"Sometimes I wish," sang Freddie Mercury, lead singer for the band Queen, "I'd never been born."  Considering how Mercury spent the last years of his life, playing both genders in his quest for sexual fulfillment, and gradually descending into a morass of drugs, alcohol, and other things, his words strike me as particularly tragic.  Despite his personal difficulties, however, I'm not sorry Mercury was born.  He brought us some striking music and dazzling performances on the stage.
     So why do I bring him up?  A few days ago, I received two emails.  The first informed me that one of my last living aunts, who turned 90 last November and had struggled with dementia for a number of years, passed away.  Hardly had I processed this news when another email came my way.  This one told me that my aunt's youngest son, in his late fifties and who had taken a bad fall a couple of weeks ago, had also passed away.  He never woke up after his head hit the floor of his home.
     Even more tragic, this is the aunt who was also the mother of my cousin who died of cancer a little over a year ago.  In the space of less than two years, her surviving children lost a mother, sister, and brother (and their father passed a couple of years before this). It's heartbreaking.
     What can one say in the face of such a confluence of pain?  It's surely not that the dead or the survivors should never have been born.  It is rather to note that, despite the way that my aunt spent the final years of her long life in mental isolation and the singularly awful way in which my cousin died, I am thankful that I knew them; I am thankful that they had some time on the planet; I am grateful for who they were in my life.
     Before heartrending tragedy, however, these platitudes seem facile and supercilious. All grief and retrospection on the planet will not bring our loved ones back to us.  What can we do?  We remind ourselves that our vision of life rests not in the vagaries and unpredictability of humanness, but in the immutability of a personal and meaningful creator.  In an accidental world, accidents and downturns, yes, happen, all the time.  In an intentional world, accidents and downturns, yes, happen, too.  But they do so in the compass of a meaningful cosmos.  Though we may not know the fullness of this meaning, we know that it is present.  That's all we have; no more, no less.  And as hard as this may be to say, it's all we, at this point, need.
     Rest well, Aunt Joan and cousin John.  One day, I'll see you.