Yesterday we attended my daughter’s senior project exhibition at the University of Michigan art and design school.
One student’s exhibit was an animated movie about grief and loss. The artist described her film as following “a young girl as she experiences constant loss due to the unrelenting passage of time: her grandmother, her childhood home, her youth, her own mother, and eventually herself.”
At separate times in the film these two phrases appear:
Life is fleeting / All of us fade
Life is fleeting / Everything stays
The tension between these two statements as they relate to grief, loss, and the passage of time, is fascinating.
While it is true everything in time fades – flowers, ideas, paint, loved ones, and even ourselves – it is also true that “everything stays,” in the sense that we exit in a universe that continually recycles and renews itself. We carry inside ourselves stardust from expired stars and DNA from generations that preceded us. Memories, stories, and love expressed in a family are passed from a grandparent to a parent to a child.
All of us fade, yes, but everything also stays.
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