No Time

April 11, 2024April 12, 2024 / Hermionejh / 2 Comments

My oldest sister and I went to Rhode Island today to meet with my deceased sister’s tax prep guy who seemed like a lovely, caring person.

Our sister had been using his service for 29 years. 29 years! I don’t think I’ve used any kind of service for that long.

He told us that they used to chat while he did her taxes, and she would talk to him about her nursing schooling, and he would tell her about his love of all things Germany – especially Munich and Oktoberfest.

We all got teary-eyed over our departed sister.

Her house sold two days ago, and while her partner bought the house, it’s not the same. She’s gone. It was her house. Many of her things are still in it, but she’s gone.

I can’t conjure her except in memories, and maybe someday they won’t be as sad and depressing.

I can’t sing music we both enjoyed without sadness and sometimes weeping. I can’t talk about things that remind me of her, and there will never be another family beach day that she attends, or time to just spend with her – because no matter how awful she could be to me sometimes – she also just let me be wherever I was most of the time.

I don’t know what happened the last several years, but she became less happy, and less happy meant me not being treated well.

I think part of me understood that she was damaged. She didn’t want to be a jerk, but trying to make me feel bad made her feel slightly better. I understood it as our shared trauma. She learned differently. She would fight and I would flight/freeze. I was the youngest sister and learned to never mistake who was in the one-up position. Having an oldest sister who liked me helped moderate our other sister’s behavior toward me. She wasn’t top dog, but she was more top dog than me.

She told me she wanted to be a better sister. I saw her struggle with her inner world. I watched her change in ways she didn’t like, but the work to be different was a foreign language she couldn’t invest in.

We had a mutual friend from our early teens and they grew closer while they seemed to shut me out.

It was one of the most painful things I’ve ever dealt with. I honestly didn’t understand what happened, but I had to learn to accept it. Another mutual friend told me it was because they lived mostly on the surface and I had the unfortunate bent of wanting more dimension in my friendships. I also remembered the past more vividly than they did, so even if it wasn’t shutting me out, exactly, it was still a shock. I’m still shook thinking about it, but I’m adjusting and adapting, and doing my best to move on.

I guess that’s growing up. Those who I thought were my tribe are not. Maybe they once were, but that was then, this is now – and she’s gone. There’s no more chance at being accepted into the tribe – and why would I want to belong to a tribe that doesn’t want me to belong?

Still, my oldest sister and I, and my deceased sister’s partner, were with her the last days of her life. We did the best we could. She knew we loved her, and she told us she loved us.

It’s not easy to die. It’s not easy to leave a life in the middle of it. I think it’s easier to go quickly with no time to reflect on the fact of life’s end.

But we’re all dying. We’re also living. Living is what this place is for, and one day, sooner than I know, my turn to go will come.

Mapped Out

February 18, 2024 / Hermionejh

I don’t know if it’s accurate to say that my body – especially my face – is more and more a map of my life, but it feels that way.

The permanent crease above my left eyebrow lets me know that my quizzical expression is lopsided – it seems my right eyebrow doesn’t care to express itself much. The same goes for my ever-deepening smile creases that have a deeper groove on my left side than my right, and how apt it is for an inner life and outward life often at odds that has left visible reminders.

I chide myself for wanting to erase those lines and creases – my vanity wanting a smooth, un-lined face forever.

I have lived. The years keep going by leaving time’s impression, not really having much to do with who we are inside. We are semi-ageless. It seems like it would be a tragedy to stay the same – never deepening our understanding, knowledge or experience.

I get it that so many would strike that bargain – and are doing their best to keep time’s imprint off their bodies. Half of me wants that too.

Wrinkles do not confer, and should not imply, wisdom, after all – just that we’ve lived long enough for our bodies to start breaking down.

The work to stay healthy and functional seems to fill up more time and can feel daunting.

It’s probably a question of available energy than motivation, but I am more alive when I’m doing things I love, and especially getting out into the woods for long hikes.

As stupid as it sounds, I’ve started understanding how we’re everything and everything is us. I have the same elements as the chair I sit on, the floor I walk on, the metal in the ladle and the clay or ceramic of the bowl that contains the soup I’m eating, that also contains the elements of my body.

I’m not even stoned! But, yes, we are made from those elements too.

