“The beckoning counts, and not the closing latch behind you: and all through life the actual moment of emancipation still holds that delight, of the whole world coming to meet you like a wave.”

– Freya Stark

Scars do not disappear but they can heal, harden, turn to something more as they become memory. A quarter century after my brother’s birth and brief life, the grief I felt as an eight-year-old seems much more distant than it did as a teen or a young adult trying to define what family meant to him. If the world would stay still I think I could say I have healed, a scar still visible somewhere on a knee or an elbow but in no way inhibiting my functioning, just an ever-present reminder when I glance down at that once-wounded limb.

The world, however, does not stop delivering its little jolts: more people suffer or die, some more expected than others; some with gentle fades into the night, some with gut-wrenching jolts. This spring in particular has been freighted with loss, and when viewed from a detached distance, it is a particularly pyrrhic consolation to observe that one appears to have a talent for processing grief. But any healing power only seems absurd in isolation: released in a social milieu, it can take on a life of its own.

One year after my late cousin Andy and I went for a four-day trudge through endless mud, I repeat a snippet of our journey up the Superior Hiking Trail. At the time, Bear and Bean Lakes were lost in fog, invisible from view. Chagrined, I was left to narrate what we were missing, and it was not hard to find the weather symbolic of Andy’s mental state in the succeeding months. When I make the return trip there is no fog, just brilliant sun above the twin teardrop lakes, both wrapped in the embrace of those jagged North Shore ridges. I bring with me a flask filled with wine from the bottle he left me a few days before he killed himself this past February. I leave a tribute on a trail register, write a few words in a notebook, and am glad to be alone. But I feel no great sadness. Instead, I look out to what lies beyond, off toward Palisade Valley and the sublime ski trail tucked between rocky ramparts splashed with summer green. The next steps beckon.

I mark this date every year, and will do so for as long as I write here. But I also think it is easy to ruminate on loss for too long, and so, barring any sudden new insights, my writing life tries not to fixate on the closed latch. Honoring the dead has its place, but we are still here in the land of the living, and over the next few weeks, many members of the extended family that suffered this latest loss are going to live well. Very well. We are off to meet the wave.

But first, a pause: happy twenty-fifth, bro.