So I’m back in CA, thinking about marriage, birth, and death. I was in Virginia for my son’s wedding, our granddaughter’s first birthday, and a visit to my father’s grave. This life is all there is.

Congratulations, Rudy and Penny!

Life is sweet.

A couple of days before the wedding, my big brother Embry and I visited my father’s grave in Herndon, VA. It was very satisfying, and brought me some long-wished-for closure re. Pop’s death. His funeral in 1994 lacked a proper burial service — even though Pop was an Episcopal priest — and I always felt bad about this.

So Embry and rode there with the Book of Common Prayer, and we read the Rite for the Burial of the Dead, taking turns on the prayers, and saying some of them together. It felt good. Such beautiful language. And if Pop’s in any way able to notice it, he would have been so glad. We reminisced about him, and I patted the stone and said, “You were right, Pop,” thinking of some of the advice he’d given me, and Embry chimed in, “You were right about everything, Pop.”

Not only a wedding and a funeral, but our granddaughter’s first birthday! She's amazing.

We had a little party at a friend’s house in Charlottesville. It was very jolly. (This is the baby's aunt!)

A wedding is an emotional peak. When you climb a mountain you’re high enough to see the other peaks clearly, standing out from the foothills. And here at Rudy’s wedding, I could see my wedding with my wife, and our parents’ weddings, and our other children’s weddings.

I see the funerals of our parents and the funerals yet to come. I see our births, and the births of our children and the births of our grandchildren. All these peaks are out there, visible from this exalted moment. And, oddly enough, each of those peaks is in some sense the same peak; and all the great events of our lives are here in this one moment.

Life is a mystery. And so we celebrate, and we open our eyes to notice how touching and tragic and beautiful it is to live this life, with its weddings, its deaths, and its births, generation upon generation.

Sweetest of all, this moment was real, all of us are together in a this lovely grassy meadow beneath a wedding tent in Orange, Virginia.

God bless us all.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 15th, 2006 at 8:22 am and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.