It's hard to fall asleep while the world keeps spinning

I'm propped up in a bed in a motel with I40 through the Navajo Nation in Arizona as the soundtrack to the constant replay of images and thoughts in my head. I lie next to my eight-year-old daughter and marvel at how she sleeps, for she is like me. I used to lie awake in bed at night, one thought leading to another and another and then the world and the universe and the solar system and how small we are and how large and unending the universe, and what lies beyond the universe, and the stars, and then beyond.
Usually, she lies awake for a minimum of an hour, eyes steadfastly open and brain visibly whirring in the beautiful ocean storm of their depth, but tonight my daughter sleeps while semis roll by outside our room. She surrendered quickly tonight, her strong and vital eight-year-old body exhausted by a small and violent war with a stomach and respiratory bug. Ever the resourceful mom, while she was barfing into an (empty) produce bag in a small and run down Safeway down the road from our motel with her brothers witnessing in their pajamas from perches in the shopping cart, I was readying an offering of baby wipes and ginger ale I had yet to purchase but was already claiming as my arsenal. We'll use whatever we have, us moms: spit and a kleenex usually, as detested by me in my youth as it is by my daughter in hers.
She lies sleeping, and to my left her brothers are splayed in questionable sheets, protected by over-loved teddy-bears and wooden trains. I am awake, and amazed. These are my children. We are in the Navajo Nation because I am driving home to California from Santa Fe and a visit with my parents and the city they raised me in, and my sisters and their miracle children and pregnant bellies and worrying husbands and the beautifully cruel reminder that we are all getting older much, much faster than we bargained for. When did it change from growing up to growing older? It's only a difference in semantics, as far as I can tell - in so many ways I am still that girl looking at the stars through the crack in the curtains, feeling my size and insignificance in the universe. And yet. If we are so insignificant, why does it hurt so much when one of us goes?
I love where I grew up. I love where I live now. I am so, so lucky to be lying here next to my beautiful children, missing my husband, reminding myself to breathe and not just wait in fragile suspense for the next piece of glass to shatter. I am holding in my heart the memory of my beautiful friend, Stephanie who died just two nights ago, and having to remind myself to breathe: that it is not me watching over my children in a hotel room on I40 at night that will protect them from harm. Just as it was not me keeping one hand on each of my sisters' beds at night in our small bedroom that kept us all from spinning out into the universe and beyond. It was enough then to imagine my brother safe and with us in his bedroom, so I will imagine them all safe now and hope, believe it is enough, at least tonight. There are stars, and streetlights, and headlights outside these curtains. I want to protect these beautiful creatures inside from the pain of loss they already have had to trace with baby fingers, but I know it is futile, and they only way to keep them from the pain would be to restrict them from love in equal measure and there is no possible way or desire to keep such perfect creatures from that.
My parents amaze me, and I see how in it's spinning the world just cycles us back through the understanding of what they felt for us, and we now feel for our children, and feel identically in our parents getting older. I want to hold my breath and know that nothing will ever change, that I can stop my parents from their cycle, but I want even more for my children to know the joyride that is life on this beautiful, spinning planet. In the Navajo Nation I remember my highschool friend, Travis, who is, or isn't, somewhere in this spinning. In my father's house I remember his second wife, and in my beautiful nephew's eyes I remember my sister's first husband. In the questions of my children holding up a photograph I remember my parents' first son. A beautiful tiny girl named Ella, my grandmothers, Aunt Virginia, a prayer flag of names unfurling in the wind. There is no shortage of loss, though in just this one hotel room it's effects are far outpaced by joy.
Stephanie, my dear friend, we raised our children these early years together and I am taking a deep, deep breath and believing you are somewhere in this marvelous, cruel universe laying a loving hand on our mattresses to keep us from spinning out into the stars, as I am keeping a hand on your boys' heads, and my own childrens', while I tell them a story of you.
It's time to close the laptop, to surrender myself into sleep that will ready me for whatever onslaught of illness or adventure or joy tomorrow offers. I give myself up to the spinning, so tomorrow I can steady myself and move us forward into our journey. I will always love you, sweet friend, I am grateful to remember all those who are gone, and all of those with whom we still have time to live.