The 2025 Purge...

I don’t know if you can feel it, but I sure do.  It is happening, quickly, in almost all areas of my life. Things that are no longer working for me, or people that cannot be carried into the new year are leaving.  My dad on Christmas, one of my mom’s dearest friends died this afternoon at about 4 pm.  I know we are leaving the year of the snake, I guess I have never really been able to palpitate the feeling of one year leaving and another arriving, but I sure as shit do this year.

I find myself intermittently caring deeply about some things, while releasing and giving no fucks about others.  People are being erased from my life, some of which I mourn and miss and others of them, I am honestly grateful for their removal.  I guess I can feel the tide surging.  2025 is drawing to a close and I guess I feel the pulse of the year’s end quickening.  A lot of last gasps for air and life.  I feel like it is all unraveling, to what end I do not know, I just know I am rearranged. I am changed, but I cannot yet tell what I am changed into.

I guess that is the thing about purging, some things get tossed out that still had life in them, that were not actually meant for the bins.  After my daughter once cleaned her room, I found $80 sitting in an envelope on the top of a garbage bag.  She didn’t know it was there and certainly didn’t intend to throw it out.  It just got lost in the shuffle...and out it went, except I intervened and saved it from the scrap heap.

I mean no respect to those we have lost lately, they were never destined for any scrap heap...and were certainly worthy of being saved.  However, for reasons I cannot fathom or understand, they were not able to be here as 2026 dawned.  I miss them and I am sad.  But I do accept that things that are no longer meant for this world will be taken, it is just how life works.  Sometimes we are granted a long goodbye, sometimes it is very short.  Sometimes we are given way too much time, and often times, never enough.

I have become acutely aware of how much loving someone takes from you.  How much you have invested in love and how much you worry all the time about losing them.  I mean, I still function in life, but I will tell you every time my kids call me at an unsuspected time, I brace.  And I pray.  

I am not sure how to move on past the life that included my father.  I mean, I know I will but I don’t know what it looks like this world without him in it.  I don’t know what it means to be fatherless...because I guess, I will never really be fatherless.  I had a dad for all my life and I have him still because he lives on inside me, in his photographs and memories.  He is forever etched upon us, each who loved him and that is something that not even time can erase, only dull.

I find myself a bit apprehensive about what else shall go before the new year comes for us.  I feel a tidal swell, pulling at the shore, pulling us towards the fathomless ocean, uncertain whether we will ride the tide, or be taken under...none of us really having much say so in the matter.

Life flows in and life flows out.  People are born, people die.  Some are taken from us way too soon for our liking.  Others are forced to remain way past the point where their lives make sense to them and they suffer so terribly.  Sometimes it feels almost cruel this whole living thing.  But then there are moments sublime, those moments when we open up ourselves to love and affection, to trust and kindness and giving and receiving.  Those moments where we are present with the ever changing tides of life and weather it all, and know that truly our only task is to live each moment as it comes and trust that all that is meant for us will come, and all that is now beyond our reach will leave.  And that is as it should be...life is happening as it should, and while we are here, still present observing the purge, we are blessed and favored.

I can feel the quickening.  I am in it, part of it, I hope to only be an observer, but I know there are no such guarantees in this life.  Life, like the tide, has a way of altering course that can and will take us down, our time as witness to the ebb and flow of life shall cease.

I choose to think of all of those who pass as stalwarts that line the coastline, vapors really, silently wandering the shore, watching, waiting, calling us home when it is our turn to move to that other side of living, which seems so final, but perhaps, it is just a new beginning.  For today at least, I will think of death as something that calls people and beings toward it, to usher them to their new place on the other side of living.  Where their memories and life lives on as testament to their existence and their love.  Each time we remember them, each time we reminisce, we are granted access to all that was.  Which I think, helps us, more fully appreciate all that is and all that will be.

Again, still...