Transformative Events

I am amazed at the slip sliding easy way truly transformative events often occur.

Back in the seventies, I was out riding my bike, taking my dog for a ride in the basket, thinking how great life was. Another day I was playing with my children, enjoying the beginning of a summer vacation back in 1986. This morning I was walking my dog around the neighborhood just wallowing in this beautiful Fall weather.

In each instance, as I was going about my everyday living, someone near and dear to me died.

Death surrounds us all the time. It is on the television and the computer, even in the local newspaper. Life ends for the departed, but for the ones left behind it is not so easy. How can someone I love no longer be here?

Not here, is an incredibly incomprehensible place to imagine. How can someone who laughed and cried with me, whose name is in my email and on my phone list, who fills my memories with thoughts of our disagreements and love, not be here?

Not here is a concept that spreads out like a flood on a flat plain, seeping in, surrounding everything. It seems nothing is safe from its touch and it is difficult to explain how something so full of sweetness can be so painful.

One day this flood will seep in so deeply that it will be as natural a part of me as the sun is to the lotus. I will lift my face into the light of my memories and bask in their warmth.

Today, I cannot imagine that.