Michael Ishida, and Chris Ishida, I commend you for carrying the service that my father began. He would be so proud to see you commissioned as officers in the United States Armed Forces.
It is because of his sacrifice that our family and extended family live here today, educated in major universities, bearing the college degree that he never received but always dreamed of for ourselves and our children.
Yesterday his youngest grandson stood along the train tracks in College Station, Texas, to witness the train of the 41st President of the United States, George H. W. Bush, roll past, carrying his casket on its way to his final resting place at the George Bush Library on the campus of Texas A&M.
President Bush’s service as a naval pilot in the Pacific, and my father’s service as an artillery man on the front lines of Bataan made them both part of the Greatest generation.
Next week my father’s youngest grandson will graduate from Texas A&M University, awaiting admittance into medical school.
After his graduation ceremony our family will pay tribute on the library grounds to the 41st President of the United States.
But my son’s graduation from college will be a tribute to the sacrifice and dreams of his grandfather.
SGT Jesus C. Bermudez received the Gold Congressional Medal of Honor for his service during World War II on April 15, 2018
A tribute to my father……
I am grateful to share my father’s and my family’s story as a guest blogger on granndparentslink.com
I am even more grateful for the legacy my parents have left to our family and our children.
Please join the link https://www.grandparentslink.com/experts-corner/a-fathers-day-tribute/
Messy Edges….Lola’s story in print available today!
Lola, as my mom is lovingly known (Lola means “grandmother” in Tagalog), celebrated her 94th birthday last weekend. The greatest tribute I could give my mother is to write a story about her beautiful heart. On her birthday I had the honor of presenting for the first time an essay entitled “Messy Edges” at the Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This story briefly encapsulates the beauty and the heartbreak of caring for my mother in my home for eight years, and the release I found during that time through the gift of watercolor painting. The essay is published in an anthology entitled, The Wonder Years, 40 Women over 40 on Faith, Aging, Beauty and Strength, edited by my dear mentor and friend Leslie Leyland Fields.
(excerpt from “Messy Edges)
My mother is still with me as I write this. Today, I stop when she notices a red geranium, just like the ones she used to have outside her home.
“What flower is that, Mom?” I ask her.
She looks at it and smiles. “Geranium,” she whispers.
She smiles and time stands still. She pushes me to see beauty and wonder in every small thing, as if for the first time. My mother, even in her illness, gives me this gift, this gift of seeing. When I paint, these are the moments I try to capture. A field of sunflowers, a field of lavender. I try to keep the colors pure and vibrant on the paper, not muddied. I try to use brushstrokes that remain fresh and lively, not overworked. For previously I was holding on, too tightly, to the brush, to mom’s health, to life, afraid to loosen the grip, to lose control of the things I could not control. Now I understand that beauty unfolds in the letting go, in allowing the messy edges to bleed.
My story is one of many, glimpses into the lives of 40 women and the firsts, lasts, and always moments they have experienced during this season of life. I am honored to have Lola’s story tucked between authors I admire such as Ann Voskamp, Elisabeth Eliot, Madeline L’Engle, Luci Shaw, Brene Brown, Lauren Winner and Jill Kandel. Each story is beautifully crafted, leaving the reader with a takeaway that could make you laugh out loud, cry, or sigh in relief knowing someone else shares your voice.
The greatest joy of this story is the hope and strength I have received in being able now to transform a difficult time in my life and my family’s life into a place of encouragement to others along the same journey.
Please pick up your copy of The Wonder Years today on Amazon. If you need more convincing, please check out Lola’s promotional video below! I had the privilege of reading it out loud to her, and she wholeheartedly approves.
“What more important, Lola? Faith, Beauty or Strength?”
“All of them,” she says with a smile.
Ina: Generations of Mothers
She raised a generation of daughters. And they in turn are raising another generation of daughters and sons.
