I brought home a few pieces of coral from our recent vacation along with the flu. Well, the truth is, I brought home a few pieces of coral and a husband with the flu who passed it to me as we packed to come home.

So, the last day in paradise, we sat in a rundown island airport for seven hours on a hard plastic chair, double masked, dressed in odd layers I scalped from my carry on, shivering, and watching flight delays scroll across the screen.

Friends and family texted me their own stories of sickness at home–entire families stricken with colds and flu and Covid over the holidays. No one was spared, it seemed.

When I finally dropped into my bed a few minutes before the East Coast rang in 2024, it felt like the best end to an old year. What a humbling way to begin anew, thankful for something so simple.

I declare 2024 a year for counting blessings.

It would be hard to say the year in which my mother died was also filled with blessings, because such a difficult bridge to cross–losing part of oneself–would seem to cancel out anything else of good note. But because I am older and wiser, I know to see her death that way would discount the miracle and the joy of living itself. The unthinkable, and the sorrowful, can coexist with the beautiful and the bountiful things we are given.

In 2023, my mother died but my first granddaughter was born, and in a softly lit room at the Hospice House in Lakewood, a few months before she died, the two met: my mother held her first great granddaughter as tenderly as she could in her bed, my daughter helping to support her baby’s weight in my mother’s arms. It was a moment no one will and ever should forget.

As we get older, the goodbyes get bigger and harder, often more meaningful and also numerous. I’ve been hearing that sentiment all my life, that when you reach a certain age, you begin a long series of goodbyes. You learn to grow more accustomed to death through necessity.

Stories are rife about families that grow distant from one another after a big loss. In a world where people are so consumed with responsibility and trials and tribulations of their own, it’s not uncommon to see relationships fall apart when the glue is gone. Also, as people get older, and their children become parents themselves, traditions sometimes lose their strength. Those gatherings at Grandma’s house become a black and white photo and thus accepting death is accepting change.

But I would like to argue against the abandonment of cherished family times and traditions in as much as there’s someone to keep them alive and a willingness by all to make time for one another. I remember a friend’s aunt left millions to an orangoutang rescue center when she died rather than give to the family and in the ensuing years, everyone died alone, so estranged they’d become over one person’s unconventional choices.

I’d like to learn from other’s mistakes, and will confess right now I have no propensity for primates.

And so, as this year begins, I hope to cultivate a true gratefulness for what remains, and treasure the things that made my family a family–traditions, recipes, songs, jokes, stories, heirlooms. There is potential for a family to bloom rather than wither from the seeds planted by those who have left us.

So, what will we grow to be next year? Which flower? Which fruit? What will we become now? I think what we choose to do with our lives in the wake of an important passing, like a matriarch, and how we choose to carry on, is in itself a form of gratitude to that person. We are saying, yes, because of you, we can become better people.

Happy New Year. May your families flourish in 2024.