Has it really been twenty years? I only knew her for fourteen years. She’s been gone longer than I knew her alive. Time is the culprit, our hearts are the allurement, excavated from a chasm of temporal grief.
It’s just so hard to believe she will have been gone for two decades; it was a millennia ago when she left. We still used film. Before smart phones. Really before the internet took off. Two wars ago, the same year the planes went into the buildings in New York. It was a lifetime ago, for many of us.
“What can’t be cured, must be endured,” was our mantra, during those three plus years she suffered acutely with MS. No, not the wine kind, the real kind.
I’ve been looking through old film negatives that my father and his father made, oh so very long ago. They had their share of travails as well. One particularly hit home. It was a picture my dad made of my mom and older sister, in December of 1941. It was night time, my sister was dressed in a robe. Mom had on a dress, and the both looked into the camera. Mom had a sad, forlorn, almost resigned look emanating from behind her eyes, the kind of look that depicts a soul sadness. Something that will take a very long time to get over, if ever.
I know that look, well. It is resignation, as much as the understanding that the road ahead will be a long one, in a sometimes very dark tunnel. What must be endured. One picture. A thousand words.
But with those thousand words there are some brighter sentiments. Like joy, hope and love. And isn’t that why we celebrate the 14th of February, for those glittering moments?
Today would have been her 68th birthday. We would talk about becoming old together, before that dreaded incurable disease knocked on our door. “What do you think we’ll look like? How will we feel? Will we still love each other?”
I hope so. I certainly hope so.
In the meantime, the vines sit under the snow, dormant and waiting for spring to arrive. It will. It always does. Just like the light at the end of the tunnel. It might take 20 years, but it will emerge. And love will never die.