This isn’t new information to any of us, but the perception or feeling is different. It feels more visceral now. Is that wisdom? I think my brain just loves rabbit holes.

The minutiae of the outer world has become more fascinating.

I never had time nor inclination much for that when I was younger – not that I didn’t appreciate the beauty and intricacy of the world and the phenomenal unlikelihood and mystery of life itself.

Maybe it’s because I’m no longer preoccupied with raising my child or finding someone to share my time or my life with. I suppose it’s different for everyone.

Maybe it’s also because I feel my mortality more strongly than ever and I want to be here as fully as possible for the time left to me.

As for any of us, my last day here could be today.

It’s like a deadline is fast approaching and the urgency to get get my shit together to have my portfolio or the highlight reel of my time here ready for who or whatever might review it on the other side from here feels more imperative.

That might not at all be a thing, but my anxiety about the possibility is clearly nerve-wracking.

Will they like me? Did I do alright? Will they forgive me if I fucked up the one job I was supposed to do here (the instructions of which somehow got lost) – or was I just supposed to wing it all along – and we’ll all laugh about the big tangled mess I made?

I hope it’s the latter because the worry is being mapped out all over my ever-creasing face.

Past Present or Present Past

February 13, 2024 / Hermionejh

I dreamed I saw a young woman who had red hair in a long thick braid like my sister used to wear her hair when she was younger. I didn’t dream of my sister – just a stranger.

What did that mean? Anything? Nothing?

I’m stuck in this wanting place. I recognize it but I don’t know what to do about it.

Why am I hanging onto the past? What do I think is there? Maybe it’s a kind of protection from the reality of now.

The past is long gone – I know that. I know there’s no going back, nor would I honestly want to. It sucked back then – but I was a part of a tribe.

A fucked up tribe, but it was as fun and interesting as it was terrible.

I didn’t know how to live this life. I only knew how to react to it.

I dreamed of being famous because it looked like an inoculation against the hell of life as I saw it.

I didn’t know that they were just people in another kind of hell. Some of them were genuine and good, and some were shit in reality. I wouldn’t know that for many years. I only saw the fantasy and the potential ticket out.

The older girls I got to hang around with seemed worldly. My sisters didn’t want me around them, but they were overruled by the clan leader. She was the arbiter of all things back then – at least to me.

She deemed me worthy, and so I was – at least when she was around. Mostly the older girls, including my sisters, kept to themselves, but I always got to hear about their adventures.

One of the girls, just a year older than me, was a true friend to me, but even we seemed to pass in and out of each others’ lives. We had a bond beyond time and space though. We belonged to each other without having to declare it – although we did become blood sisters by cutting our fingers and pressing them together to mix our blood.

She pierced my ears when I was 12. She was a mother hen toward me and did what she could to protect me.

I didn’t know that I needed protection, but she saw how I blew with the wind. She kept me safer than I would have been on my own. The wolves were always at the door.

She left the world last May and I so wish I could talk to her about my sister’s death and hear what she would say to me.

I keep thinking I should just go join her, but I can’t for several reasons, the biggest being that I don’t know if I would find her out there. What if suicide fucks you up on the other side from here?

My therapist said to hear what she would say to me, but the thing is she almost always said something I wouldn’t have thought of. She also didn’t judge me or tell me to have a better attitude or that everything would be alright. Just that she loved me and was here.

But she’s not anymore.

I have to figure it out from here.

I guess I always did figure it out anyway, but knowing she was in the world helped.

My sister was a jerk to me quite often. It was how our family abuse twisted her, but she came into this world with her own essence just like I did – just like we all do.

It feels stupid to miss her. But it’s complicated. She brought fun & high adventure in our early lives regardless of her prickliness.

I don’t know if anything truly exists after this life, but her story has ended.

The ringleader of the group of older girls died a few months after my friend died, and then my next oldest sister a few months after that.

I’m worried that I’m just going to see all my friends and loved ones die before I do, but I have no control over any of that.

I wish we would all just leave this world on the same day and have a plan to meet on the other side – if there is an other side, but it’s not my deal.

Being here at all was never my deal. But here we are, so, good luck, I guess?

I’m not pondering or railing against anything that hasn’t been pondered or railed against before, I know.

There are thousands of books and programs and gurus and religions who all say different, albeit similar, words and thoughts about the why of this place, but the bottom line is that no one knows – and anyone who tells you they do know is deluded or lying or mentally ill.

