Once A Long Time Ago

One year ago today, I was running around trying to get everything together for a drive out to West Lafayette, Indiana.
How can I explain what has happened in a year?  I thought that maybe I would write about the trip to Indiana, but I am choosing not to dwell on that sadness.

This past weekend, I drove my sister and my nephew Crosby up to Albany to visit my Dad, Erik, Pam and my niece Beatrix.  Both babies are almost seven months old now, I watched them meet each other, now aware of life.  They'd met before but were too little to know it.
My Dad held them, realizing he had two grand-children, and we laughed and watched them sitting next to each other.  Their chubby baby knuckles, big heads and almost toothless grins...I laughed at the simplicity of being a baby.

I tried not to think.  Tried not to think about the person who was not there, could not be there.

I've been told that every great work of literature is about loss or love or both.   I know now that's because everything in life is about loss and or love.  They work in tandem at times, one following the other.  If you put your heart out there, it will eventually experience loss.

The love I feel for my niece and nephew is so great, I never knew I could love two people who are so new, so unknown to me.  Two little souls, who entered my world just as another left.
There is something so tragic in this, I don't quite know how to write or express it at all.  I see people posting things about their Mom's on Facebook, or their grandchildren and it's wonderful.  That love is wonderful, but at times it just reminds me of my own loss...

I think about Crosby and Beatrix, how they will never know this person who brought me  and their parents into this world.  How she will never tell them funny stories about their Mom and Dad as small children.  And I wonder, will they miss someone they've never met?

Maybe I love them more because she is gone. And I wish that I could just wrap them up and keep them in my pocket forever.

I don't want this to be sad, that's not where I am at right now.  There are just little fragments of sadness illuminating my days, because I'm starting to feel better.  Starting to accept things.

Friends, most of you who are my age, you've yet to experience so great a loss.  Some of you have, but someday you will.  Remember that there is no "right" way to grieve, we each have our own way to learn to live without someone.

Maybe that's not right, I am not learning to live without her, maybe I'm just still learning to live.


It's almost Spring again, I'm longing for the warmth and the flowers.  Maybe a soft rainfall, that first smell of Spring...because it's all about rebirth, a respite from this cold.

Hope.  Hope that each day the sun will come up again, that sorrow lessens over time, that there is love to be had in this world again.