The concentric circle extends even father outward, as she was the “Tita”, the aunt to an extended generation of daughters, her nieces, whom she raised as her own and even more significantly, brought them here to the United States. She continues to be the matriarch and mother figure for decades of lifetimes beyond their own, to their children’ children, even as she lies in her hospital bed, the place where her nieces and sister gather around her now.
The strength of my mother’s love reaches past borders and generation, touching lives even as she lies still, her left side paralyzed, her heart still as full and loving now, smile filling her entire face.
During this gathering of my cousins and aunt we shared a weekend of tears, hugs, laughter, and our favorite Filipino food, Kare Kare (oxtail soup), my aunt’s specialty. When my mother was admitted to hospice several weeks ago I had asked them to come to see her. Her Alzheimers was taking its toll on her memory and she was losing weight rapidly.
“Please come see my mother,” I asked them.
And they did. They travelled from the other coast to be here. My mother’s only surviving sister of nine siblings, at 87, came to be at her side. My cousins, two the daughters of this sister, and one, the daughter of my mother’s younger beloved sister who passed away two Mother’s Day ago, with Alzheimer’s.
Together we leafed through old black and white photographs. Since they were raised in the Philippines and I was born here, my cousins knew so many details of the family’s life that I did not. Our bedside visit became a story telling session of our family’s past.
We pick up a photo of our grandmother. She is dressed in her best Filipino embroidered gown, a “terno”. Her waistlength grey hair is wrapped in her signature bun on top of her head. On the back of the photo in her very best writing, she writes this:
Dear Bing and Jessie
This picture was taken in inside the house with my appliances.
Your loving mother,
Filomena C. Bermudez
My cousin Carina explains to me that our grandmother was the queen of the province where she lived in the remote farmland of the Philippines. She was the only one with electricity, with appliances- an electric fan, a refrigerator, a radio, a television. Carina remembers the neighbors peeking into the window of the concrete block house, the biggest one on the street, to get a glimpse of the television working, a novelty back in the 1970’s.
My father would send his mother money to purchase these appliances from his meager salary as a food service worker at the Veteran’s Hospital. He was a veteran himself, 24 years in the US Army, a retired sergeant who had risked his life as Philippine Scout to escape from the Bataan Death March in World War II. My father, an enlisted man who fought on the front lines of the Korean War, would be so proud to know that Carinas’ sons now serve as officers in the US Army and Air Force, one as a major and one as a lieutenant as well as other cousin’s son, one who bears his name, Bermudez, a major in the Army.
These sons of Carina were taught by my mother how to read. They had just come to this country, and I remember my mother, a former third grade teacher, sitting on the couch reading our favorite children’s books, Where the Wild things Are and Curious George to these sons who are now officers serving our country.
Carina leans over the bed to my mother. She whispers, “Thank you, Tita Bing, thank you for teaching my sons to read. Thank you for all you have done for us to have a good life in this country.”
Carina’s sister, Marlene, turns to me. “I don’t like seeing your mom like this,” she cries. “She is the strong one, she is the one who did everything for us. She is the one who would make our favorite food and we would all eat at her house. Her house was the gathering place for us.”
Her mother sits quietly by mom’s beside. There are no words between them, only a smile and grasping of hands
We pick up a photo of our mother’s mother. Veiled and stoic, hosting the same eyes and my mother, she is receiving an award from their priest at their parish. I know this now because my cousin reads out loud the back of the photograph written in Tagalog in my grandmother’s handwriting. At the end of the paragraph she signs in script, “Ina”.
“What does that mean?” I ask Carina.
“Mother.”
Yesterday, the day we celebrate mothers, the great granddaughter of these grandmothers who lived in provinces in a country 10,000 miles away hosted a Mother’s Day Filipino Brunch in honor of these mothers. She prepared food native to our country in a city, Seattle, known for its foodies. Her heritage menu was promoted in a local magazine as one of the Nine Best Mother’s Day 2017 Brunches in Seattle.
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As the circle of mothers and daughters extend further out so does the gathering around the table, not only including family, extending to guests. The tradition of welcoming and gathering with food and laughter ripples out through the generations.
