I picture a circle of relatives, drawn together by circumstance, from distances and activities that kept the majority mere echoes to one another, voices from the past, children's faces, simple times. There is a circle of relatives standing around a hole cut into the earth, gestures turned to ashes, words turned to dust.

And in that gathering of grief, as though each had swallowed a stone, the weight of gravity drawing them down, as if to join the departed one.

When a child is born, the world makes a sound, small cry to large shout, a note come into being, and every one who hears that note says yes. Now, in our sadness and in our fear – mostly in our fear – we see a life departing, and say no.

But the word is not allowed: it is an anti-word, or the lack of a sound. It denies existence, when in fact that is all there is. You cannot say "void" without it suddenly being filled to overflowing with stars. You cannot make silence without the Word coming in to fill it. When a loved one passes, your head says no, but if you will love, your heart must bear the truth of it, there is only one word, for birth and for death, and for everything in between, and that word is yes. A lover leaves you: you must say yes. A husband, a wife, cannot find the way to stay in a marriage: you must say yes. Humans heap horrors upon other humans: you must acknowledge first, say yes, then do what must be done.

If my dear aunt had said no to her husband's disease, she would not have been able to care for him. She would not have had the strength to lift that frail body, and to help his spirit free from that failing container. If she had said no, the poor man would have had to make his own passage, as his partner would have denied the road existed.

But she said it, she said yes, and helped her husband leave this place.

Now she and we are left to inhabit it, and to that task we turn our faces now, as we turn them to the rising sun, as the day burns empiness out, colors each color, and names every living thing.

Even if it is said with sadness, and with a sigh: yes.