Parents

I turned 25 the week my mother died at 63. I was in my 40's when my father died at 83.

They become more and more distant to me each day. I can no longer remember my mother's voice, though I can remember my father's.

I can see them in pictures but not in my mind--not clearly at any rate.

Parents begin to disappear on us. I actually remember my maternal grandmother more clearly than my mother and my paternal step-grandmother more clearly than my father.

Here's something I wrote about them a couple of years ago that (sadly, to my mind) not many people read.\

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Watching time pass

I've outlived my mother by 35 years. I was only 25 when she died at 63, My father died at 83, when I was 43, with two children. I'm 13 years younger than he was when he died.

Watching time pass makes me realize these things.

Being the only child of older (in those days 'much older') parents means that I've lived 37 years without parents.

My mother never knew her grandchildren. My father met them both.

Now I have grand-daughters--four wondrous girls--who will all be with us for Easter. Joy! Wonder! Grace!

All my Aunts and Uncles, a whole host of them--18 in all--are dead too, like Mommy and Daddy (what I always called my parents). Aunt Elsie (my mother's youngest sister) died last year at 90, I think. She came into my mother's hospital room when I was feeding my mother vanilla ice-cream with a wooden spoon and told me "Happy Birthday, Jimmy" (the only name my family ever called me!)

I remembered that as I stood by Elsie's grave.

Time passes.

Those little babies we brought home to Hazelwood Avenue in Charleston West Virginia are 41 and 38 now, both with summer birthdays. And I have Morgan and Emma (11), Tegan (8) and Ellie (8 months and counting) in my family.

We were at the hospital with Morgan and Emma were born. A nurse stopped the elevator at the visiting floor and showed Bern and Cathy's mom and me  them all new and tiny.

Time passes. Inexorably.

But here's something I know and know fair well--there are 'two' futures available as time passes...the one that will happen if you just wait and the one you create for yourselves.

So, as time passes, choose the latter and 'create' your future.

That may just be the only real choice we have in life--to live the future that will happen anyway as time passes or to have a hand in what that future is.

Create your future, as time passes (it always will), by speaking the future you create into being.

Only shot we have to making a difference, making the future matter as more than just 'watching time pass'.....