How The Story Ends

I've been doing a lot of thinking this past week, about life and death, your life, your looming death, mine, that of others I love.

I can't help it. My household is filled with your death impending, its energy sapped, tired and drawn, sighing like a tired horse dragging its worn carriage.

Uncle J, whose turkey and stuffing are the very symbols of Christmas for me. I want you to know that my definition of Christmas will always be one with you as the central figure. Your food, made with those kind hands, the whispered prayers of love from your heart and those lips that were always ever-willing to kiss a silly girl hello and goodbye.

I know you and I don't. You have been so generous with your stories. Yet I know that I didn't see the most of you, the other younger parts of you that your children know.

Your life has been one of kindness. I see it in the throng of people at your hospital door, generations in tow, come to pay respects to your sleeping self.

I hope it is painless till the end for you.

And us, us who are left behind, don't you worry about us. It's not your place to. It's our turn now. To carry this burden of remembering you, this memory that will bring back such happy memories they will make us cry for the absence of the real you in the flesh.

You have loved and you are loved.

And I think in the end, that is the measure of a man, woman or child.