Postscript

One last thing on my Mom. I remember our last visit to the Cape. We were out at the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History and they had a special exhibit on Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring. For those of you who haven't heard of the book, you should immediately go to your local bookstore and buy a copy since it should be required reading for all Americans. The book dealt with the nation's increased use of pesticides and how this was affecting the environment. It is so good you won't be able to put it down.

Anyhow, Rachel also fought and lost a battle with cancer. And, the museum has a large mural of one of her diary entries. My Mom stood and read it several times and actually asked me to take a picture of it. Given the similarities between the two women and my Mom's love of butterflies, I think that its a fitting postscript.

"This is a postscript to our morning in Newagen, something I think that I can write better than say. For me it was the loveliest of the summer's hours, and all the details will remain in my memory; that blue September sky, the sounds of the wind in the spruces and the surf on the rocks, the gulls busy with their foraging, alighting with deliberate grace, the distant views of Griffiths Head and Todd Point, today so clearly etched, though once half seen in swirling fog. But most of all I shall remember the Monarchs that unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force. We talked a little about their migration, their life history. Did they return? We thought not for most, at least, this was the journey of their lives."

"But it occurred to me this afternoon, remembering, that it had been a happy spectacle, that we had felt no sadness when we spoke of the fact that there would be no return. And rightly-for when any living thing has come to the end of its life cycle we accept that end as natural.
For the Monarch, that cycle is measured in a known span of months."

"For ourselves, the measure is something else, the span of which we cannot know. But the thought is the same, when that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that life comes to an end. That is what those brightly fluttering bits of life taught me this morning. I found deep happiness in it-so, I hope, may you."

-Rachel Carson