Winter is a death of sorts. Grey mornings, cold, leafless, quiet landscapes. Roots, reaching, stretch to soak in moisture from deep within the earth. We humans hurry from buildings to cars to grocery stores, no skip in our walk, unnoticing and unnoticed. Nature sleeping, yet alive with unseen movement just below the surface.

Death, in similar fashion, sends us scrambling for shelter within comforting words. Death forces us to stretch the roots of our believing deep into our questioning souls, to find the moisture of the spirit there. It reminds us we, like nature, have seasons and reasons enough to track our passages. We sit with someone else’s dying and get in touch with our own. We know something profound is happening we cannot decipher with our eyes.

I cannot sit with the death of someone I’ve loved without both the joy and the pain of it. The laughter shared, the things said, the memories bonded in that exchange of one life with another. The loss, the unfinished dance, the things unsaid. Such a mystery, to laugh and to cry with the same experience, death.

We are, after all, nature’s sibling. We look back over our shoulder to claim a common source. We can learn from winter. She’s been doing her dance long before we drew our first breath. She’ll be here long after we’ve taken our last.

The sun breaks across the winter sky and within its wink, a hint of spring. A memory breaks across the landscape of a dead friend’s life and brings them rushing back, alive in us. For but a moment, we languish in the smile of it, the pain of it, the song of it that rises up in us from somewhere we know not:

Death only is for those who cannot see beneath it. With death, a friendship vaults into lasting presence that lives in the one who remembers. In that sense, Dear Friend, death is no more for us.

Perhaps that’s enough for now. Winter carries spring and spring, winter. We carry the dead within ourselves, their passing embedded in our living. They carry the mystery with them silently into death and wait. Nothing is lost.

I’ll continue to cry and continue to smile with the death of those I love. I’ll continue to love winter with spring hidden within its sleeve. I’ll continue to pay attention to my breathing as a sacred thread that bonds us all, the dead, the eternal, nature, myself.

I’ll continue to live until I die. And then? I’ll continue to breathe into the mystery of it.