I awoke this bright, sunny morning of my 58^th birthday, feeling extraordinarily lucky and loved.  Facebook birthday greetings came chiming in. Beret brought me coffee, toast, brie, and the Times in bed.  The cat clamored for attention.  My daughter Paige WhatsApped from her Peace Corps posting in Panama.  I am warm, dry, safe, fed, loved.

Still, as I’ve contemplated the arrival of my birthday over the past week, and inevitably the year gone by, the song that’s been rattling around my heart is the Mark Knopfler/Emmylou Harris duet “If This Is Goodbye.”  Their album’s been in among the CDs in my car for about a month, and instead of getting progressively sick of it I’ve found myself obsessively homing in — until last week, driving home from a particularly exhausting divorce mediation, I had to pull over at the tourist lookout on the highway leading into my town, turn it up loud, and weep.  For basically no reason.

Or perhaps, for many reasons.  I’m coming to the end of the year of grieving my mother’s death – my siblings and I are going to Virginia next week to place her ashes.  Her last few days were spent in hospice in my house, after she’d announced her firm wish not to recover from her stroke.   And so, there was leave-taking before she went, and on another plane, there’s been more leave-taking since.

Then there’s what I do for a living.  The accumulated sorrow of mediating five to ten domestic relations cases a week does add up at times.

One can add the ignominy of our politics and culture, whose machines goad us to despise each others’ distended shadows, muffling our human cries, uttered just beyond view.

And finally, there is the suffering of the planet itself.  The new IPCC report on climate change brooks no poetry and accepts no apology.  It stands as a damnation of any of the puny works or professed values of the Boomer generation against the tidal judgment of the future.

What a depressing litany, right?   But when I think of these things, I actually don’t get sucked into sorrow.  When I wept on the highway, my deepest feeling was a pang of sweet appreciation.  Not that I lost my mother, but that I was with her at the end.  Not that there is marital carnage around me all the time, but that my own love, after 34 years, is still so tender.  Not that our democracy is so horribly imperiled, but that a surge of new voters could, just maybe, transform it.

After I developed epilepsy a few years ago, I came to manage the anxiety that my consciousness could be drastically altered at any moment, in the blink of an eye.  But it also taught me to live in the moment in a way no amount of philosophy could.  Beauty sprang out at me from ordinary places.  Now that my seizures are fully controlled, I still try to cultivate that awareness.  And at 58, living with an awareness of loss is easy to do.  Friends around me lose parents, partners, and – most excruciatingly – children; battle illness; endure separation; and go through all manner of other trials.  My birthday riches are sweetened by being at edge of — and surrounded by the brimming love attending — these other losses. They mirror our generation’s place in the world, and in history.

So here’s a duet from Mark and Emmylou.  I didn’t know until I sat down to write today that he composed it in memory of another bright fall morning – September 11.   Enjoy!

And, since Mark’s singing in particular is maddeningly indistinct in this version, here are the lyrics:

My famous last words
Are laying around in tatters
Sounding absurd
Whatever I try
But I love you
And that’s all that really matters
If this is goodbye
If this is goodbye

Your bright shining sun
Would light up the way before me
You were the one
Made me feel I could fly
And I love you
Whatever is waiting for me
If this is goodbye
If this is goodbye

Who knows how long we’ve got
Or what were made out of
Who knows if there’s a plan or not
There is our love
I know there is our love

My famous last words
Could never tell the story
Spinning unheard
In the dark of the sky
But I love you
And this is our glory
If this is goodbye
If this is goodbye