The center of this outward circle is not forgotten
My cousin Grace leans over to say good bye with tears and words of gratefulness for all my mother has done.
“Thank you Tita, for bringing my family here, for taking care of us, for giving us the chance fo a new life here. We love you Tita Bing.”
The cousins gather around her to sing a song, a Filipino love song that was the favorite of my mother and father. Although the names of my cousins are barely recalled, the words of this beloved song are not forgotten.
“Dahil Sayo”.
Dahil sa’yo (Because of you) Nais kong mabuhay (I want to live)
Dahil sa’yo (Because of you) Hanggan mamatay (for the rest of my life)
Dahil sa’yo (Because of you) Ako’y lumigaya (I’ve become happy)
Ang lahat sa buhay ko’y (Everything in my life is)
Dahil sa’yo (Because of you)
A Bloom from dark places
We are in the midst of a drought here in Florida, all grass and flowers withering and crumbling here.
I see my friend’s peonies blooming in rich North Carolina soil, these blooms, full and beautiful, for a brief but lovely season.
And on this May Day, where we celebrate bloom
I celebrate this blossom, a dance choreographed by my daughter
Who during her young pre-teen and teen years observed the slow withering of life as her grandmother, my mother, lived with us and the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.
She named this piece “Help”.
Out of the years of watching her beloved grandmother decline, and our family’s growth in caring for her, and out of her co-choreographer’s mission trip to an orphanage in India this piece was born.
How lovely this bloom flowers from parched and dark places.
“Help” Choreographer: Lauren Mogg
Baylor Dance Company
God knows what is hiding in this world of little consequence
Behind the tears, inside the lies
A thousand slowly dying sunsets
God knows what is hiding in those weak and drunken hearts
I guess the loneliness came knocking
No one needs to be alone, oh save me
People help the people
and if you’re homesick, give me your hand and I’ll hold it
People help the people
Nothing will drag you down
Oh and if I had a brain, Oh and if I had a brain
I’d be as cold as stone and rich as the fool
That turned, all those good hearts away
Birdy
Songwriter: Simon Aldred
People Help the People Lyrics
Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
Flowers by Bev Walker, A Loose Leaf Life
Message in the Sky
I rise above on metal wings.
Rise above this broken earth
Fractured and shattered.
The craft moves upward
Away from anger, pain and protest
Grief, and forgetting, my mother’s disease.
Pulled into the greys of heaven
clouds and mist and vapor.
Behind it trails the dawn
The beginning of a new day
The gradual warming of earth’s tent
From greys to pinks to orange.
We soar along horizon’s line
Away from dawn, westward
from here the daunting now appears
Insignificant, small.
Land recedes, gives way to gulf waters
The blue of waters reflect the blue of skies above
A layer of mist hovering between
Above the blue
As if a heavenly artist took one stroke
One brush of his hand
A message
half a heart
In vapor, in white on a blue canvas sea.
What message does this half a heart bear?
Unfinished?
Incomplete?
Or is the remnant of a broken heart? Half empty from grief and pain and sorrow?
The half heart remains floating above the gulf waters. A message in the sky.
The remaining journey attempts to answer that question.
Half hearted?
Or broken hearted?
He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God. Issac Newton
On this journey across the country I see the remnants, the attempts for us to be like God, constructing our own universe, power, the windmills the towns laid out in perfect grids, the farmland, from the sky, perfect circles. The network of connection of roads and highways sometimes singular across a vast nothing, sometimes a puzzle of roadways. All connectors. All looking for connection. The towers reaching to the sky to send signals. The skyscrapers stair stepping upward.
Beyond the cities and towns, a single peak, snow capped, tapping heaven, then sloping down into a valley that breaks out into a river, then a canyon, then a desert. This vastness that is this land. The land our forefathers traversed at first by foot or horseback centuries ago. The land our forefathers traversed in search of a new life and new horizon. This country of promise.