“Life is pain, Highness, and anyone who tells you different is selling something,” from The Princess Bride.

She Was Here

January 11, 2024January 11, 2024 / Hermionejh / 2 Comments

I pick up a paper from the growing stack of papers, and sympathy cards scattered here and there on the table, and I put it back down. I seem to walk in circles – doing mindless tasks, and chores – but nothing that requires real focus because I can’t seem to get myself together lately.

I’m supposed to be writing her obituary, but I can’t. It nauseates me to think of it – like maybe I’m making it real? I don’t think that’s really it. Maybe it’s that I have to face all that her passing means.

Any chance of a closer relationship is gone. While we both lived there was the possibility.

What is an obituary anyway? So much is left out. It’s the highlights, the best of them.

We don’t talk about the trauma much, if at all – or the pain and lingering hurt. That’s for me to work out alone, but it makes the writing seem disingenuous.

She was this, and that. She did these things, and then she left.

She left in the middle-ish of her life, and didn’t want to go – but not many of us do, regardless of our age.

She had a small life that she enjoyed, and she worked hard.

She didn’t know that she was getting sick, or that once she got sick it would be two & a half months of progressive hell with the hope that she’d regain function that never happened.

Her partner is devastated – shell-shocked really – and just a shadow in his own life now. Work is what saves him from the gaping hole of grief.

Her chair sits empty – her belongings mostly gone. How quickly physical traces got erased.

Do I want a shrine to her? Don’t we all deserve a shrine? We lived, dammit! WE WERE HERE.

I see my favorite picture of her in my mind’s eye. She is standing on a hill, maybe, with an Aruban breeze whipping her long copper red hair into her brightly laughing face. The beaming sun brings the feeling of warmth and being fully alive into that moment she was captured mid-laughter.

That was one of the happiest periods in her life. That’s when we were friends & I got to enjoy her company – her sense of adventure and be part of her strong, independent and earthy existence. She was fearless and exuberant. Her life was filled with activity: camping, canoeing, sunbathing, swimming, singing, dancing, and laughing.

But life moves on. She was better at letting go than I was. She went to nursing school, and finally got her bachelor’s degree focusing on diabetes education where she began a career.

She liked her house and her garden – so many things she did on her own.

She was good to my son, her nephew.

Time took away her sense of fun – or maybe that was what she thought maturity was.

Maybe we all figure out what’s comfortable for us, or what we’re willing to accept. Or maybe time just goes by regardless of what we’d like.

She was important to me. She was family. She showed up and made a point to have at least four gatherings a year.

I wished she had been kinder to me as time went on, but I didn’t recognize that maybe she was changing in ways that she didn’t understand herself.

Accepting how she changed was hard for me. I’ve changed too. Time changes us all whether we know it or not.

We have an essential self that gets buried under life’s burdens, but we can still shine through.

I will remember that laughing young woman, grateful for all she gave me as her sister, and hoping that she remembered the goodness we once shared.

I love you Twyla. I hope you’re in your happiest self, sparkling among the stars.

Strangeness

December 30, 2023 / Hermionejh / 2 Comments

It’s this inbetween-land. Everything looks strange and inaccessible, but it’s also all familiar and available. I think I’m not liking this aspect of human-being.

Anger has saved me lately. It’s raw and vivid, and takes me out of any other feelings. Its also cold and callous. I see pain around me, even within me, and I’m not moved – except sometimes I am.

I will come back to balance & center again – but I’ve been trying to drink it away, and all I get is 15 or 20 minutes of relief, but hours or a day of feeling sick.

It’s not a good trade off. I feel better when I don’t drink, plus I can’t afford it anyway.
I can’t sustain anger either. I have to let the grief be there. I don’t want to talk, I have to walk about and let all of it be there.

So I’ll leave the booze to those it won’t try to kill, and I’ll keep putting one foot in front of the other.

My sister got very sick, fairly quickly – even if it had been signalling its arrival for several years. It was hard to see what was happening until the worst happened.

Systemic scleroderma is a lot like cancer in remaining a general malaise for a long time before it erupts. Some get a milder version they can live with, but my sister got the worst version. It was relentless.

