On Anniversaries, Life & Death

Day 8 - Michelle and I are in our 8th year together, and today we celebrated both our 8th day with Lian, as well as our 2nd wedding anniversary. We celebrated in style - at a great little tapas restaurant in the Mission. It was almost perfect, except for the quiet.

You see, we arrived at 5.45pm, only 15 minutes after the restaurant had opened for dinner. And we arrived at that time because Lian had to be fed at 7, and since we're hard at work on getting her into a sleep routine at night, Michelle didn't want us to go out after then. So at 5.45pm when the three of us arrived at the restaurant, we were the only ones there. I never would have imagined myself as that type of restaurant customer. The last time I remember eating at 5.45pm was when Mrs. Kocsis our Hungarian babysitter when I was in 5th grade would call my sister and I in from the yard for dinner. In fact, until June when we were living in New York, I would sometimes be grabbing lunch at 5.45pm.

Nevertheless, we weren't there to meet any other diners, and the service was excellent - prompting us to conclude that service levels in San Francisco were truly a step above New York's.

For our anniversary, I offered Michelle a small card, and an even smaller package - a new wedding band since she was allergic to the first one I'd offered her. Yes, her skin developed an allergic reaction to the white gold - and ... oddly enough ... the platinum engagement ring I bought her didn't produce any such reaction so I went out after much prodding and finally offered her a new platinum wedding band. But it was the card that she cried over. With little Lian propped up next to her in our car seat, fast asleep, she read the anniversary card in which I had written that the best anniversary present she could have ever offered me was that little bundle of joy and beauty on the chair next to her. It took two napkins to dry her tears.

Needless to say, Lian is a little beacon of emotion for us. It seems like every time we look at her, we're looking into the soul of some deeper being than the little one-week old inhabiting her body. Michelle considers her an "old soul", and though she can't exactly explain why - it's merely a feeling she has with people - I believe her.

Michelle likens souls to spirits – claiming that they inhabit one body from its birth to its death. And an old soul is one that has lived in another body before inhabiting its current one. So the cycle of life and death is the process by which a soul will exchange from one body to the next.

The cycle of life and death is particularly enhanced – even acute I would say – when you watch a fresh baby out of the womb. Watching the act, body, spirit and soul of life pulse out of your wife’s womb and land crying on your wife’s chest, quivering with the shock of breath, is strangely saddening. You see, until you witness a child’s birth, you only know vaguely what the Broadway actors exhort about in the Lion King about the Circle of Life.

When you see your child take its first breath, you are present at the most powerful moment at the start of that cycle. And what that does, for those of us who haven’t experienced death – the death of someone close to us – is that it somehow transports you to the end of that cycle. You feel transported in time and space to another point where you reflect upon how life ends. My grandfather is slowly dying and suffering from Alzheimer’s. It is painful to watch him wither away into a ghost of his former self. For some reason, watching Lian being born transported me from one end of the beautiful, painful and inexorable cycle of life to the other.