December is for many a time of joy, and one of the most joyous things about it is the glee of young people and, in many cases, the way the milestone of an annual holiday allows us to chart and reflect on their trajectories of growth. While I will invariably experience some of that in the coming weeks, for me the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 forever marred the holiday season. One more specific element of that is that (at the risk of sounding particularly morbid, but I’m just trying to be sincere) I can no longer look at young people without some part of me consciously acknowledging the possibility that they may not grow up. I recognize the privilege that allowed me to make it until the morning of my 39th birthday with that aspect of mortality and frailty remaining an abstraction, but so it went that until then I took growing up for granted. As a result, I have grappled ever since with how to keep my heart open and keep my spirit of nurturing undiminished within that awareness that everyone I know will die and some of them will do so way too soon. It is through this inner turmoil that I began contemplating the notion of love as a form of palliative care.
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