This year took a steady toll from my wider circle. Some deaths, occurring in a generation up from me, were more or less expected: an in-law aunt, for example. Some, occurring in my generation, were not all that surprising: the father of a former colleague, for example. Some, occurring in the next generation down, were shocking: the fifty-something wife of a former colleague, for example.
Today I light a digital candle for my family, acknowledging their deaths but also celebrating that they lived, that they live in my memory, and that they live in me.
Nicely done, Isabel. Thanks.
Tom
Tom – Thank *you.*
As we age, I think I feel a little like a block of marble, being chipped away at, as friends and associates — and even enemies — die. But the metaphor of marble makes me consider its implications, even as I write those words. Am I an unfinished block, having all the waste removed by Michelangelo to reveal the David within? Or was I once Michelangelo’s finished product, now being chipped away at by the beaks of countless pooping pigeons?
Jim T
Jim – Maybe it’s the initial metaphor that wants some looking at. 🙂 But I get (at least in part) that feeling of losing people who used to mark the edges of my life.
The further we travel, the closer the sense that “we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses”. I find strength in the ways they have “run with patience the race that is set before us.” And just as often ask myself, “How did they do it?” Thank you for the ways your efforts to share your mother’s stories have enriched my resources as well!
Laurna – A lovely thought: a cloud of witnesses. As for patience, I don’t suppose they did any better than we do. And yet they got through.
A generous action. Well said.
Judith – Many thanks. Sometimes I miss the lack of ritual in my upbringing. Sometimes I rectify it.
Thanks!
Barry – They’re nice, aren’t they?