Not only with the glorious birth of my own two children, but also as a pediatrician who has attended many a middle of the night deliveries, I can attest to the profoundly transformative power of witnessing a new life enter the world. In what I have come to refer to as my year of dying— when in less than 9 months I saw my father, mother-in-law, and mother make the transition in the other direction —I learned the deep sense of love and connection that can come with the end of life. Or not.

Our world today appears locked in the iron grip of what many refer to as generational trauma. I wonder if a more apt and descriptive term might be unprocessed and unintegrated loss. A psychoanalyst colleague often said, “All emotional suffering is about loss, and all healing is about mourning.”  The Persian poet Rumi expressed a similar sentiment in the aphorism “The cure for the pain is the pain.”