Momento! Memento!

Kitty before the Prom, Q. Cassetti, 2010It’s funny that life is this long strand of time that sometimes just keeps going on it’s own without a definite time or date to tag things around. There are dates that are significant that one really doesn’t have any control over.Your birth and death happen outside of your control. But some you can impact and fix a time and date to. The day you enter college and graduate. The day you got your first apartment. The day you were engaged. The day you were married. The day you gave birth. The day your child went to school. Every Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter and birthday. Each date a thread that twined with the next to infuse the continuum with color and note, annual comparisons but blending with the main thread and becoming one with it.

Then there are the times that things change significantly. Deaths change lives of those left behind for good or bad. Births do the same by changing the family dynamic through causing everyone to budge up and make room (in their time, pocketbooks and attention) for the new member. This new one, a child leaving home has for me, caused the clock to stand still. She is gone from us. Not for summer camp but has crossed the threshold into her own life independent of us. Sure, she will always be our daughter and one of our most amazing God-given treasures , but she will not be late for breakfast every morning or floating in the bathtub late at night. She will not be singing at the top of her lungs as she walks the dog at night. She will not be here every day to tease the cats and cheer her brother. The wild,extreme outfits and hairdos every morning and the wonderful, kind humor every night. Her insights and observations, her ability to see the good and obvious, her delight in everything and everyone is no longer here. Our dancing girl, our laughing princess, our gentle girl has gone to grow and expand. She has moved forward to be her own person and to infect the world with her kind, rational spirit—and we have been bumped out of her direct sphere of life to another ecliptic path that has the occasion to be in her vicinity versus daily or hourly to monthly to an occasional week here and there. We have to share now, whether we like it or not…there is no choice in this matter. 

We can fix a date to this change (09/02/2010) which none of us saw coming. No preparation, no warning but this sort of thing can creep up on you. And it did.

And left us all winded as our light moves on.