The unexpected keeps on coming

The dear friend whose hands eloquently express her sorrow has had to cancel plans for her 76th birthday party to attend the funerals of a nephew and a beloved brother-in-law.  She's also in the throes of the end of a love relationship.

As we sat in the sun, talking, I reflected on a time when I, young and stupid, might have looked at a couple of gray-haired ladies talking in the sunshine and thought they had nothing more to discuss than recipes and rocking chairs. But we old ones who walk the cliff-face of death, loss, and the uncertainties of love know otherwise.

These lines:

Fibers of darkness and weeping light,
blind embellishments, curly energies,
river of life and essential fibers,
green branches of cherished sun,
here I am, in the night, listening to secrets,
wakefulness, solitudes,
and you enter, amid the sunken fog,
until you grow in me, until you reveal to me
the dark light and the rose of the earth.
--Pablo Neruda, from "The Apogee of Celery/ Apogeo del Apio"