Stretching

I read obituaries.
Nearly every day, I scan through the obituaries.
Mostly, it's a professional thing. I tend to jump to the ones with the Star of David on them, checking my little community.

Sometimes things catch my eye.

Today, there was an obituary for an older person, asking for donations to be made to the Ronald McDonald House charities. That's not exceptionally common, so I kept reading. The other option for donations was a named foundation. My sense of morbid curiosity got to me, and I googled the name.

Based on what I can tell from the obituary, 38 years ago this person's niece died of leukemia. She was not yet 3 years old. And 38 years later, it still had impact on the family's handling of this person's death.

Thirty-eight years later.

It stretches so far into the future....it's almost my entire lifetime.

One of the reasons I haven't been writing lately is that I am actually paralyzed by the immensity, the weight, the magnitude....of that lifetime. I wonder, sometimes, how that can actually be real.

Our lives are fairly normal. Normal stuff happens. School, laundry, movies, new shoes....whatever makes us ordinary travelers in this world. The living kids are great. "Well-adjusted." Happy.

Sammy's life doesn't hang over us like a cloud. It really doesn't. His presence is everywhere, we talk about him all the time, but it's not in a Big Deep Dark Way. We live with him.

And yet....there's that lifetime. Stretching before me. Without him.

In 2015....Older
In 2014...It's Been 103 Days
In 2013....Buzz Cuts for Cancer (video....and omg)

just days before diagnosis at his Kindergarten graduation ceremony