My father came to this country, decades ago, standing on the deck of a freighter. He earned his entrance into America fighting on foreign soil, a soldier in the Philippine Scouts during WWII. He survived the Bataan Death March. He survived the Korean War.
As he approached the port of entry spanned by the Golden Gate Bridge, he spoke to his young daughter, my sister, of the promise of this land, of the promise of America. “We will have a good life here in America,” he said to her as they crossed underneath the great orange arches.
My plane lands a few hours south of where my father first entered this country, Monterey Bay, where a Filipino taxi driver takes me to my hotel. He is from the same area in the Philippines as my father. He speaks his language. He has been in this country 17 years. He speaks proudly of his daughter, who is going to college. He has my father’s dream, that his children get a degree. He has my father’s name. Jessie.
I see my father’s face in the ones of those who work here at the hotel. My father, who was a laborer after his 24 years of service as a sergeant in the US Army. My father who could could only dream of staying at a seaside resort. My father who labored so his children could dream.
Over the waters the next morning, perhaps one hundred miles south of the port my father first entered this country over sixty years ago a rainbow reaches from end to end. Not just one, but two. A double rainbow over the grey blue pacific waters.
Promise. The rainbow.
These days it can mean so many things
But originally the bow
Was set in the clouds as a promise
That God would never flood the earth again
Despite our turning away.
“And God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come. I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth.” Genesis 9:13
A sign of promise.
A sign of hope.
My father crossed the sea to enter this land just miles from the span of this rainbow. He came here to hope. He came here to fulfill promise.
My promise now to him is to care for his widow
The woman he brought here years ago torn from her homeland and mother and family
To start a new life in the land of promise.
I will care for her
And the memories she can no longer recall
Of a life, a home, a car, a family started here in this country.
I will care for my father’s grandchildren
The ones who now live the life he only dreamed of
Who carry degrees from universities and live in cities and towers from coast to coast.
Who pursue education and the hope of helping others in a world that greatly needs help.
And as my mother fades she too will join him.
And they will live in the legacy of their children and grandchildren
Who live out the promise they began
Perhaps broken
But not half hearted.
.
Measured by the moon.
The moon hangs like an orb, suspended in the sky. Weightless. Floating. Full.
As if it does not carry the weight of measuring time and days as it brightens the dark sky on its descent into a new day.
This day it drops into is my birthday. Another measure of time, in years. A span of 365 risings and falling of the moon, marking 56 times today.
But the one who gave birth to me that day 56 years ago does not remember.
For her time is still, only measured in present. No before or after moments. Only now.
At times it is a gift, this only present moments. There is no sorrow about the past. No worries about the future. Alzheimer’s has taken away time consciousness. Perhaps it is not thievery. Perhaps it is freedom.
Time is suspended as I sit beside her bedside now, stroking the soft, thin folds of her hand in mine. I move for her this hand and arm, the one she cannot move, rendered still from a stroke months ago. She moves the other gracefully to the beat of an old Filipino song, O Ilaw:
Oh light, in the dark night
You’re like a star in the sky
Oh light in the quiet night
Your picture, dear, makes one hurt.
O Ilaw, sa gabing madilim
Wag is mo’y bitiun sa langit.
O, tanglaw, sa gabing tahimik
Larawan mo, Neneng, nagbigay pasakit.
I read the translation to this song we have listened repeatedly over the past months. Today it strikes me how true these words are. How is hurts to see her bedridden, to see her bones so frail, her arm still, her head and neck so weak. But her smile and the light behind her pale eyes still shine so brightly, the way they always have.
Those eyes close now, yet her hand continues to move to the beat of the music
Her voice is barely a whisper as her mouth forms the words.
Only months ago we would sing this together aloud as I took her for a walk outside, to take her out to feel the sun on her skin and see the flowers she loves bloom. Those days now are few as her lack of mobility makes it difficult to put her in the wheelchair.
She no longer marks the days. Yesterday I told her, “Tomorrow is my birthday.”