Her death was a relief for her because there was no out. She wasn’t traumatized at the end, her breathing got fast for a few minutes and then just stopped. We did all we could & in the hours before her passing we kept her comfortable, and kept telling her we loved her.

Don’t make any major decisions for a year wiser people say, but all I want to do is run. I want to move to another country or another planet. I want to not be at all anymore, and not because I’m grieving over my sister’s relatively early exit, but because there will be more.

It’s never going to end – it was just much less of it earlier in my life.

Maybe whatever comes next will be amazing and I’ll be so happy once I’m there, but as I am still earthbound, I have to deal with being human. If I hurt myself through carelessness, I’ll just have those consequences on top of getting old or sick.

If I’m going to be here, it’s important to me to be in the best shape I can to live the rest of my time well, and I will deal with my death when it comes.

Sisters Forever

December 14, 2023January 7, 2024 / Hermionejh / 6 Comments

So, what is there to do, after all, when the hard news comes that you knew was coming?

You also knew, and held out hope, that sometimes circumstances come together to change momentum’s direction, or change a person’s mind and will to continue on.

Hope was needed, but now it belongs back in its box.

The story’s end is known – only the timeline alters.

There is no changing what is happening, but I don’t have to hold my breath, or keep anxiety in my heart or mind. It won’t help, and it’s not compassion or acceptance.

What if she were going to a privately held party on a remote tropical island where everything is as you wish? I would feel envious instead of anxious, but I would be happy for her.

I wouldn’t try to delay her flight, or talk her out of going based on my fear.

She’s got her party hat all picked out.

Her dress is floral and flattering, her sandals and bag match, and her heart becomes light and joyful upon her arrival.

Maybe the flight was dreadful and terrifying, but the warm breezes embrace her as she disembarks. The distress of the difficult journey falls away as she gazes upon white sand, an azure ocean, and a forget-me-not blue sky.

Relatives and friends from her entire life are there to greet her, and celebrate her arrival.

She pauses before walking off because she hears crying in the distance – tears for her, and she looks for a way to ease them.

She sees an oyster shell at her feet and picks it up. She somehow knows that if she blows on it, the breeze will whisk it away into the ethers and it will soon gently fall at those sad ones’ feet.

They can know that she is now safe, and happy, and free.

All is well, and as it should be.

Peace, Love, Grief

August 20, 2023 / Hermionejh

There have been better days lately. I’ve been doing my best to fill up the friend-shaped space she once occupied.

We don’t know what, if anything, awaits us after this world, so it’s a crapshoot if we’ll ever meet again. We won’t have eyes to see one another, mouths to talk and share a laugh, or arms to give a hug, but we will recognize each other if we retain consciousness outside our body.

I saw another old friend today that I haven’t seen in years. He was part of our large mutual friend group when we were teens, and I’m grateful he hasn’t radically changed since then. Matured, yes, but still true to his essential self.

After we parted I was hit with a wave of loneliness or sadness that seemed outsized for the situation, but later realized that it was about belonging – and about loss, because my friend who died in May also belonged in our friend group.

It’s kind of silly that I wanted to cling to him emotionally, as if his presence would resurrect our friend, but she’s gone, and no one can bring her back.

We both had places to be, so we left, and I walked myself through the mental patch of grief left in his wake that he really had nothing to do with.

The starkness of grief can trigger my leftover childhood neglect trauma. It feels like standing alone in the midst of a crowd.

My inner peace comes from the center of my heart, because I have no peace without love, but it’s very hard to find the love without peace. Thankfully, it’s still possible, even if it’s only moments.

I’m still in my life. I have things to do and places to go. It’s ok to still be here. It will also be ok when I’m no longer here.

I wondered earlier today if the experiences we have and the knowledge we gain are not ours alone, but are directly feeding or enriching the spirit world.

It might be that that is not how any of this works, but it made me feel like I’m possibly contributing something worthwhile to the whole.

Who knows?

To Everything…

April 23, 2023May 10, 2023 / Hermionejh / 6 Comments

All morning the rain has fallen, soaking the greening ground in my northeastern town. The growing season is here – the birds trill out their morning song most days, but not today.

The birds are sheltering in while the hard rain falls. Only the deer venture out from the woods to eat the fresh tender shoots.

Spring mornings feel gentle, though I know strenuous work has been (and continues) happening to break new buds open, to push up the snow drops, crocuses, daffodils and tulips from the hard, cold earth in rapid succession.

