If I could choose an outcome for us after we are no more; it would be that we would leave behind our dusty bodies and sharp bones to add our essence to the fuel that lights up the stars.
I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around the idea of an ever-after. Though I have kidded with my mother that her mother and father are above us playing double-deck pinochle and having the time of their lives, well, what they would be having would, in fact, not be the time of their lives, for the time of their lives is over.
I mean, just, what, exactly, would be the point of this time here, and now, if we were going to get to go to another place and do the same thing again, but this time just all our favorite bits?
Is all we do on earth simply preparation for a greatest hits album?
If so, I find it unappealing.
I miss my brother.
I do think Bill would have a pretty good time in the great beyond playing pinochle with Grandmom and Pop, and cracking jokes to make my father laugh. Bill was always one for his favorite reruns, and I think he often wondered why we couldn’t take a new year and replay the same exact holidays in it the same ways as the year before, or make them just like the ones he liked best from childhood
Trying to repeat your favorite moments is like herding cats. People will not hold still and stay the way they had always been.
My brother was 9 years older than me and 17 years older than my sister. I know there are people and events he knew that I never knew, and still more that he and I knew, but not my sister. So much flux, and unending forward movement.
In any case, maybe I’m too smart for my own britches, but it seems, on the one hand, unlikely to me, and on the other, undesirable. Though I would love to see them all again, and especially my Bill, I do not think I would enjoy playing out our same lives, over and over minus the bad times, for all eternity. I’d get bored to, well, death.
For my dad and my brother I feel like I wish so much that I could have somehow convinced them to take better care of themselves.
In any case… here I am, woefully behind on my blog because I am back to teaching, albeit online, which is not any easier at all, and because we are into the homeschool experiment big-time. But that’s for another blog.
I have some wonderful plants around my house that my BF Kris gave me when Bill died, and my BF Dot gave me this star today in memory of Bill.I know that those who left before me are certainly part of the essence that I see in the stars. Do we really want a mapped-out life re-do?
When you leave us, when I leave us, may we all number among the stars, bringing light to even the most dark of nights.
And may I always miss my brother.