She raised her eyebrows with a familiar smile.
“Oh it is? I did not remember,” she says. “What month is it?”
“January,” I tell her.
“January,” she repeats.
“Do you know the day?” I ask.
She shakes her head no
“My birthday is January 13,” I tell her.
“Oh,” she mouths quietly, then whispers, “What do you want for your birthday?”
“A new dress,” I tell her.
She smiles. “Ok.You get one.”
“Ok, I do you want to go shopping with me?” We used to spend hours shopping together.
She shakes her head no.
She whispers again, “What do you want?”
I think of the time we spent only months ago, when I could push her outside and we could sing her favorite song together,
I tell her, “I want you to sing, sing really loud mommy, so I can hear you.”
Together we sing in Tagalog words that have become familiar these past months, translated:
Awake and arise from slumber, from your sleep so deep. Open your window and look out to me, so that you may understand my true lament
I read the translation to this song, this day before my birthday. This day I have scheduled hospice to come to do an evaluation of mom’s condition. Her strength has declined markedly since her stroke last August. My lament over her condition has rendered me sleepless and worried.
This day before I start a new year, I need to know. I need someone to help me measure the amount of my mom’s decline, need to know where she was at in her stages of Alzheimer’s. And the hospice coordinator comes to the door shortly after we finish our song.
“Hello,” she greets my mother, “How are you. Who are you? Can you tell me your name?”
“Bing,” she answers with a smile.
“I want to know if she has a awareness of who she is,” the coordinator had told me earlier in a brief interview.
“What do you mean,” I asked.
“Does she have a sense of who she is,” she answered. “Can she answer the question, ‘Who are you?'”
On this birthday of mine I ask myself, Do I have a sense of who I am? Can I answer this question: “Who are you?”
In the past years it has been entangled between caregiver and mother.And lately I have fallen exhausted into both. But that is not the woman my mother raised me to be.
She would want me to answer that question, as she still can: “Who are you”
Me separate from my mother, from my children
Me the one who is shaped by caring for others but not defined by it
Me, searching for to be fully the one I was created to be
The day my mother brought me into this world 56 years ago
If the measure of our days here on earth is to have a sense of self, let me be the one my mother led by example for me to be.
Loving others, caring for their needs, listening, laughing alongside.
As she has for years
And has she does now
In each moment
Suspended still in the air
Like the moon, full.
Going Home
The sun climbs over my roof this morning, and under it my children are home.
Even the cat had been waiting expectantly for their return.
Home, a place to let down your guard, a place of rest, much needed after a season of change.
Just the other day my youngest, a freshman in college, called.
“Hi sweetie,” I answer, “how are you?”
It is the 14th week of her freshman year. She has been away from home for over three months now.
“Hi.” She has that voice, the one that I have, the one where everything is ok but it is not.
“I’ve been trying to call you.”
“I’m sorry sweetie, we’ve been out.”
We’d been away on an empty nest retreat to Pebble Beach for her dad to play in a golf tournament. His life’s work, golf. And I am grateful his life’s work brings us to this place of crashing waters that shift to cerulean to grey with the winds and the sun. He can play the game he loves and I can walk these shores I love where the rocks jut out of the seas and the sandpipers nip at the shores and dogs run unabashedly into the surf in complete freedom.
For the first time in months I felt that same freedom as I walk and reflect on the things I love and the ones I love and the salt air fills my lungs and the skies shift from grey to lavender to orange early in the morning and the surf sounds calls me to walk and think and pray along its edges during this season of shift and change of all things familiar.
This was a gift of a week alone, in this new season of being alone.
A gift of a week before the kids come home.
A gift to reflect and pause and be thankful.
Lauren whispers into the phone,
“I just want to be home.”
“Only two more days,” I tell her.
“I just want to be home now,” she tells me.
Her voice breaks. I ask her to face time so I can see her face to face. She says no mom I don’t want you to see my face right now.
And I hear the sobs in her voice.
I want to fix it. What do you want I ask.