So many trees and flowers are gorgeous with their blooms, but standing out are the yellows of daffodils, dandelions and forsythia blooms that are now bursting out along their stems.

I once learned at a Chinese medicine workshop that spring is the season of anger, and yellow is its color. That anger offers the force needed to push through the semi-frozen, hard-packed soil of my mind.

It’s a losing proposition to try to regulate my emotions well, and lately The Byrds’ version of Turn, Turn, Turn plays in my mind several times a day as I keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Pete Seeger arranged passages from the biblical book of Ecclesiastes:

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time for every purpose, under Heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep

A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together…

Death is as close as life, but I act as though I will be here forever so endings always feel too soon.

I know it’s fear. I shouldn’t fear the ‘unknown’ because I once knew it, if I were somewhere before I was here – and the conservation of energy tells me that I was because energy is neither created nor destroyed. Energy can only be transformed or transmuted. While that could be comforting, it does not comfort or console.

I don’t know what it was like before this time. I don’t know if I had any senses to determine anything. It appears that this is a unique experience.

Do we report back somewhere? If I am taken to account will I quiver in a dark corner for eternity?

It’s important to me to do my best in this world – whatever my best has looked like, and whatever it will continue to look like until I die.

Another biblical passage from I-don’t-care-where reads that ‘the wages of sin are death.’ Like a bulb flash the other day, I understood that the payment for being born (sin) is death. It’s as simple as that. It’s not a judgement, it’s a fact.

Another passage allegedly from Jesus, is that ‘those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life will keep it forever.’ To me that speaks to the ‘middle way.’ Don’t be overly attached, or despairing. This was always temporary.

That still doesn’t answer what the point of having a flesh body is, except that it is a singular experience, I guess.

Maybe we reincarnate and maybe we don’t. Maybe the physical world is like choosing an adventure package from the spirit realm. Maybe there are infinite worlds we can inhabit in different forms – or maybe we never have to leave home and can learn about it from others? I suppose that would make experiencing it for oneself attractive. (Suckers!)

(Maybe being in a flesh body is more like the carnival in Tom Sawyer where you pay your entrance fee, but there is nothing to see inside – you’ve been suckered – but you leave and tell those about to enter how great it is.)

I can ponder the unknowable all day and I will be right back where I am now, no closer to understanding a damn thing. The clue has always been right there in bold type: it’s UNKNOWABLE.

All I can do is focus on the moment.

What stones am I gathering? What should I cast away? Is that something I can know? I think I should cast away what hinders me – but with all the practice from all the therapy and knowledge I have gained throughout my life, I still haven’t cast much away!

I don’t want any of my people to leave this world while I’m here, but so many already have – and one day – sooner than I can imagine, I will too. I just really hope it doesn’t suck.

Free To Love

December 22, 2022 / Hermionejh / 3 Comments

I don’t mean to always be writing about a dark journey. This is where I currently am. I just don’t have time for bullshit anymore – if I ever really did.

It used to be important to me to seem like everything was fine. I hid from all except a select few. Like so many of us, most never knew my full story – they got to know what felt safe to tell them.

We grow up knowing the lay of the land, don’t we? If we want to be our true selves, we walk a narrow path. I learned to live in disguise for so much of my life.

While none of us are guaranteed another minute of life, most of us seem to live fairly long lives – in human time at least. Eventually, we have more days behind us than ahead of us, no matter how rich or well-connected we might be.

Maybe we think more urgently about our life’s purpose – if there is such a thing – or what being here means to us. Is there a point?

If you’re religious, the point is built in. You have a structure, and you never have to question anything. You follow the directions, and you’re good – safe in your salvation. Except that we’re often more complicated than that. Faith is tested – sometimes to being undone.

I was never very faithful, but I have always been faithful. A friend once told me I think about God/dess more than anyone she had ever met. It makes me laugh to think about that because I am no friend of deities. I think about it so much because I want to understand it. Who made gods and goddesses? Humans did. Maybe we need to believe. Maybe I need to believe.

But, in what? That some magical being is going to greet me when my body dies and tell me what a good job I did getting through hell?

“Fuck off” is what I will say to that being. It watched me and did nothing? It saw the shit that I and every other being on this rock slog through and thought it was okay to let us slog? Or if all it could do was watch us and hope for the best for us – what is that?

