Bittersweet

I started writing after Mom died...poetry, prose, short stories...mostly just expression of all the emotion I was dealing with at the time. It was therapeutic for me.

When I left home (Jackson) for the last time, knowing I wouldn't be returning, I wrote this...

and....so, as I stand here, waiting to go,

I feel I can't leave without letting you know,

that in just a few moments a new era begins,

and I hope this is how the old one will end.

By remembering the moments, remembering the smiles,

and measuring no distance between us but miles...

There was more to it, but I can't remember it now...It was written to one person, but as the years went by, I realized it was really to everyone I had left behind.

Everyone who had a part in the making of me...

Each and everyone of them, a fiber in the tapestry that I would become.

Yesterday, I found out that one of those who contributed to who I am, left us this year.

I re-connected with an old friend, and asked about Lori, fully expecting to hear that she was doing fine, living in blah blah, doing great things (because I knew that she would) and the LAST thing I expected to hear was that she is gone.

Well, not "Gone"...because I don't believe we are ever truely, "Gone" !

Just take yesterday, in fact....Lori was with me all day, after I got that news...

Couldn't shake her...

Everytime I turned around, her energy was right there with me.

Flashback's of times we shared....the faint sound of her laughter tickling me throughout the day.

Even now, I can feel her...standing right over my shoulder, reading as I type...

No, she is not gone...

She is in my heart. She is in my memory. She is a fiber in the tapestry of who so many of us are.

She is in her work, that she left behind for all of us to have, and she is in the eye's and familiar gesture's of her children, and their children...and she will go on forever...

But, I sure wish that I could have hugged her one more time...