What Spring knows

It is officially spring, a calendar fact confirmed each day by new daffodil blooms.

Their cheery yellow feels like an extra blessing this year.

For many of us, winter has been long and cold. It was a reminder that even beautiful winters can wear you down. By February I noticed myself craving signs that the earth hadn’t given up.

When the ice eventually melted, it seemed like only hours before the first green shoots were pushing up from the ground. The air felt softer and the light lingered longer, enlivening the early evening hours.

Spring brings relief. It also brings perspective – a reminder that renewal is real but that endurance is part of the bargain.

Nothing blooms all year or stays green forever. And the earth does not apologize for its barren seasons. It simply lives the cycle, over and over: growth and ripening, loss and rest, death and return. We belong to that cycle too.

For me, that cycle is one reason to keep returning to mortality.

It’s not that I think we should dwell on death for its own sake. But mortality has a way of clarifying life and reminding us to ask better questions:

What am I postponing?

What have I left unsaid?

What do I keep assuming I can put off till later?

When we pay attention to mortality, it’s easier to recognize the moments when those questions arrive through ordinary life: a parent who is slowing down, a beloved dog whose muzzle has turned white, a drawer full of old papers no one has explained, grief that surprises us, a body that reminds us we aren’t exempt from limits.

With renewal all around us, it's easy to celebrate the blossoms. But we also need honest ways to face the decline and decay.

That’s why, two springs ago, I began writing this newsletter. I wanted to create a space for honest language and humane company on this journey through life. We want to know we are not alone in facing what families often avoid, before that avoidance turns into regret or an extra burden for the people we love.

Mortality is a hard teacher. It does not let us pretend that time is endless.

And yet, once we stop assuming we will go on endlessly, other things come into focus. The conversation we need to have. The letter we need to write. The drawer we need to sort. The apology we need to make. The beauty we have been too rushed to notice. The ordinary day we live straight through, realizing at bedtime that we never paused for a deep breath of gratitude.

Spring knows something about not rushing. It does not arrive all at once. It comes in small signs, a loosening of the earth and a gradual thaw. Eventually, we see real evidence that what looked dormant was not dead after all.

That’s usually how change happens in us, too. Not all at once, but in ordinary acts of honesty: starting one conversation, taking one practical step.

That is part of what I hope Mortal Matters can be — a place where those small steps seem possible.

Not a place that offers perfect answers or treats mortality as bleak, or even fashionably edgy. Just a place to sit for a while and look more steadily at what is real: love, limits, grief, beauty, responsibility, and the brief life we are given.

I like to think of this space as a front porch. A place where we can say: Yes, winter is part of life. So is spring. So is loss, and so is renewal.

And so is the work of living in a way that lets us leave behind more care and less confusion. That’s a conversation I need to keep having through every season of the year, and every stage of life.

I hope you do too.