Yesterday he was laughing. Today he is gone.
At the time that a friend's plane crashed into a snowbank I was helping his great niece sew a hummingbird. It had a ruby throat and forest green wings. She was proud of it as well she might be. But the wings that lifted her great uncle across a frozen lake in Wyoming faltered somehow and he
went down.
Last week he and his wife toasted their thirty ninth wedding anniversary which was made more delightful still by the birth of their newest grandchild. Perhaps they spoke of plans for their fortieth, and a glorious gathering of their children and grandchildren, sisters and brothers. There would be a chocolate cake with a slender candle for the little girl just learning to stand.
It's bittersweet to think of them passing in heaven's corridor, he and his son's first child. Did they pause for a kiss disguised as a falling star? What did he say to her of earth? What did she intone to him of heaven?
Now his wife will
celebrate without him, if that word even applies. Yet there is reason to rejoice over a shared lifetime, and a posse of descendants. While every day she will jar again at the absence of her life's companion, she will see him. In the smiles of her sons and the mischief of her grand babies. The pictures of him, of them, will hang as timeless testimonies of their abundant life.
But she was not ready. Not ready at all.