What did we gain? What is the place that we are going to that being “honed” through being alive will be useful for?

I don’t like being a pawn.

My mother thought that we’re all goddesses and gods creating this world as we go.

Roger Ebert’s last words or sentiment stayed with me. His wife said he wrote a note to her that this place is “an elaborate hoax,” or that “it’s all an illusion.”

It’s all an illusion.

What does that mean if that is true? Can you jump off and that is okay? None of this matters?

If I leave now, my son will be sad – I think. He has a whole new family now. A much better one that anything I could ever give him.

His wife’s family lives in a beautiful house on a bay of Lake Champlain. They seem to have what I wish I had had.

My son does not visit me. I am not complaining – I am noticing. I’m noticing that his preferred place is a place I would also prefer. I understand that it’s also his wife’s family home, and that is what they do – which is good. I am happy for them. I’m just saying that my absence wouldn’t be life changing.

It would be, of course, in some way. My mother’s death was life-altering for me, but my father’s death was not.

I think there was, and remains, a trauma bit left about my mother – something that my brain wiring connects to something so deep I honestly cannot describe it, but I think my son and I are clean and free from that. He does not have the trauma wiring that I have.

What a huge accomplishment that is, says my objective self.

Mostly, being free from myself is what’s important to me. I don’t know how to do that yet. It’s a work in progress. What’s important is not dragging this weight around after I leave my body (if I retain my consciousness). It’s all in my brain. And if it isn’t, then it’s all in my consciousness.

I thought that I was supposed to do something memorable in this world. But most people never do. We just live.

For the few nanoseconds (or way, way less) of eternity that I was here – if there are ever psychic archeologists – I want them to find the vestiges of love left where I walked, and lived, and was. I want them to discover that my love emanated out into the universe in a network that continues on and will never fade.

I Miss My Mom

August 31, 2022 / Hermionejh / 4 Comments

I was going to write about how rock and roll aging is, but my mother zoomed into my awareness and I dearly miss her. She was fucked up. She trashed her body with alcohol and guilt and shame. Sounds familiar.

Regardless of anything else, I was close to her. She was my mom. She was important to me. She was the person I went to when things sucked – even if we didn’t talk about it. We’d have a crappy cup of coffee, and I just got to be in her presence. She made me. There is no other person on this earth – this heaven – this hell – that can say that.

I have dear, dear friends – and I would be deeply angry if they leave this world before me, especially Dimitra who has been here for me since I was 10 and she was 11. We are soul mates. If there was any type of organization before zooming into this world, we made a plan to stick together no matter how far apart we got. It’s just how it is.

I love my family – deservedly or not. That does not mean I accept terrible treatment, and they are on notice now in a way they never were before. I have self-love and self-respect that I did not have a good handle on for most of my life, so I was often treated less well than I deserved, or at least as I felt I should be treated. Now, however, I think my siblings know that this life is fleeting, and possibly only love remains. Only connection can be accessed beyond this plane of existence. At least, that’s how it seems to me.

I refuse the stupid reward/punishment paradigm. It sucks being on earth – for so many reasons. It’s also astounding to be on earth for so many reasons. I am reveling in how beautiful and varied this world is. I weep for what humanity has done when we had information and choices and ignored both.

As someone once said: humans are the only species that knowingly shits where it eats. That stands for pollution, over population, and all poor stewardship of our planet.

But, today, on my birthday eve, my mom is here. I am glad she is, even if it means I miss her human companionship. I want to talk to her. There are so many things I want to ask her – things that I cannot know without her input, and that is now lost forever. If I were psychic – or super psychic – I would be able to chit chat, and maybe get information that I want, but I can’t see her. I can’t hug her. I can’t be in her presence like I could before. Warranted or not, I felt comforted around my mom. I felt belonging. My oldest brother said that we’re orphans now, the day after my mother’s death.

I feel orphaned because all of the relatives that I loved and felt loved by are gone. My aunts and uncles are all gone, and me & my cousins’ generations are next on life’s conveyor belt. My mother was the youngest of eleven, but several of her siblings were still having children when she was too.

I am choosing to believe that my mom is surrounding me with love, wishing me a happy day tomorrow.

I miss and love you Mom.