Evangeline Kyle.

“Now I know why they’re called ‘a bundle,’” I whispered to my beloved as our baby lay leafed up like a cabbage in the swaddling that garnered our nurse’s praise: tight, secure, previously unknown yet welcomed like a fond memory. Over the last several hours came an outpouring of texts, emails, messages, comments, and phone calls; amidst which we shared Evie’s sense of calm, surrounded by a presence pressing, tender, and almost unbearable. Even her name, a tribute to those before her, as if by christening her with the invocation “You are your kin, your kin is you,” she really would continue the character and qualities of her legacy, cradled in them like the swaddling clothes. Angelina, Great Grandmother, Iron Matriarch of the Farol Family, Major’s Wife, mother to six sons and one daughter raised in the same stalwart respect and loyalty, such that in her last days they were all there, children having moved from the same home in Batangas to live in the same area of Southern California, children with children’s children and children’s children’s children, all formed in the same living reverence. And Kyle, Dear Cowsin, Forever Young, with his indomitable smile, who in teaching his younger brothers to be older brothers themselves shifted the paradigm for brotherhood: not roughness, not dominance, but with humility and gentleness he taught them to stand on their own feet; Kyle, who joined his grandmother before starting his first day as a UCI anteater, ending his lifelong battle with lupus. Together, Angelina the Iron Matriarch and Kyle the Forever Young, Kyle and Angelina, Angelina and Kyle, they gird her, establishing the principle by which we intend to raise her, that love is given before it is known.

- J