Sunrises and Sunsets

The birth of a child is a personal sunrise.

The loss of a sibling is definitely a sunset in life.

The reaching of a goal you have spent years dreaming about and working towards achieving is one of life's sunrises.

Family is what fills the time between sunrises and sunsets.


Our lives are filled with sunrises and sunsets and the last few months have brought that back home to me over and over again. Not just the sunrise of each morning, or the sunset each evening, but the personal life events that can be referred to as our sunrise or sunset.

In the last six months, we added a new member to our family with the birth of my second grandson Michael. That birth of a child absolutely counts as a sunrise in life. But less than a month from his birthday we lost my youngest brother, the death of a loved one counts as  a sunset in our lives.

It never ceases to astonish me how a family can be filled with joy one day, and the next day sadness sweeps in and the total family make-up has changed.

This has been a joyful and yet disheartening few months as we smile at the astounding changes in a young baby over such a short time, and at the same time we cry at the thought of the ones he will never meet and who will never meet him.

Sunrises and sunsets are daily fixtures in the world, they are two of the most beautiful and simplistic wonders of the world and still two of the things we simply just think are supposed to be, so we often miss the wonder. Birth and death are much that way too, we take for granted that they will be, are supposed to be......and they are. But birth and death like the sunrise and sunset of each day, though much the same are still very different. Each birth represents something different to each individual whose life it touches, and death does the same.

The birth of Michael brought changes to my personal world. I get to watch my third oldest child be the parent now, and though our thoughts and views on children are at times alike, they are also very, very different most of the time. But this is his turn to have a sunrise, and my turn to just enjoy the scenery.

The death of my baby brother, though he was a grown man, was a sunset in my personal life. A reminder that the sun will set on more people in my daily life, and in an odd way I am supposed to also find a way to enjoy the scenery of the sunsets. I am still muddling through that part, and have been for several years as I have had more and more sunsets in my life the last few years. I will at some point discover the beauty of them, and at times I think I actually have glimpsed it.