9 lbs, 7 oz.

My sister hannaH had her second baby this morning, via C-section. Named her Cassandra Lenore, planning to call her Cassie. The baby actually looked pretty good, owing largely, I'm sure, to not having had her head crammed through something called a birth canal. You either explode through there or come out a hole they've cut in your mother with a knife. Life is so violent.

Anyway, I was standing at a window on the 13th floor of the hospital's maternity wing, waiting for an elevator, and looking across a kind of a courtyard at the shaded windows of the rooms in the other wings. I don't know how the hospital's organized, so I don't know what I was looking at--could've been anything. No doubt in at least one of those rooms I couldn't see into, someone was dying. Someone was saying their last goodbye's to the people they'd walked through life with, maybe to the people who'd visited when they'd delivered their own babies. Maybe to those babies themselves. Or maybe the goodbye's had been said, and someone was slipping away quietly and unaware. Maybe death had been more sudden and there hadn't been any goodbye's at all. Maybe someone was dying alone. I don't know.

Seems like that hospital today was a kind of microcosm of the path we all walk (ideally) together. Balloons and life support, bubble-gum cigars and last rites, Peanuts scrubs and tearful hand-holding, flowers. All right there together. I was grateful this morning to be among healthy people in a happy, Beginning place, but I couldn't stop the awareness that I wasn't even a hundred feet away from the other end of things. No hurry though, I'll get to that end of the building soon enough. Meanwhile, I'm riding in a car full of people who love me; we're not taking the most predictable route, but the scenery is incredible, the curves are breathtaking, and the company makes it all worth it.

Happy birthday, Cassie. We love you. Buckle up--it's a hell of a ride.