Category Archives: loss

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We celebrated my mom’s 70th birthday this weekend. If my dad was still alive, we would have celebrated his 66th last week.

I just got home from a long weekend with my mom and family in a small artist community in the middle of nowhere Texas. When I hugged my mom goodbye, I had a terrible sense of foreboding. I had a flash that I wouldn’t see her again and that frightened me. I will be an orphan when that day arrives.

It is inevitable that parents die. But it wasn’t until that moment that I realized how quickly finite our relationships are with them. My grandpa (dad’s dad) when asked what he thought when he looked back over his long life said, “I never realized it would go by so quickly.”

My mom and I have always had a tenuous relationship, but we have also always had a strong bond. She isn’t very demonstrative, but I know that she loves me deeply. So did my dad. I can’t imagine a world without that love existing for me. Some of it is already lost.

The present has a way of moving quickly into the past like lines on the road seen through the car back window. I never realized it would go by so quickly.

Mom, happy birthday.
I love you.

time slips away

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April used to be such a happy month for me. It was full of the delight of the first warm spring days, the beauty of yellow daffodils, celebrations of my birthday and the looking forward to my dad and mom and grandma’s birthdays in May. April was the turning point from the drudgery and dreariness of Winter, into the life-filled lush smelling rains of summers promise.

Now, March moves into April with a sense of dread.
The early April reminds me of my dad’s untimely death, and now added is the suicide of a close friend, and the terrible attack on the Boston Marathon which resulted in at least three deaths and hundreds maimed and wounded.

April should not be a sad month, but today the lively singing of the birds outside my window does not cheer me up.
It becomes simply a reminder of how quickly time passes.
Yet another spring has fallen on my doorstep, another year disappeared into the infinite.