Life, death and diamonds

One good thing about being a mom is that you can't buy into all the end of the world banter, because if you did you would have to be huddled in a cave some 30 feet underground with a years supply of  goldfish crackers, water and sippy cups.
We have the instinct to protect our children from immediate or perceived danger but what are we to do with all of this apocalypse nonsense? Well, it does make me reflect momentarily (read panic attack in the middle of the night) on mortality and death. My mom says "no one makes it out alive" and that is the truth, but yet many of us are afraid of going too early, or not making a meaningful difference in the world, or simply being forgotten.... forever.  Why does this feeling of mortality grip us? Why are we sad for the inevitable future that will certainly exist without us? Do we mourn for the eternity of time before we were born?

Last night I had an image of our lives as a necklace, the beads are the years we are alive and the quality of them is determined by the way we live and how we interact with the world. There is chain on one side of the beads to represent the unending time before we came to existence, and the other side of the chain represents the eternity of time after death, and eventually they come together to make a circle. It's not that I believe that we will come back again, but almost like we were always here and always will be, and our beautiful beads (the years of our life) are the sparkle of the necklace, and what makes it special and unique.
We cannot control when we are born, and have almost as little control over when we die, but we can say kind words instead of angry ones, we can give instead of take, we can create instead of consume, and we can take each step of every day with the intention of polishing those beads of our life until they shine like stars.  Imagine the chain of a beautiful baby who only lived one year, but that one year is a diamond, clear and bright, and singly beautiful. That short life still has the same length of chain but instead of many different beads, it just has the one perfect diamond.
So.... if my husband ever decides he wants to buy me a beautiful diamond necklace with one perfect diamond, it will always make me think of each tiny life we have created, including the one who never made it out of the fallopian tube... a life in the blink of an eye.