The love a child has for his mother is indescribably powerful and lasts a lifetime. It is so strange (for me at this time) that my mother is lying in a bed just a mile or so from the place this photo was taken by my father over 50 years ago in Brookline, while I’m thousands of miles and oceans away here in Hawaii. Yet I’ll be back there soon. All things return and life is in many ways a circle, an Odyssey of sorts the begins and ends more or less in the same place where it started. My hope and prayer is for my mother to be at peace as she confronts the mystery of death with the full confidence of all our love.

In the end comes also our beginning, the ancient sense of a door opening to some final unknown, some invisible voice attempting to help us come to terms with our own disappearance, the hand extended to help us over a horizon equally as mysterious as the one we crossed at our birth. — David Whyte