A Birthday

 Today is Sharon’s 55^th birthday, I lost her at 15, and it still hurts, even though I can’t even begin to imagine what she would be like today or what she would be doing.

Would she have been a career woman?  Or a mother, would I have more grandchildren?  Perhaps both? 

These are the eternal questions that stay unanswered and haunt my reveries.

I am continually surprised and confounded by how this grief over time has so profoundly changed me.  I doubt I could capture in words how, as it is still changing me, and is a process that I can’t predict or control.

At the core of my being there is this space that belongs to her and I am never very far from that grief, it is easy to slip into that sadness.  There has grown up around that space a garden of my life that is deep and rich because I so value what I have. I go back again and again to that crooked garden to renew and remind myself that life is still good.

Every year is hard in it’s own way.

But grief is always a walk alone