Life ends. And life continues.

Pat Corbett, one of Saguaro Juniper’s founders, passed away on September 26th of this year. Though she had been fighting various ailments for many years, the end seemed to come suddenly. I simply couldn’t imagine a world without Pat in it. Then she was gone.

At the end of her life, her physical sphere of influence shrank, until the only times she went out of her house or yard were to ride her horse, drive to a doctor’s appointment, or roll next door to coffee at Dave’s. Even then she was still fully present at El Potrero, like the queen bee snug in her hive with her belongings pulled close around her. All of us could feel the gravitational pull of her personality. You just knew she was there, even if you never went in the house.

After she died it was so quiet. It was like a hole had been blasted in the center of the universe, and was still there smoking every time I came to El Potrero. Though Pat and I worked together a lot for Saguaro Juniper, we weren’t exactly close personally, and I wasn’t so much sad when she passed as I was disoriented, or shaken, like I had come through an earthquake. What it really did for me was bring home that fact I started with: Life ends. If Pat could die, then the same thing can, and will, happen to everything else I know and love.

A few weeks ago, on the day of her memorial for the local Cascabel folks, I went out on range looking for Mycha and TwoToo, two cows that I hadn’t seen for awhile. I found a fresh cow trail at the Fenceline Drinker and followed it northwest, through the creosote and palo verde, up and down the dry ridges. Just as I was about to give up and head back to change clothes and make fruit salad for the memorial, I dropped down into a wider sandy wash, and there were the cows I wanted to find, loafing with about a dozen of their companions. And……..there with Mycha—14-year-old Mycha who hasn’t had a calf for 4 years—was a little boy calf! Well, no wonder I hadn’t been able to find her—she had snuck off to have a baby!

My shower and potluck dish forgotten, I lay down in the warm sand of the wash to watch the ageless bond of mother and child unfold again as the calf explored all sides of Mycha’s calm, recumbent bulk. And as I lay there in the low, warm, winter light watching the calf try to nurse in Mycha’s ear, I realized that the hole left by Pat’s passing was filling again for me for the first time. Life continues. Not the same life we knew, not the specifics we are used to, but Life. “Capital L” Life. Happening all around us, all the time, on this miraculous world where we are home. And here, today, was just one more example of the way the land holds us, and the way healing is also a part of Saguaro Juniper’s work.

Life ends. Life continues. And we are part of it.