B-Side

Seven

The Geometry of Grief.

I have a bit of a “thing” for The Golden Girls. As Dorothy would say, “There’s a support group for people like you.” To some, it’s a sitcom about four women eating cheesecake. To me, it’s a survival manual. I’ve lived in their living room for years, fluent in the specific cadence of Dorothy Zbornak’s logic.

In a moment of peak anxiety, Dorothy once tried to “science” her way into courage. She claimed that because our body’s cells replace themselves every seven years, she was — biologically — a completely different person than the one who was afraid. I used to laugh at the line. I didn’t realize it would eventually become the compass for my grief.

There is a strange comfort in the number seven. The seven days of the week. The seven colors of the prism. The seven notes of the scale before the octave folds back on itself. Seven is the fundamental unit of a human season.

In the language of the stars, the planet Saturn takes roughly 28 years to orbit the sun — a journey that naturally divides into four chapters of seven years each. Astrologers have long used this as the map of a human life, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Our first seven years, we cry and someone feeds us. We don’t choose our home, our name, or our language. Life happens to us. The next seven, we are running around with brothers and sisters, cousins, the kids next door — learning the unwritten rules of belonging. Life happens around us. Then high school arrives with its brutal social physics, and something shifts. We start becoming someone. Life happens through us. And then — college graduation, a wider world, a door swinging open — we step all the way in. Life simply is us.

Four seasons. One orbit. Twenty-eight years.

Most of us hope to see that orbit spin three times.

Even the absurdist stories I love carry this rhythm. Rose Nylund — played by the legendary Betty White — often spoke of a world where life moved in simple, cyclical patterns, where the punchline was never cruelty but grace. It feels like a quiet wink from the universe that my own mother was named Betty.

While one Betty taught me how to find the light inside the absurd, my Betty taught me the quiet geometry of a life fully lived.

My mom, Betty, died on March 19, 2019 — the very last day of Winter.

She was 84 years old.

The math is heartbreakingly perfect. Twenty-eight years times three. Twelve seasons of seven. She lived the full Grand Year of a human life, and she closed the book on the very last night before the world turned green again. She didn’t just leave. She came full circle.

This month marks seven years since that morning.

Which means Dorothy was right, at least in part. Science confirms it: nearly every cell in my body has turned over since 2019. The skin she last touched. The blood that carried my initial shock. They’ve been replaced, rebuilt, quietly renewed. I am, in a very real biological sense, a new person.

But there is a beautiful glitch in the system.

The cells of the heart muscle are among the few that stay with us for life. They don’t refresh. They don’t swap out. They hold their ground.

It turns out Dorothy was only mostly right.

We do get a fresh start. But we are allowed to keep the permanent equipment — the original heart that loved her, still beating. Still here. Ready for the Spring.

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