First it was the brother of a close family friend, diagnosed with advanced liver cancer at the age of 39. His wife was expecting their third child, who arrived a week after his death. Then, only a few weeks after giving birth to her fourth child, another friend lost one of her older children to an infection that struck quickly and left a terrible loss in its path. An acquaintance's father, a vigorous man of 59, died in a snowmobile accident. An old friend called to tell me his girlfriend had died after falling down the stairs in her townhouse.

A part of me began to fear answering the telephone.

Yet all around me were signs of new life. Grass turned from dull winter brown to vibrant green. Blossoms appeared on trees. Tulips poked tentatively through the hard soil to reach for the light of the lengthening days. A cautious, hopeful robin made a nest in the front corner of my porch. The anguish of my friends who had suffered devastating losses stood out in sharp relief against the backdrop of the renewal of spring, shamelessly bursting forth in abundance. It seemed paradoxical, perhaps even mocking or disrespectful.

Shouldn't life have the courtesy and decorum to slow down a little, to acknowledge their sadness? And then I recalled my own surprise when children appeared at my door in Halloween costumes only days after my father's death 13 years ago. I remembered the strange sense of comfort I found in realizing that life continues its steady, onward march, undeterred by the unexpected detours each of our lives may have taken.

There was a peculiar sweetness in recognizing that, in the midst of my own sorrow and my sense that life would never return to normal, the normal rhythms of life had continued unchanged. Children still went trick-or-treating. Families still savored holiday dinners. Robins still built nests in the brave expectation of new life.

In our contemporary culture of fast food and quick fixes, we often have difficulty enduring the season of grief with patience and grace. Yet grief can be neither rushed nor outsourced. It must be walked through in its own time and, though there may be companions -- sometimes even guides -- along its path, much of the journey is solitary. Grief is highly transformative, and we emerge from its forge altered in ways we cannot anticipate.

My mother phoned one day early in spring. She was gazing at the hillside outside her window. My father, always a reluctant gift-giver when an occasion "demanded" it, delighted in surprising loved ones with unexpected,

sometimes even anonymous, gifts. Before his death, he planted forsythia bushes along the ridge defining the edge of their property line. Each spring, they are the first to blossom, dazzling my mother anew with vibrant exuberance. As she described this yearly gift from my father, I was reminded that the grief's lessons are numerous and highly individualized, but perhaps the most powerful, and universal, gift is the simple understanding that even profound loss can be the fertile soil of new growth.

And so the forsythia have bloomed once again.