Rabbit rabbit

So much of any year is flammable.

What we call the beginning is often the end.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from…

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding”

At the end of 2021, my dad emailed me these lines. "What do you think of this as a new year's greeting?" he asked. I have pages and pages of poetry and music he sent me over the years, and emails dating back to 2016 (when I suppose it first occurred to me that I might want to archive some — special ones, or ordinary ones from special people). 

Less than a month after he sent this, Dad was diagnosed with ALS. And three years later, we're* entering our first new year without him. 

How on earth do we do this? I guess we move forward, we do the things we have to do, and the things that bring us joy. We take our routines and tasks and try to turn them into rituals that make a life: light the winter afternoon candles, warm our hands with coffee cups on dark mornings, play the music that makes us cry even though (and because) it makes us cry. Walk the dog, wash our hair, talk to the people who love us enough to tell us so. Pay particular attention to birds and the moon and the sound of laughter. We sort through photos; we sleep and dream and drink water. I suppose that's how it's done.

*Not the royal "we." The "we" who loved him, who are stunned by the reality of his death, whose brains often find it impossible to comprehend it as fact.