When I think of the phoenix, I think of my grandparents.
I think of everything they lost, everything they built, and how they found a way to begin again when the lives they knew had changed beyond recognition.
To me, they represent an entire generation.
But their stories are also part of my everyday life.
Whenever I feel that everything is falling apart, I think of them.
They are the reason I know I have it in me to rise again.
My maternal grandmother lost her first husband in the Second World War and was left with two young children. She fled Riga, and her little daughter died at just one year old.
As far as our family knows, she died of hunger.
When my grandmother returned to Riga, she was a widow with one surviving child.
There she met my grandfather, a soldier who had lost a leg on the battlefield.
It turned out that he was in love with her, and he asked her to marry him.
She took some time to say yes. I will always be grateful that she did.
They went on to have three daughters together.
My mother is the eldest. After losses I can barely begin to comprehend,
they built a family, the family I would eventually be born into.
My paternal grandfather also returned from the Second World War to devastating news. His wife and all three of their children had been murdered.
Later, he met my father’s mother. They fell in love, and she became pregnant.
She died just three weeks after giving birth to my father.
Once again, my grandfather was widowed, this time with a newborn son.
He had met his third wife while serving with the Red Army.
He found her after the war and brought her to Riga, where they married.
She, too, had lost her husband. Together, they built a new family.
I can tell these stories in a few paragraphs, but each sentence holds a whole life.
I cannot fully know what it took for them to get up each morning, open themselves to love, raise children, and make a home after everything they had endured.
And life continued to test them. More hardships, more losses, more moments when they had to find their footing again. Each time, they found a way forward and built something with the life they had.
That is why the phoenix makes me think of them.
There is a line in this video: “I build a home from what remains.” It brings to mind the families they created, the children who were born, and everything that grew from their willingness to begin again. My own life is part of that story.
I have had my share of painful upheavals, too. I have changed careers.
I have changed things about myself. Again and again, I have had to find a way forward, sometimes in a direction I could never have imagined.
And there is one especially painful experience my grandmother and I share:
I, too, lost a baby.
Knowing that she had found a way to go on living after that loss became a profound source of strength for me. In my own grief, I could look to her – to the life she had lived and everything she had built afterward – and believe that, somehow,
I would find my way, too.
Over the years, I have come to understand that each time I get back up,
I create something different.
I do not need to decide whether it is better or worse than what came before.
It is different. And sometimes, it grows into something bigger than I could have imagined.
I carry my grandparents with me into every new beginning: their stories, the lives they built, and the strength I still draw from them.
So when I fall, or when everything seems to be coming apart again, I know I can rise.
It may take time. I may have no idea yet what comes next.
But the strength is there.
And so much of it comes from them.
