My mother’s Jahrzeit returns this weekend for the 38. time, she did not even reach 60 years of age. Neither did another, even younger woman, artist Dorothy Goode, who died this week last year. Also a year ago we lost Ruth Bader Ginsburg, going on 90. My mother-in-law died at the beginning of this month, well into her 90s. Two years ago the poet Mary Oliver was taken from us in her 80s, her incomparable sensitivity to and insight about nature now restricted to the work she left behind. Uncountable numbers of souls departed as a result of a pandemic that could have been stemmed during the last two years. Uncounted humans were erased by climate catastrophes, poverty and violence, children among them. May they all rest in power.

Jewish custom has us say “May their memory be for a blessing” after someone’s passing, often expressed as (z”l) or in Hebrew (ז”ל) after their name, which stands for zikhronah livrakha, blessed memory, in the shorthand form. The phrase refers to the blessing a person leaves behind, from a life lived in ways that reverberate, an impact that continues to flow. Whether goodness, creativity, love, justice or any other positive mark they left on the world, the point is that something lives on, blessing future generations.

In this regard, it does not matter how many years you are granted. The issue is what you make of them, or as someone said “your legacy of righteousness,” a term deeply settled in my soul, cliché be damned.

The poet Mary Oliver resonates for me over and over again by her ability to reconstruct the familiar, give it a twist or open it to questions that reveal reversed perspectives. Couldn’t think of a better legacy. The poem I chose for today, in memory of my mother who loved all things owl, helps us to move from visions of death as something dark and frightful to the opposite:

but so much light wrapping itself around us — as soft as feathers —

White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field

by Mary Oliver

Let yourself be carried, is the transcendent metaphor in the poem, without fear.

Until then let us carry others, without hesitation.

It’s the one legacy we all can leave behind.

Photographs today are of some of the postcards sent to me throughout the last 18 months of what turned out to be among the hardest times of our family’s life, by a dear friend who knows what owls stand for in my universe. The constant stream, tucked up on the fridge, has sustained me.

Music also dedicated to my mother, an anxious rebel and a Stevie Wonder fan, who never stopped trying to reach her highest ground.