21 years

My mother died 21 years ago today, she was 57 years old. She battled through 9 months of suffering after having spinal fusion surgery to relieve back ache. The doctors had no answers for us, other than to say her brain had slowly liquefied and had she eaten calves brains at any time? Perhaps, they said, it was Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Later we came to know this as Mad Cow's disease.


She never got to meet my son, who was born almost exactly a year later; she never got to know her grandchildren as adults.
And I miss her every day.

Parable of Immortality

Author: Henry Van Dyke (1852 – 1933)

I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze
and starts for the blue ocean.
She is an object of beauty and strength,
and I stand and watch until at last she hangs
like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says,
" There she goes! "
Gone where?
Gone from my sight . . . that is all.
She is just as large in mast and hull and spar
as she was when she left my side
and just as able to bear her load of living freight
to the place of destination.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her.
And just at the moment
when someone at my side says,
" There she goes! "
there are other eyes watching her coming . . .
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout . . .
" Here she comes! "