This is a bit of a novel I am writing in which a young woman is working to protect endangered cranes species.
She also envied the cranes their tribe. The sense of belonging. Her genetic tribe were dead or at least dead to her. She’d developed a tribe of people who believed as she did, who worked for the same things that she did, but it wasn’t exactly the same and didn’t fill that void that the death of her father and grandmother had left.
Olivia thought of one of her mothers favorite sayings, amor fati. She’d never understood it as a child. It sounded romantic and hopeful, “love of fate”. She’d asked about it in one of her philosophy classes as an undergraduate thinking that it would make her appear smart and worldly. Her professor, Dr. Campbell, had been excited to launch into an explanation of its meaning which gave Olivia so much more insight into her mother. Dr. Campbell explained that the phrase referred to the love of fate that is inevitably death. He said that the joy of it was the redeeming ecstasy, that there was no heaven, no future bliss, nothing but utter darkness. While it made her sad, it also helped her understand those afternoons when she would find her mother staring off into nothing lost in thoughts that Olivia would never understand.