When the Veil Is Thin

It’s that time of year when the veil feels thin between the worlds — when the air itself seems to hum with memory. Those who have left us linger at the edges of our days. Maybe we live a little harder now, more awake, as if to make up for their absence.

For me, this past week carries a particular gravity: the anniversary of my brother’s death, my mother’s, and — folded right into that — both my birthday and my father’s. It’s all here in one bundle: grief, gratitude, and the undeniable pulse of life continuing.

I’ve come to think of this season as a kind of initiation. A reminder that to live fully means standing close to the edge — to look right at loss, love, and impermanence without turning away.

How are you as you wander there, near the edge?

There’s a poem I return to every year about this time — Ellen Bass’s The Thing Is. It holds the paradox perfectly…

The Thing Is

BY ELLEN BASS

to love life,

to love it even when you have no stomach for it

and everything you've held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you down like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again.

This is the work we do at Kit for Living: learning to hold life, whole and unedited, between our palms — grief and joy, endings and beginnings — and saying yes, still.