In his song “Seasons of Love”, RENT composer Jonathan Larson contemplated how to measure the value of one year in a human life, which as the refrain goes is 565,600 minutes. Today I am contemplating the value of the lessons learned from lives lost and the paradox that there is a gift in grief should we choose to receive it.

Today marks 5 years since I lost my mother. That's 2,629,440 minutes. 

And though I miss her dearly, I know that she is all around me in everything I do and I have a massive amount of gratitude for the gifts that have come from the grief. As counterintuitive as it seems, I encourage you, if you’ve suffered loss of any kind, to look for the gifts, to look for the lessons, to look for the growth, to look for what has been shown to you through this passage in your life. The gratitude that I have found is the gratitude  to have been shown that I am resilient and strong even in the darkest of moments. I am grateful to have grown a deeper relationship with my dad,far  beyond what I might ever have imagined. I am grateful to have known the absolute love of a mother which remains now even more strongly than it did when she was mortal, and I feel her love inside me today and forever and a day.

What follows is a replay of what I recorded one year ago today in her honor. Thanks so much for listening.