John J. Farmer, Jr. (Dean, Rutgers-Newark), Change, Sadly, Is Inevitable (Newark Star-Ledger):

[N]atural catastrophes are mirrored in the transformations of our own lives. Most of us lead several lives in the span of our years, each demarcated by what we’ve lost. There is the early life with our parents and grandparents, the life alone before marriage, the life with our spouses and, if we’re lucky, our children, the diminishing life after our loved ones have departed. Each of these lives is complete, with days full of sun and peace, sufficient for its time, lasting just long enough for us to believe it won’t end.

They shouldn’t end, you think, the days of Poppy reading the Sunday Daily News in the kitchen in his undershirt, of your sisters riding their bikes, of the magic light in your wife’s eyes, of sunlit ball fields, of the joy of your horses running after a storm and your dog chasing waves in the shore’s salt breeze. They shouldn’t end. They last just long enough to create the illusion of permanence. Just long enough to break your heart.

For they do end, swept away in a natural disaster or a terrorist attack or in more mundane ways, in car accidents or broken relationships or illnesses or the slow death of a child or the sudden demise of a spouse or in the hoped-for long twilight of a parent’s life. You can plan for catastrophe, you can map every contingency, but the history of our planet teaches that disasters will overwhelm your every effort.

Somehow this reality doesn’t defeat us. We assimilate the tragedies that cause our lives to change forever. We move on. We always have.