I want you to pick me up and take me to dinner with you and dad.
All of me wants to find a flight right now that will take me to where she is thousands of miles away to pick her up for dinner.
She’s alone tonight. All her friends are gone, a lot of them home already.
My little girl just wants to go home.
Depending on whose voice, that statement means different things at different times.
It used to frustrate me at times when my mom, in her Alzheimer’s state of mind, used to say, “I want to go home.” She had a place under our very roof, and I used to wonder “what else can we do for her?” until my caregiving counselor explained to me that when she asks to go home, she is looking for her place of safety and refuge.
Later she used to say, I want to go home, and playing along with her, I would ask, where is home?
She would smile, and point her finger up to heaven.
Yesterday during our visit at the place that is now her home, we sang songs from the sound of music, her favorite. We both laughed out loud when we sang together “so long, farewell” and in her raspy voice, weakened by a recent stroke, she sang out “Goodbye, Goodbye!” so loud it startled even herself!
When I kissed her on the forehead to say good bye, she asked me, “Where are you going? Where is your home? I don’t remember.”
Tomorrow I will try to find a good place for her to sit at home comfortably at the table in her wheelchair.
Tomorrow we will gather all together. At home.
Around extended tables will be our children and our friends who have gathered around the Thanksgiving table with us over the past 20+ years, friends who at that time were far away from home and were making a new one.
And for the first time my son will gather around the table with his new wife and her parents, as the circle extends out concentrically of starting a home.
The empty nest
The empty nest.
I discovered it as I was discarding the flower pots by the front door. Pots with shriveled plants that had been ignored too many mornings in the hot Florida sun. I was about to toss the entire brown mess out when I realized it was a nest.
Two black speckled eggs were nestled in the back. I wondered how long it had been abandoned.
I chuckled at this discovery, a metaphor for my life, things disheveled, neglected and passed over these past months as I readied myself for the upcoming changes. A daughter, my youngest child, headed for college in Texas. A son, just graduated from college, to be married in a few days. A mother, with Alzheimer’s, has just had a stroke, leaving her left side paralyzed. A category 3 hurricane was approaching our vicinity. All that was exposed had to be brought in.Then was the empty nest revealed. All I had been dreading was now uncovered in a neglected pot.
Nestled in the little bramble of branches were the promise of life, left alone, never brought to its potential.
My inclination to boo hoo my days through the empty hallways, empty rooms, an empty refrigerator is slowly shifting each day. Raising four children was fun and frenetic, full of loudness, laughter and laundry. On a bad day I may breakdown when I see a young mom pushing her kids in a full cart at Target or when I find Goodnight Moon tucked away on a dusty shelf
But this discovery has me rethinking the meaning of an empty nest.
These abandoned shells reflect life never realized
But my empty rooms should remind me of life realizing possibilities.
Not only for my children, but for myself.
It’s strange not to have my extension of myself be my children, or even my mother, who have been and continue to care for these past years.
Being sandwiched in the middle I lost myself, not because of their demands but because I thought that was the right thing to do.
But now as I crack the shell of self created isolation these past years I am rediscovering the joy of who I am. Separate, but whole. And that is OK.
So I will paint because it makes me happy. I will take walks with friends because it feels good to chat. I will take long walks alone along the beach because it feels good to breathe salt air. I will sip coffee on the back porch and chat with my husband, my high school sweetheart, because he does know me better than I know myself. I will do laundry once a week instead of once a day.
I will visit my mother, and enjoy being the child instead of mothering her.
I will cheer on my daughter instead of missing her. For she is the one telling me, “Mom, I love it here. I love finding out who I am.”
I will root for my son who is tackling biochem and physics and the MCAT and the other one tackling a media career in New York.
And I will forever remember the joy of watching my son taken aback with tears as he watched his bride walk toward him, ready to begin his life with her as husband and wife.
For the empty nest should be a reminder of new lives, not the old one, and the joy that comes from watching new lives take off and soar.
seaglasslife 