Life and Death

My grandmother died last Monday.
My sister is going to have a baby this coming Thursday.
I know that I'm not the first to have this thought, butit struck me as odd/interesting/strangely cyclical how the two most important events in human existence, birth and death, can be so closely intertwined and yet appear to be such polar opposites. Death, by its very nature is an ending. It is the last page of the book, the final credits rolling at the end of the movie. And rarely do any of us leaving the theatre feel that we have reached the actual end. How can the story end here? Isn't the author planning another installment? Didn't the director leave room for a sequel? Maybe that's where the baby's birth comes in. Not a sequel, per say, but more of a continuation of the same story. Perhaps with a different director or author - one trained by the antecedent and therefore prepared with the history of the family, ready to rear the child on stories of our familial past in order to ready him to face the future. And perhaps the joy of the impending birth will help to hasten the healing process for the rest of us. Perhaps this was God's way of telling us that it will be okay - life goes on and we should live in the joy of this new life while remembering and then passing on to the next generation the joy of the life that has so recently moved forward in her journey. Grandma would have been the last person to want us to weep over her passing - after the initial cry, of course - she'd be the first to tell us that she's with God and the rest of her family now, and will eventually see all of us, including the newest member of our lives. Then she'd say she has better things to do than listen to us blubber over something that we couldn't control. She'd tell us to buck up, move on and get on with living our lives. And she'd say it with a smile on her face and a cigarette in her hand, just as irreverent as always.